It’s Bad for You

Steven D. Low

Have you heard the news? Smoking is bad for you – it gives you cancer. Also, eating too much sugar, that’s bad – it gives you diabetes. Okay, you probably don’t live under a rock so you already know.

Here’s the new news, though… loneliness is bad for you.

A recent U.S. surgeon general’s report reminds us that a lack of connection to family, friends and community wrecks your health. Imagine smoking fifteen cigarettes a day for a few years and you’ll get the idea. Chronic isolation triggers a slow-drip of stress hormones that over time taxes your physiology and opens the door to illness. This disconnection throughout society is endemic. It’s a public health crisis.

We are sick. And we’re getting worse.

The epidemic of isolation joins a decades-long rise in mental and physical ailments: depression, inflammatory disorders and a variety of addictions. Our poor individual health is also reflected in our broader society. Fantastic wealth inequality, fascist politics and global warming – these phenomena are symptoms of an ill social body. In both cases, neoliberalism is the disease.  

Yes, you read correctly, neoliberalism is bad for you

Bringing up the topic of neoliberalism at a party and showing a dog a card trick typically elicit a similar reaction – bafflement. While complex, dry and lacking a common definition, the concept of neoliberalism (sometimes referred to as market fundamentalism) generally comes down to these core elements:

• Cutting government regulations on private enterprise.
• Reducing taxes for the wealthy and corporations.
• Privatization of institutions and resources traditionally held in the commons (schools, libraries, parks, water, air, etc.).
• Idolization of individualism and competition and an antagonism toward collective values.

Like global warming, market fundamentalism has produced a seemingly disparate web of ills – their origins a mystery on the surface. In his bestselling book, “The Myth of Normal”, Dr. Gabor Maté links the rise of our personal ailments to a culture that is antithetical to human health on all levels: physical, mental and emotional. I argue that this toxicity, afflicting both ourselves and our society, is the logical outcome of more than forty years of neoliberal policy.

The connection between neoliberalism and wellbeing

To illustrate the connection between the poor state of our bodies (individual and social) and neoliberalism, let’s discuss a demographic whose suffering has long been ignored: middle aged white men. For the first time, white men in the U.S. between the ages of 25 and 64 are experiencing a steep decline in life expectancy because of self-harm, whether acute (self-inflicted gunshots) or chronic (alcohol, opioids or other drug addictions). This phenomenon is known as “deaths of despair” (old news for many people of color). These deaths of despair have generally clustered in former manufacturing centers like Detroit, Scranton, Ohio or Camden, New Jersey – regions that provided stable blue-collar professions and thus meaning, community and prosperity to many thousands. When heavy industries migrated overseas for cheaper labor, these core elements of human thriving withered.

The prospect of the future is an aching void for these communities. To those of us paying a modicum of attention, the opioid epidemic and similar crises of addiction should come as no surprise.

Neoliberal economic policies opened the door for the mass exodus of manufacturing, capital and investment. One can almost see the “invisible hand[s] of the market” performing their very tangible magic – one hand wraps around the community’s throat while the other pummels with clenched fist once vibrant neighborhoods, to then grab any wealth and hope left behind.

“This is the only recipe for prosperity,” is the incessant mantra. It’s the type of refrain that’ll be familiar to those of us who have a narcissist or psychopath in our lives.

Attention policymakers: this is your brain on neoliberalism

We’ve touched on neoliberalism’s deleterious effect on personal health. Neoliberalism’s effect on the health of our climate has been more disastrous contributing to out-of-control heatwaves, wildfires and floods. Our climate’s health has reached this point thanks in part to 1) the enabling of the oil industry through subsidies and lack of regulation and 2) lack of public investment in clean technology and infrastructure.

While public and private investment in green technology has increased in recent years, the logic of neoliberalism guaranteed that for decades federal climate policy remained comatose while the oil industry ran wild. Instead of government regulation, corporations were allowed to police themselves and offer empty climate pledges – a familiar song and dance of bad faith. Instead of the state driving the development of clean technology via trillions in investments, we crossed our fingers while the private sector invested a comparative pittance in the silver bullet of the month.

Connect the personal to the political

Loneliness is a public health crisis. In a culture that glorifies individualism and competition at the expense of community connection, this crisis should be seen as a logical extension of forty-plus years of neoliberalism toxifying policy and culture. From the perspective of the market fundamentalist, the epidemic of isolation, deaths of despair and climate change are simply externalities – a cost of doing business, but one which is borne not by owners and shareholders but everyone else.

I have no silver bullets to share. It seems, however, that the first step is to name our collective blight: neoliberalism. To recognize that neoliberalism’s prescriptions, often presented with the veneer of inevitability, benefit a minuscule portion of society to the necessary detriment of the human race as a whole. And to start connecting, as education scholar Dr. Henry Giroux asserts, “the personal to the political.”

For the sake not only of our society but of our planet, the next step we take must be taken collectively.

For further reading (in order of relevance):

• “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” by Naomi Klein
• “Ill Fares the Land,” by Tony Judt
• “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution,” by Wendy Brown
• “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs,” by Johann Hari
• “Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice,” by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel