{"id":33523,"date":"2018-04-18T17:18:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T22:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33523"},"modified":"2018-04-18T17:18:43","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T22:18:43","slug":"our-strange-attraction-to-self-destructive-behaviors-choices-and-incentives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33523","title":{"rendered":"Our Strange Attraction to Self-Destructive Behaviors, Choices and Incentives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our Strange Attraction to Self-Destructive Behaviors, Choices and Incentives<\/a><\/h3>\n

Self-destruction isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of our socio-economic system.<\/i><\/p>\n

The gravitational pull of self-destructive behaviors, choices and incentives is scale-invariant<\/b>, 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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

That is of course only a partial list.<\/p>\n

Dependencies are one of the many self-destructive attractors in our society.<\/b>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.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[19842,5995,19844,587,19843,19845],"class_list":["post-33523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-chalres-hugh-smith","tag-choice","tag-incentive","tag-of-two-minds","tag-self-destructive-behaviour","tag-socioeconomic-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33523"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33524,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33523\/revisions\/33524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}