"When evil walks into a room, it is not wearing horns and a tail"

I was listening to a podcast of Krista Tippett On Being this past weekend while hiking. She was having a conversation with Darius Rejali, an Iranian-born American scholar who studies and writes about torture. His most memorable line was: "When evil walks into a room, it is not wearing horns and a tail". He said that one does not have to read Hannah Arendt to understand the banality of evil.

Yet for me, reading Eichmann in Jerusalem did produce the very epiphany evoked by the book's subtitle: A report on the Banality of Evil. More than any other previous experience, Arendt's narrative wove for me the convincing tale demonstrating how easily one can slide into evil. The journey is incremental and, by virtue of this, insidious. The travel companions also matter -- they must be people whom one respects and emulates, and, the logic becomes that, if they are acting in a certain way, it must then be OK for one to act similarly. She illustrates these ideas by recounting the testimony of Eichmann, a petty clerk, a follower essentially, who ascended in the Nazi bureaucracy to the level of orchestrating a massive genocide. The story is one of almost witless and blind compliance with the higher-ups, all people commanding Eichmann's respect and admiration. The thesis is so spooky that it demands constant self-examination to assure avoiding the barely noticeable descent into evil.

Similarly, Rejali described people who are hired to perpetrate torture not as psychopaths, passionate about hurting others, but more as methodical disciplinarians, careful not to inflict too much damage, lest the victim expire prior to giving the wanted information. So, essentially, they are just "doing their jobs". Just as marketers who sell us cigarettes are doing their jobs. I am sure that they do not perceive themselves as evil -- they have families, children, they have their faith, they play golf and eat Chinese food, just like the rest of us. They drive their children to soccer games and sit on school committees and boards of charitable organizations. Yet, what they do at work is follow orders and money and sell certain death.

And how much other evil gets perpetrated by regular people? What about climate change deniers? Because they do not have unequivocal proof that humans are catalyzing an environmental catastrophe, they feel justified in prioritizing the economy over the facts. They do not understand that observational science does not provide proof beyond the shadow of the doubt, and we indeed need to heed the circumstantial evidence before us. Yet, since respected politicians deny any possibility of an impending man-made environmental disaster, citizen deniers feel justified in their willful ignorance.

Am I stretching this concept too much? I do not think so. Nicholas Christakis and colleagues have been showing the importance of networks to our health, and it is not a stretch to imagine that networks may be critical to the health of other common concerns. These include the environment, and may even include our vast and growing economic disparities, which are no longer merely causing illness and inconvenience, but are responsible for killing our children.

So, next time we cavalierly dismiss others' concerns about shared resources, next time we turn our heads away from socially and economically inconvenient realities, let us inspect methodically the possibility that this very banality of evil may be working to insinuate itself into who we are. Because an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure.  

Our children's future: healthcare vs. peak oil

Do you believe in peak oil? What is peak oil? Peak oil, also referred to as Hubbert's peak, is a projection, based on our historic patterns of consumption, of when the demand for oil will outstrip its supplies. The world uses about 80 million barrels of oil per day, mostly in the transportation sector. So, to keep up with this demand, at least this much oil needs to be excavated from the ground daily. In reality, even more is needed to keep some in reserves. Hubbert was a geophysicist who in the 1950s predicted that, based on the current patterns of oil consumption, we would reach peak oil sometime early in the 21st century (see graph).

How is this possible, you ask? A better question is how can it be otherwise? If you really think about it, oil is the product of the earth's development and evolution. It is an alchemy of dead organic matter and glacial and volcanic catastrophes brewed slowly over hundreds of millions of years. In this sense, oil is not a renewable resource, at least not within the human time frame. And as you can see, the curve of the production until the peak appears mostly exponential, with some stops and starts. Exponential growth, by virtue of its accelerated trajectory, is unsustainable in a closed biological system, where the production of resources cannot keep up with their consumption.

So, peak oil is not hard to imagine, given our gluttonous consumption of it. So, why is it that the international body, the International Energy Agency (IEA), responsible for forecasting our oil situation has been so reluctant to admit to the impending peak oil? Turns out, according to a report in today's Guardian, that it has been cooking its numbers because of the pressure from the US. An unnamed whistle-blower has come forth to indicate that

"...the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves."

Why would the US encourage such deception? Apparently because we are worried about the implications of this revelation to the markets. So, while shouting loudly about fiscal restraint and sloganeering about the impact of universal healthcare coverage on our children's financial future, our nation, with its eyes shut tightly, has been on a collision course with a very real and close wall of peak oil. This is simply unwise.

We can make up all kinds of stories about the potential reserves. I am not sure why these stories seem more plausible to the same people that energetically deny human contribution to the climate change, except to say that we believe what is convenient for us to believe. Everything you see on the graph below beyond the real oil reserves is imaginary. But, even if it were feasible to get at these potential resources, they would be fraught with an enormous carbon footprint, not only while mining, but also when used as fuel.

And, by the way, haven't we learned our lesson about investing in imaginary assets? Is that not what our investment banks were doing with the mortgage-backed derivatives?

Come on, people, the writing is on the wall. Fossil fuels are on the brink of exhaustion. And we have more "stuff" than we can use in multiple lifetimes! Let's stop for a moment and take the toll of what we have done to the planet. Let's really consider our children's future, and their children's and theirs. In fact, perhaps we can remind ourselves of this old Iroquois philosophy:

"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."

This is our opportunity to consume less and to tell President Obama to make a real difference in Copenhagen!

Will more healthcare bring better health?

An awful lot of time and energy is being spent on finding solutions to our broken healthcare system. This  is justified, of course, given the unprecedented 16.2% of the GDP that it eats up, while virtually excluding 46 million people from participating through lack of insurance, and harming many through poor and defensive practices. But will focusing on these unquestionably important trees improve the forest of the nation's health? A nation that boasts unprecedented rates of obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases? A nation 40% of whose citizens suffer from a chronic disease? A nation where 80% of the adult population pops at least one pill every day?

I am skeptical. And here is why. The Rand Corporation created this very interesting pie chart, quantifying the influences of factors responsible for premature death in the US.

Based on this chart, only 10% of all premature deaths will be avoided if we fix the access to and quality of our healthcare system. If we posit that avoiding premature death is our primary goal, then perhaps we need to be exploring other risks that compete with the medical care short falls. This scheme suggests that of the 70% of the causes that are modifiable (we cannot change our genes yet), 86% can be attributed to our social status, the environment around us and our behavioral patterns. Let's examine each one separately and see what conclusions we might draw.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is known to be the single most important determinant of health. SES determines not only where we live, but also what we eat, how much activity we engage in, and our educational opportunities. It is well appreciated that obesity rates are higher in poorer communities. Most shocking, however, was a report a little over a year ago indicating that, in the face of ever-increasing life expectancy in the overall population, life expectancy in the poorest parts of the US is declining. At the same time, the economic gap in the US is widening, with an unprecedented 6% of the wealth concentrated in the top 0.01% of the population. Further, since the mid-1970s, the real wages for the bottom 80% of earners have remained constant, while productivity has enjoyed exponential growth. And are we doing anything about this driver of health? We are continuing to outsource jobs, we continue to tolerate astronomical bonuses on Wall Street, all with the blind belief in economic growth, but in reality at great expense to the majority's welfare.

Environment is next. We have not only passed Hubbert's peak in oil consumption, but we have gone beyond the level of CO2 production, 350 parts per million, beyond which we threaten the planet with temperature increases that will not only alter our geopolitical balance, but also potentially bring us to the brink of extinction. Yet, much like the tobacco "debate" played out in the decades of the 20th century, we continue to drag our feet on climate change. Furthermore, we use tobacco tactics to cast doubt on the potential links between other man-made environmental contaminants and disease, confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence of such a causal link.

And what about behavior? In the 21st century we are not talking about sex and substance abuse. In the 21st century the addiction of choice is the media. Children spend on average 7 hours per day glued to a screen, being unabashedly marketed to even while in school. Three major corporate conglomerates control the content of TV programming, telling stories not in order to promote responsible citizenship, but so as to create the perception of need where none exists, to drive consumerism and finally to generate the next generation of corporate drones with the single aim of ever-increasing productivity.

If it seems that we live in the Brave New World, it is because we do. The healthcare reform discussion, though necessary, is taking a lot of air away from other, equally as or potentially even more urgent concerns. The lather stirred by the opposition to healthcare reform is an effort to imbue this almost no-brainer populist need with a false controversy in the hopes that the hot air will distract the already apathetic nation from the worsening crimes of Wall Street against Main Street.

So, no, I do not believe that solving our healthcare problem will resolve out health disaster. The latter will need a more global approach to our runaway societal woes. A few posts ago I indicated that the market model of healthcare was a miserable failure. Today I have to conclude that unopposed market forces have promoted the failure of many, the success of a few, and have sold our Democracy to the highest bidder. Only by injecting humanist values into our society can we hope to get this ship back on course. If we don't, we are simply enjoying our final days of debauchery on board of this titanic.