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Our Strange Attraction to Self-Destructive Behaviors, Choices and Incentives

April 18, 2018

Our Strange Attraction to Self-Destructive Behaviors, Choices and Incentives

Self-destruction isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our socio-economic system.

The gravitational pull of self-destructive behaviors, choices and incentives is scale-invariant, meaning that we can discern the strange attraction to self-destruction in the entire scale of human experience, from individuals to families to groups to entire societies.

The proliferation of self-destructive behaviors, choices and incentives in our socio-economic system is profoundly troubling. Exhibit 1 is the opioid epidemic (charts below). How did we reach this level of individual and social self-destruction?

There are culprits aplenty: a “healthcare” (sickcare) system that incentivizes maximizing profits by whatever means are available (for example, claiming addictive medications aren’t addictive); a system that encourages the consumption of costly prescriptive medications without regard to their interactions; a system that establishes a “standard of care” that relies on prescribing pills of one kind or another; a system that treats psychological-physical pain with painkillers rather than treat the source of the pain; a system that cannot recognize spiritual pain (from losing sources of meaning, purpose and positive social roles) much less address it; a workers compensation system that incentivizes vague pain-related injuries as a way of getting a vacation from work; a pharmaceutical industry hard-wired to seek and promote “the next billion-dollar drug” regardless of the long-term consequences of the wonder-drug, and a culture that worships convenience and the illusion that instant remedies to chronic conditions are available or should be available.

That is of course only a partial list.

Dependencies are one of the many self-destructive attractors in our society.Dependencies on addictive substances is one manifestation of self-destructive behavior, but dependency on an institution that leads to a loss of self-reliance is also a subtle form of self-destruction.

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