The United States’ position as top contender of the industrialized world is the very reason why it sucks. Because Americans no longer have to fight for their survival, they’ve begun to fight against it.
Although there are times when there is, like, “nothing to drink” despite the virtually endless flow of clean water from our sinks, and other times when you have like, “literally nothing to wear” despite the 50+ articles of clothing in your closest, most of us can agree that our basic survival needs are met on a daily basis.
But we’ve had it too good for too long, and the implications are becoming hard to ignore. Rather than fending off starvation, we suffer from an obesity epidemic.
While adolescents in developing nations band together for survival, we see our youth bullying each other to the point of suicide. Prolonged prosperity has invited a whole new realm of issues that are difficult to define and even harder to fix.
Like mentioned, one of these difficult-to-define and hard-to-fix problems is bullying. In a typical bully-victim relationship, the bully, usually someone higher on the social ladder (a position achieved by instilling fear, probably due to “advanced” physical size (ahem, obesity epidemic)) preys on victims because of a perceived physical, social, or financial ineptness (or because they have pudding snacks). Why the bully engages in such aggressive behavior is not quite understood, but it is certain that it lowers the self-esteem of the victim, making them more vulnerable.
But in all seriousness, bullying is becoming an increasing concern. On Sunday, a 16 year-old boy from Corpus Christi, Texas, committed suicide after years of torment and no effort from the school district to stop it. The school denied that bullying was a problem, despite community parents who spoke up and claimed to have withdrawn their students from the school because of unrelenting torment. This is just one of the dozens of cases that has made national spotlight this year, and just one of millions instances of bullying itself.
From an evolutionary perspective, bullying could be explained by Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” hypothesis. But we don’t have to fight for our survival anymore because it is practically guaranteed by our modern society—our psyche just needs to catch up with reality.
The autonomy allowed by our society creates a false sense of independence, people undermining the role other people play in our lives. They think independence is buying their own groceries, but where would they be without markets in the first place? Because mass collaboration is no longer needed to survive, there has been a mass disintegration in order to “thrive. ”
Psychologists argue that humans are social beings in the first place because we needed each other to stay alive. Men hunt and protect. Women gather and make babies. But with the autonomy allowed by our current industrialized society interdependence is less pronounced. Fueled by the idea that we no longer need to each other to get by, have we subconsciously began to divide, doing what we can to retain our allusion of power we hold over others?
What is bullying if not a magnified version of the social stratification of America—an elitist group leveraging their power on a vulnerable lower class? The recent Occupy Movements come to mind. It’s driven by a group of people who feel victimized and immobilized by another group, whose dominance is vague yet unyielding. There have been countless acts of physical aggression against the lower class in reaction to their pleas for equality. Earlier this week, around 30 people were pepper sprayed outside of a Santa Monica College trustee board meeting protesting proposed higher course fees. Two of the victims were a mother and toddler in the crowd. Like bullying in school, this is one of countless examples.
Our prolonged prosperity has us fighting to ensure individual success, not collective. And when this is reversed, we will see an end to the complex issues our society faces. We will be able to reap of the benefits of being on top when people think it how they could help our whole population, not only themselves. If we were all working together, bills for universe healthcare would pass. We would petition to have education programs expanded, not cut. The wealthy would except their social responsibility as the breadwinners and happily pay more taxes to provide more for the millions of people who live below them.
In order to stop sucking, we have to start sharing.
A poignantly written article, Chunder. It's interesting to see how modernized countries deal with their issues. In America, it almost seems like a reversal of the basic survival issues that threatened our species thousands of years ago. Now humans are struggling to survive in another way--mentally and emotionally, like you said. I also really liked your comparison of school bullying to the bullying by Wall Street. Humans seem to have a natural drive to shun the outsiders and create animosity between groups. It all seems so primitive.
ReplyDeleteI know you're a psych major, so you might understand where I'm coming from. I'm currently taking social psychology and we're learning about helping others and aggression. The chapter on aggression really made me think about how poorly we treat each other, and most of it seems to be based in evolutionary psych and survival of the fittest. People who could mentally, emotionally, and physically thrive did, and their aggression has been bred into our genes (or so they say). But I don't understand why we can't realize we aren't neanderthals anymore and act like the civilized human beings we are.
ReplyDeleteThere are about 30 cultures all over the world that just don't have violence. Either it is very uncommon, heavily punished, or they don't even have words in their language to describe anything aggressive/violent/warlike. These cultures, like the Amish for example, are more cooperative than competitive, and that is thought to be the source of their ideologies on peace.
You bring up a good point. An all-American ideal is to be competitive in order to get to the top and fulfill the American dream. A side-effect of that could very well be bullying. I wish we could all be more cooperative, like the Amish, so we wouldn't have as much violence and bullying, otherwise known as oppression, in our society. Sadly, because we live in a country that runs on capitalism, some people aren't going to want to share. It makes sense though, imagine if you had tons of money and worked hard to get that money. Would you want to have to give that up because someone else couldn't make it? I guess it comes down to if we all can be as altruistic as we'd aspire to be in a perfect world.
ReplyDeleteThough I don't endorse bullying in any way I believe there is also a huge problem in the way American youth are taught to deal with their problems. Suicide is a very serious problem and what amazes me is the immediacy with which it seems children turn to suicide as a viable solution to their problems today. This comment in no way aims to alleviate bully's of the damage they do to their victims but I think there is a lot of pressure on learning how to become a contributing member to society and not enough education on how to realize yourself. The pressure for young people to keep up in a fast paced society that values having as many friends as you can, padding resumes and gaining acceptance to ivy league schools leaves no time for young people to find themselves and gain internal strength. Strength now is conferred on you by your peers by accomplishment. I think it is impossible to ask the nation to band together to solve problems as a collective and to forget about their individual worries. The bottom line is that people are selfish. I think that individual pursuits and success are not a bad thing if it concerns trying to understand your values, strengths and weaknesses and attempting to create a better world from the inside out and and not the outside in.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your post. I think one of the main problems with America today is that we have become a country full of selfish individuals. People seem to only care about themselves, rather than what is best for others. What frustrates me is that when people try to combat this and use rhetoric of "working together," the selfish people simply shoot them down. People seem to want America to return to its previous strength, but not if it means working harder or setting aside their selfishness.
ReplyDelete