How Disease Reveals Our Politics
Our inner politics reveals itself by outer harmony or dysfunction and our society’s outer politics reveals itself by our inner disharmonies and dysfunctions.
Disease is not private, it reveals our social politics! And politics reveals collective psychology!
— Alex Carberry
Most conventional wisdom treats disease as an individual aberration, and divorces individual disease from the wider socio-economic and political issues that shape and affect our world. It causes attention to be focussed disproportionately upon sections of the chain of relationships and processes (nexus) that support the emergence of disease.
Since we are shaped by the social relationships, social ethos and institutions for transmitting our social identities of our societies, we cannot separate psychological conditions from the social identities and ethos of our societies. Our individual psyches break down around the tectonic pressure points of our societies, and in this sense reveal the patterns of our collective psyches. An example of this is the deep caste racism of American society, which is set up to deliberately and systemically exclude Black Americans from preferential access to the benefits of that society, and which builds social identities that protect and perpetuate this order. The society accepts and includes whilst rejecting them; they provide the artistic drive of the society and by extension Modern World Culture, whilst being portrayed as criminal and dangerous. By the state systemically restricting economic access, it creates and sustains ghettos, within which the order may be perpetuated and which manufacture criminal behaviour. The COINTELPRO programme systematically persecuted and murdered Black American leadership in order to ensure the continuity of the caste order of the society, whilst the circumstances of the ghetto confirm the ‘truth’ of the identities of the inhabitants.
The American ghettos are often food deserts, which sustain attitudes which drive the prevalence of nutritionally based diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, obesity and hypertension. This confirms social attitudes and the sense of hopelessness driven by deliberate socio-economic disinvestment, whilst investing in prisons to incarcerate the products of the very deliberate socio-economic and political machinery. The psychological disorders are then driven by the psycho-social realities and the deliberate infliction of repetitive targeted trauma.
Many of these issues affect poor White American communities as well, however the collective identity does not imprison them within the caste definition of identity designed to disenfranchise Blacks. This results in differing patterns of emergence of these matters.
The disease landscape in this example then reflects the politics, which reveals the collective psychology of identity. We will never be able to address the prevalence of diseases driven by these forces without the addressing the collective psychology and their translation into social, economic and political levers which inflict our perverted collective psychological identities upon our world.