The Highly Diseased Post-Modern Society

In these days when society is fast losing its moral as well as physical roots, it is becoming ever so hard for the ‘tree’ of civilization to survive, let alone flourish. It is painful to admit that we modern people have ‘successfully’ built a highly diseased society. Man gets sick from this diseased society, and not usually the other way round.

The basic problem is that today hardly any people think, feel or act like normal humans. Or rather, nobody has the freedom to feel, think and act like the real human species. By mechanically extending our bodies and functions, during these mechanical ages, and thus having mechanized and mentally degenerated to the core, modern humans, especially the ruling elites, think, feel and act like the mechanized life forms, a la the semi-broiler chickens.   Here, how can we understand the problems of mankind, let alone solve its problem, when we cannot feel, think or act like the real, pristine or normal humans?

How does the mind fall prey to these kinds of diseased state of thinking? It is because the development of modern scientific thinking is the beginning of sort of weird   thinking. Development of modern scientific thinking itself may be attributed to a curious development in mental, spiritual sectors that have many things to do with the onset of degeneration in the mental, spiritual sectors “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it”, wrote George Orwell. Today both the ruler and the ruled have developed a tendency to remain perpetually in the risk-free fantasy world—away from ground realities and truths. It is only when things go suddenly critical and catastrophic (like the global warming scenario showing undeniable data, global financial ‘meltdowns’ putting banks in ‘distress lists’, reports of nuclear arms reaching to terrorist hands, massive spreading of degenerative diseases the world over etc.) that the world starts to cry wolf, only to linger back to seek refuge again in the fantasy world of market, media and consumerism. Here we, as pressurized, seek refuge in denial: denial that Earth is in crisis, denial that the atrocities and suffering are actually occurring, denial that it is going to get worse, denial that it is our human responsibility to do anything about it, denial that we can do anything about it, and denial that we have any personal responsibility beyond just doing our best not to contribute to the crisis.

Today modern society is brewing like a volcano. Yet we miserably fail to convey this crucial message.  Travellers on a living ‘spaceship’ (Technosphere), humans continue to live like cowboys on an open frontier—living out an old story in a new era. In deep denial and captive to the imperatives of global corporations and financial markets that value money more than life, those who hold positions of institutional power remain resolutely committed to policies that accelerate the deepening crisis. For the latest example, take the case of the highly catastrophic Japanese nuclear tragedy in 2011. In spite of the magnitude of the Japanese nuclear tragedy to mankind, there is a tight lipped caution from all the uranium-exporting countries. The world and most of its leaders still remain tight-lipped and in cover-up mode.

For millions of years, man was living in a world which was exclusively built not by man but by Nature. But today, we, as modern mankind, are travelling on a mechanical vehicle—the highly mechanized modern society( we call it Technosphere) —the expiry period of which is just coming to a close, according to the makers of these vehicles, namely, the scientists.

(Earth is now in a post-evolutionary phase, and we live at the end of Nature)

It is immaterial and even self-defeating not to admit this mortal reality. Modern man—the chronic modern system addict—may cite many alibis to deny this reality, saying many such prophecies have been proved wrong by history and the like. For, every man-made device has its own short life span and an inevitable expiry date, unlike Nature-made natural system the expiry period of which is infinite.

When we say that the world is going wrong, it simply means that those who lead the world are going wrong.  When we say that the problem is with the system, it simply means we are adopting the wrong system or the wrong methodology. 

Today there are clear and authoritative findings that Earth’s life support systems are disintegrating; that modern society is literally undoing the work of organic evolution; that the institutions we have created are destroying the livability of the whole world.  As stresses increase, eventually the ecosystem will reach a breaking point, after which total collapse of the system is rapid and irreversible. Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century.

How do we know that this society is sick or the planet is sick? The sickness or the disease of society or the planet comes to our notice only when their symptoms come out through the inhabitants of this society/planet, as the living species like humans and the vegetations of the planet.

Though human being has existed for about four million years, it is only in the last four or five decades that diseases such as cancer, asthma, obesity, allergy, arthritis, high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes, osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases have developed on a large scale. Obesity is now considered a global epidemic because its prevalence in both adults and children is increasing worldwide at an alarming rate. Why do these diseases continue to spread like epidemics–on a worldwide scale? Because almost all these degeneration diseases are the ‘gift’ of modernism, a fact  which we conveniently shrug off as modern lifestyle diseases.

We all know that the so called degenerative disease of humans and animals are basically constitutional disorders, the outward symptoms of which come out only after many years or when the disease turns chronic. The recent reports of China’s ‘cancer villages’ reveal the dark side of modern economic boom. Polluting factories in rural communities are forming a deadly toxic cocktail for villagers, leading to surging rates of cancer.

Chinese farmers are almost four times more likely to die of liver cancer and twice as likely to die of stomach cancer than the global average, according to study commissioned by the World Bank. The domestic media is increasingly filled with reports of “cancer villages” – clusters of the disease near dirty factories.

Here we can say that the whole China is a diseased society that is run, as a police state, by the Communist Party, and the system is terribly corrupt at every level. If regular Chinese people had a say in how to manage things, at least locally, the polluters wouldn’t get away with the crimes against the environment/people that they do.

However this is not just a China problem alone. You should have a look at some of the factories and chemical plants in the developed nations including USA and Netherlands. The parallels with Victorian England’s rocky journey through industrialisation are all in evidence; in India too, in slightly different ways, the boom has been possible only through awful human & environmental sacrifice. The latest reports of the emergence of ‘cancer villages’ in Punjab (a North India state ) must be an eye-opener in this context. The same is true of the whole post-modern society and the developing nations including India, Brazile, Pakistan and the rest, albeit the diseased conditions are much sophisticated and are kept camouflaged by media Reality shows and other commercialized glossy socialization process.

The case of cancer is only just one among thousands of other catastrophic crises. A world driven by a culture of consumer ambition has damaging consequences across a wide array of sectors. The changes in environment first alter the constitution of the body of the planet which subsequently comes as problems or diseases in the animals and plants on the planet.  Pets live in the same environment as people do, often sharing the air, water, food and sleep patterns of their owners. Like humans, these animals develop cancerous tumors that arise spontaneously and grow. And dogs, cats and horses are more closely related genetically to humans than are the laboratory mice typically used in research. That modern man, on a mistaken notion, suddenly started to apply medicines, chemicals and pesticides as remedies to keep them artificially healthy and alive is altogether another matter of growing concern.

Why is it that the present medical science is unable to find any permanent cure for the fast spreading degeneration diseases like cancer, asthma, obesity, allergy, arthritis, high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes, osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases etc? It is because the present medical science is trying to treat the individual of the highly diseased “pond” (society) and not the vitiated “pond” (society) that goes on throwing up more and more diseased inhabitants of the “pond” (society). Therefore treatment is actually needed for the “pond” (society)  and not the contaminated ‘contents’ of the “pond” (society).

We can easily concludes that this “pond of life” (the society in which we live) is highly polluted. Modern society is a highly vitiated and corrupted “pond” in which almost all life forms, including humans, are at an advanced stage of decay—mentally and physically—and the process goes on throwing up almost all the problems and diseases mankind faces today. A clear and evident case is the massive acidification of the environment and the soil. In our day the Gaia and human evolutionary tree has contracted a highly massive disease–DEGENERATION—which is at a chronic stage today.  Almost 90% of the present 7 billion people are sick the treatment of which cannot be undertaken individually nor can it be depended on the so-called doctors who are only part of the disease or part of the problem.

Basically, the idea is that any help/solution should come from the government, group of governments and  people. These vital tasks are not to be trusted with unregulated private organizations, individuals or doctors.

Life on Meltdown, the book written by this author and published by Layman Books in April 2014 has proved that scientific thinking, as a product of collective stupidity, is a particular symptom of mental illness. But on a deep reckoning, it is increasingly becoming clear that modern mankind is badly caught in this ‘technology’ trap of its own making. Like a monkey in a trap holding a banana refusing to let go to free itself, modern humanity, long addicted and trapped in reductionist science and technology, is doomed by its own stupidity. It is the old monkey trap story of how hunters in Africa trapped monkeys by putting bananas in a bottle. As the monkey with a bottle stuck on its hand, mankind is fearful of any change today: it fears failure and it fears success. The monkey keeps its hand doubled up in the bottle holding on to the banana, just as modern man is holding on to the highly consumerist and pollution-ridden technology despite the fast unfolding fact that this industrialism is out to destroy mankind soon. Because, like the monkey refuses to open its hand and free itself,  modern man too refuses to let loose his hold on technology and let go the industrialism, he can’t go free and think of alternate methods in the world in which human species lived for millions of years without modern technology of industrialism.

To address the fundamental pathogens, humanity will be required to turn away from the conventional concepts and approaches of our institutions. This fundamental change in direction is fraught with anguish, as old ideas die hard. Illness today is more mental than physical, more social than material, and more complexly system-related than any particular person-related. There simply cannot be any individual or even sectarian solution to any chronic problem/disease that is more societal than individual, more mental than physical, more complex, civilization-linked, global  and fundamental than anything sudden, provisional or superficial. Increase in the prevalence of obesity, for example, is the result of several economic changes that have altered the lifestyle choices of people over a long period of time. Hence these choices are beyond the individual’s control and scope. Here even the so-called holistic remedies too will have only very limited roles to play if the approach is only on individual basis.

These are the sorts of data, analyze and arguments that are being given in the book LIFE ON MELTDOWN, a cause book pertaining to humanities/environmentalism genre. For more on this, please visit:

http://www.humanfirst.in/discussions/life-on-meltdown-an-outline/