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 The school denied that bullying was a problem, despite community parents who spoke up and claimed to have withdrawn their students from the school because of unrelenting torment.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.
