Introduction

Even the most secluded person cannot fail to have noticed that the United States is riven by two competing worldviews—one politically and culturally conservative and religiously bounded and the other socially progressive and largely “spiritual but not religious.” Each is defined endlessly in the media—which just feeds the divisiveness—so my need to do it here is hardly necessary.

An unintended consequence of the financial collapse has been a further intensification of this schism. The rise of the antipodal Tea Party and 99er-Occupy Movements attests to this. The rhetoric of their disunity is couched in the language of values, and it is a wrenching struggle.

Which challenges us to ask this question: If it is a fight over values, which values are best? Of course the critical word here isbest, so let me define what I mean by that. Best is the greatest state of social wellness beginning with the individual and growing to include our entire society, Earth, and all the beings who inhabit the planet. This is the transition we must make, reflected in every aspect of individual and social life. It’s not whether we have to make these changes but rather how much pain are we willing to endure before we make wellness our first priority? So this is a very important question.

Can we answer it in an objectively verifiable way? Can we avoid the mires of theological or ideological dispute? Can we know with surety which set of values produces greater social wellness? The answer: Yes, we can. And we can do it on the basis of data, with no reference to polemics, ideology, or theology. Just data. Does the conservative theocratic worldview of the right, or the more inclusive social progressive left produce better outcomes as defined by greater wellness? Thanks to a network of excellence, created through the meticulous work of hundreds of researchers, publishing thousands of studies, we can work out an answer in which we can repose significant confidence. And we should.

Publication History: explore.2011.12.009

By any one of several dozen measures — here are three:

•Healthcare—37th in the world

•Maternal Mortality—31st in the world

•Prison Population—1st in the world

—the United States is a society of ailing communities. Our national wellness is poor, and this condition exists and is growing just as the country and the world are entering into a perfect storm of transition. Here are just a few of the trends I see:
•Climate change, sea level rise, and associated extreme weather events

•The green transition out of the Age of Petroleum into an environment of nonpolluting energy

•The Decline of the American economic empire

•A destabilizing disparity in wealth and a increasingly alienated 99%.

•A population declining in education and even literacy

•A crumbling Illness Profit System

•The breakdown of American Justice

•A growing and regionally based schism fracturing the culture along value issues

•The death throes of the bipolar world we have known all our lives (US vs Soviet Union) and the rise of a multipolar geopolitical reality

•A global culture shift such that, for the first time in 500 years, since Henry the Navigator, the world will not be ruled by Atlantic Caucasian values.

•America becoming a majority non-White multiple minority society

•A major geopolitical shift away from the power of the nation state as a result of the rise of the Corporate Virtual States—global companies functioning as countries without the burden of geography.

Publication History:  Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 8, Issue 1

Read the entire article on Explore, the Journal of Science and Healing

One of the wrong questions you will hear raised in the upcoming health care debate is this one: Aren’t the poor outcomes in health care in the United States all the fault of the bad health choices Americans make? Stated baldly: “It’s not our fault, it’s those irresponsible citizens who account for the bad health care outcomes.” As it happens at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University researchers Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, asked just this question. They compared the health care systems of 13 first world nations, including the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.

Their study, which covers the years 1975 to 2005, is particularly important, not only because it is recent and well designed, but because in addition to health care expenditures in each country, it focuses on 15-year survival for people at 45 years and for those at 65 years. As they say in their report published in the November Health Affairs journal:

Many advocates of U.S. health reform point to the nation’s relatively low life expectancy rankings as evidence that the health care system is performing poorly. Others say that poor U.S. health outcomes are largely due not to health care but to high rates of smoking, obesity, traffic fatalities and homicides. We used cross-national data on the 15-year survival of men and women over three decades to examine the validity of these arguments. We found that the risk profiles of Americans generally improved relative to those for citizens of many other nations, but Americans’ relative 15-year survival has nevertheless been declining. For example, by 2005, fifteen-year survival rates for 45-year-old U.S. white women were lower than in 12 comparison countries with populations of at least 7 million and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of at least 60 percent of U.S. per capita GDP in 1975. The findings undercut critics who might argue that the U.S. health care system is not in need of major changes.

Nicholas Bakalar, writing about the 30 years of the study in the The New York Times said:

In 1975 the United States was close to the average in health care costs, and last in 15-year survival for 45-year-old men. By 2005 its costs had more than tripled, far surpassing increases elsewhere, but the survival number was still last — a little over 90 percent, compared with more than 94 percent for Swedes, Swiss and Australians. For women, it was 94 percent in the United States, versus 97 percent in Switzerland, Australia and Japan.
The numbers for 65-year-olds in 2005 were similar: About 58 percent of American men could be expected to survive 15 years, compared with more than 65 percent of Australians, Japanese and Swiss. While more than 80 percent of 65-year-old women in France, Switzerland and Japan would survive 15 years, only about 70 percent of American women could be expected to live that long.

One of the most cynical aspects of the Illness Profit System, is that it hides its rapacity, behind the smiling humanitarian face of the health professionals who administer the treatments. Thousands of hours of advertising, showing us friendly doctors and nurses being competent and compassionate, re-enforces the natural deference we show to those who care for us when we are weak or ill. The system understands and exploits this just as it does the health professionals in its employ, exploiting their calling to the service of healing even as the system is constantly trying to corrupt them.

It starts with the broad population of physicians tempted with conferences at great resorts and spas, that qualify for continuing education — read presenting information on pharmaceuticals, that just happen to be made by the sponsors.

A second level of the process addresses a more select population. This concerns the fees paid to prominent physicians for speaking at conferences. Tom Detzel writing on the investigative siteProPublica presents a survey of seven companies using data taken from the companies own websites — information in some cases compelled by litigation to be released. In 2009-2010, just seven of the big pharmaceutical companies paid 17,700 presenters a total of $281.9 million to promote their products. These physician presentations were instrumental in a “combined prescription drug sales amounting to 36 percent of the $300 billion U.S. market in 2009.”

But it is in the third, most exclusive, tier of corruption that real damage is done. Science depends on properly executed studies accurately reported in an unbiased way. It is the fundamental code of all experimental research. In medicine it may literally be a matter of life or death. And it is exactly at this vulnerable fulcrum that the Illness Profit System seeks to corrupt physicians and medical researchers.

The Project on Government Oversight, is an independent nonprofit that “investigates and exposes corruption and other misconduct to achieve a more effective, accountable, open and ethical federal government.”

Once, years ago, walking across Louis Kahn’s magnificent campus designed for the Salk Institute, Jonas Salk answered my question about how he had seen so clearly what others had not seen. He said, “The answers are not the hard part. It is the questions. Asking the right question. That’s hard.”

We are about to enter yet again into the great debate over American health care, and the discussion once again will be mostly couched in financial terms. I want to suggest money is the wrong question, and it leads us to the wrong debate. Here’s what I think we should be asking: Is the health of the American people an essential part of our national security and prosperity? Is America better equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century when it has a healthy population more capable of working at its full potential? If the answer is “Yes,” then the next question to ask is: Why is our health care system so very bad — 37th in the world according to the World Health Organization? To answer that, we need to accept this reality and to start fixing it by telling the truth to ourselves about money.

The Center for Defense Information estimates the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will total over $1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2010. We have almost nothing to show for these wars, and the sacrifices made by young men and women motivated by honor, duty and a call to serve. Yet we have made these wars such a priority that in the midst of the worst economic downturn in two generations we continue to fund them at a cost of tens of millions each day. It’s not about the money.

We have a defense budget that is larger than the defense budgets of every other nation in the worldcombined – $683 billion, going to $743 billion in 2015. It’s not about the money.

The sense of spiritual consciousness, connecting to something greater than oneself, is one of the most intoxicating realms a human can enter. Across the millennia, such experiences have shaped the lives of individuals and, upon occasion, whole cultures. The question for science is not to deny them, but to seek to understand the processes by which they occur and the domain into which they lead us. Central to these true stories is a special state of mindfulness, what the psychologist Charles Tart described in his classic 1972 Science paper as a state of consciousness.

Although these experiences, when they happen spontaneously, are often one-time events, almost every human culture on earth has developed practices, usually in a spiritual or religious context, for attaining this state. Similarly, all the martial arts have this component of mindful discipline, a practice of focusing intentioned awareness. Collectively, we have come to call these practices meditation.

Of all the things that you can do to know yourself, nothing will serve you as well as developing the practice of meditation. Although meditation is often associated with Asian cultures, it is not Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Satanic or any faith at all. It can be done in the name of any of these faiths, or without faith in a religion — as distinct from a spiritual sense. Meditation is a single term defining many practices.

What is the true battle royale facing humankind?  Liberals vs. conservatives?  Fascists vs. libertarians?  Fundamentalists vs. infidels?

Strange as it sounds, I’m starting to agree with the people who point to ignorance vs. education, noting that recently, it’s become “cool to be ignorant.”  Think that’s far-fetched?  Check out Stephan A. Schwartz’ piece called Willful Ignorance.

I’ve been lucky enough to have been referred to one of the most enlightened writers on the planet, Stephan A. Schwartz, who has generously accepted my request to let me interview him for my next book. I invite readers to visit Schwartz’ website to get a sense for who he is in terms of the sheer breadth of his work.

While you’re there, note that he’s connected with some of the people from the landmark film/book “What The Bleep Do We Know?” and all the incredible thinking associated with that project, e.g., the confluence of quantum physics, metaphysics, and epistemology. My kind of guy, to be sure.

To me, all this raises an interesting and somewhat disturbing point, on which I’d like your feedback, if I may:

I have no doubt that the world would be a wonderful place in which to live if all our leaders – in both the public and private sector – were as enlightened as Schwartz. But the simple truth is that they’re not. In fact, most of them – while they may be smart, hard-working people – are on missions that have nothing whatsoever to do with improving the quality of life of the other seven billion people on the planet. As a result, we as a species have sunk to new depths of poverty, hostility, fascism, injustice, fanaticism, and environmental degradation.

Read the Rest of the article on 2GreenEnergy.com

Presented at: The Planetary Collegium’s 12th Annual international Research Conference, Consciousness Reframed: art and consciousness in the post-biological era. http://artshare.com.pt/cr12