011 Culture Solution: Rebuilding common sense

what we need are high cliffs

We are standing on the coast of Scotland, near St. Andrews, on high ground.

We have an unbroken view out to the North Sea.

There’s a storm out there “brewing.” We can see it.

And that’s good because early warning can save lives.

We are acting as a weather station. We stand on guard against natural disaster.

Now we need early warning of another kind.

We need to stand on guard for cultural disasters.

Take for instance that case of Problem 010 (The end of common sense) and the death of a young man who believed that he should drink large amounts of water.

I looked to see if this was a trend that claimed other people. I couldn’t find any evidence that it had, or data for hospital admissions or mortality rates.

But there are several other examples of people departing from common sense and behaving in self destructive ways.

Take the case of Opioid-related deaths.

These have been increasing since at least 1999, as this chart shows:

There is something particularly horrible about this chart.

In 1999, there were several thousands deaths.

These data must have landed on someone’s desk.

You would have hoped that this someone thought “Hmm, this looks bad. I should keep an eye on it.”

Five years later (2004), there could have been no doubt that the trend was rising.

Surely by this time, our “someone” was creating a response. Using funding from the CDC, NFP and Social Purpose branding, there should have been a way to disrupt the trend.

By 2006 there should not been anyone in a vulnerable community who had not heard the word.

But no, apparently. The numbers kept rising. Now it is possible that there was a campaign and this has the effect of preventing a much steeper increase.

But I think there was no effort here. Your tax dollars not at work.

By 2009, fully ten years into this crisis, the CDC had evidence of a clear and present health care crisis, and grounds to declare opioid abuse a national emergency.

Nope.

Instead, the numbers now stand at 68,000 and they are accelerating.

Deaths rose 20,000 between 2019 and 2020. (In the early days of the epidemic, it took ten years to grow this much.)

Things could have turned out differently.

There could be someone or some organization standing on the high cliffs of contemporary culture watching for storms brewing.

They would have collected the available data.

Done their own research.

Invited some and committed people to figure out whether this was a “blip” or the future.

Of course it’s not enough merely to know about the trend.

We must also learn to solve the problem.

Sam Ford and I surmised that people were especially vulnerable to opioid abuse when they found themselves pushed out of the industrial economy and were now left to wonder whether they were ever going to get a “good job” again.

This sense that your working career was now over was, we thought, profoundly depressing and one of the things that gave opioids a magnetic quality.

But, hey, we thought. We are students of contemporary culture. We sometimes stand on the high ground of American culture.

Was there, we wondered, an alternative?

And, sure enough, we thought we saw an alternative “brewing.”

The artisan economy was growing. There were lots of options. The pay wasn’t always great. But the barrier to entry was low and there was something artisanal labor that encouraged a sense of purpose and pride. It also gave you a place in the community.

This meant that even if an artisanal gig did not produce a large income, it might well armor people against the opioid epidemic.

We created a website to reach out to people. It was designed to give people simple instructions on how they could get involved in the artisanal economy.

See for yourself at the artisanal economies project. (Snappy title!) www.artisanaleconomiesproject.org.

I can’t say we saved a lot of souls. I can’t say this was the best solution to the problem. But I hope it demonstrates that with early warning and cultural ingenuity, we can reply to the kinds of problems now generated by the decline of common sense.

So far:

001 Culture Problem: the “Failure to Launch” people
002 Culture Problem: vibe shifts in decline
003 Culture Solution: fluidity as an adaptation
004 Culture Problem: decline of the water cooler
005 Culture Solution: big pictures
006 Culture Problem: bad food
007: Culture Solution: good food
008: Culture Problem: celebrities
009: Culture Solution: the Denzel Washington School for Drama
010: Culture Problem: the death of common sense
011: Culture Solutions: rebuilding common sense

Here’s how the argument here is shaping up.

We have covered six culture problems:

001 Culture Problem: the “Failure to Launch” people, a generation is stalled waiting for adulthood
002 Culture Problem: vibe shifts in decline: evidence that culture is not cohering
004 Culture Problem: decline of the water cooler: our ability to calibrate is failing
006 Culture Problem: bad food: something as fundamental as food was corrupted
008: Culture Problem: celebrities are sometimes a bad influence, colonizing our kids
010: Culture Problem: common sense is being emptied out

We have suggested four culture solutions:

003 Culture Solution: fluidity can serve us as an adaptation
005 Culture Solution: big pictures are available and improving
007: Culture Solution: good food and a massive revolution, proof of our power to repair
009: Culture Solution: The Denzel Washington School for Drama can help us use culture to fix culture
011: Culture Solution: There are ways to use culture to address the crisis in culture. Encouraging people to enter the Artisanal economy is one of these.

And if you liked this post, please “like” it and tell your friends!