Most people in the United States can't see this but affluence pathology rules everything around you. Its in every system and institution and business and community in the United States. The majority only sees this as a "rich people problem." The academic research says it's the mid-middleclass.
But to understand it we have to understand what produces it and what the characteristics are.
By the time of this article you will see a major "abundance" of wealthy people claiming abundance is coming. Many average middleclass people are quoting U25 because they just found it even though that study is over 50 years old. Those who believe Calhoun's study proves anything are people who can't understand how hospitals work, how important education systems are, how roads are made or how they clear transport for EMS, or how grandma's properly function as a cornerstone in a given community.
Yes, that's correct. Calhoun's progeny and modern supporters are missing the point. All of those things I just mentioned are more telling of our species and humanity than the fact we just stood upright one day and began farming.
But none of those things are in the study are they?
So, why does this little mouse study prove so much to people what will happen to humans when given abundance? How did we ever survive this dreaded abundant surplus created by farming as far back as Mabu Co or Syria thousands of years ago?
But we are also verifiably in a fertility crisis and most Americans can shower every day. That's a verifiable fact that we are already "the beautiful ones" (Calhoun's own words in the study) grooming often and slowing procreation prior to any impending AI and robotics "abundance," "solar punk," "luxury space communism," or billionaire-gifted "universal high income" that Calhounians ignorantly harken will ruin us all.
To call this mouse study a clear tell in human abundance is antiscientific.
Speaking of Farming
To better understand affluence you really must go back to a few critical moments in history.
In modern history much of the tells blur together due to invention and change being so rapid. However, the point where humans figured out the modern version of farming, roughly ~10,000 to ~15,000 years ago, is an easy place to see a clear example.
Since this article is not about farming I'll cut to the chase. Just before farming in a culture or civilization's history there is not farming. Just after agriculture takes off the culture receives more spare time and docility. This is what lead to domestication. For thousands of years people understood this makes you soft compared to the forest hunters and gatherers of the predating era.
"You're going to grow all that? Behind a fence? The corn and the cows? You're not going to chase your food and kill it? Your children will become weak."
That is the sound of what a modern Calhounian would've said 10 thousand years ago pretending that fitness, gyms, sports(archery/hunting/marksmanship/et al), education systems, etc. will never develop to compensate. It took a very long time before the plow was recorded into invention and then to develop the tractor. The fitness gym ensures people who choose to can still grow big and strong.
So why is it difficult for people to understand abundance? We'll get back to that in a minute.
One of the most important things that modern society lacks is true learning trial. Most people think that your undergrad or your career is a real accomplishment because of the pep rally surrounding people who run through that gambit. However, most of the accomplishments had in the middleclass actually are actually had by simply showing up and being smart enough.
Much of them aren't real accomplishments.
I've been rich and I've been poor. I've literally died a couple times. My first job was farming tobacco. I've seen homelessness as well as restaurant ownership. I've had multiple guns pointed in my face, as well as, I double majored and double minored at the nation's oldest collegiate military college. I can tell you that nothing about middleclass life, specifically, is ever really hard. That's exactly how its all designed. All you have to do is show up everyday and with money. The customer is always right. The universities cave and don't make you read books anymore. Parents do everything they can to make their kids' lives easier. Everything has bumper guards, training wheels, and safety nets up.
Why would you ever argue against me?
The learning trial came about due to affluence pathology.
What are learning trials really? I named my program Trials of Activism 15 years ago. I was trying to make a point but I'm not sure everyone understood it.
Familial separation. Dangerous trial and struggle. Reunite with family.
Some rites of passage aren't that big of a deal compared to what I'm actually talking about here so let's quickly divide them. What I'm NOT talking about: ceremonies, drug use, religious doctrine. What I AM talking about: cut off from your society, sent to the woods with no food or water for days or weeks, forced to hunt lions or wolves with only basic tools and defenses.
It's typically best when you die for a period of time and then are brought back.
Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to ease someone into this and modern society will never allow those things to happen to children. I mean just imagine a rogue parent doing that to their kid? The current system will take their child away because affluence pathology is a legal policy requirement. An undergraduate college education does not provide the same inoculation as hunting something that's also hunting you while you are also starving.
Sorry, you can't recreate that in a classroom.
How do I know this? Remember I told you I died a couple of times? I was attacked by yellow jackets and ground hornets twice when I was fifteen. I was stung over 400 times in total. On two separate occasions I had to make it to help very quickly. Yellow jackets are not bees. Hell, I'll take a big fat hornet over a few little yellow jackets. ANY DAY.
I do not test allergic in a biopsy but due to the amount of venom that did not matter.
They are a species and category of their own. Just look it up. Their behavior and their venom and their sheer voracity and tenacity make them unique. Even their numbers can get way higher than any other type of insect similar. Not even the Japanese murder hornet quite compares to a full hive of yellow jackets despite "murder" being in its name as yellow jackets scavenge and eat rotting flesh and have been known to kill things much larger than I.
I survived BOTH times thanks to my own quick actions, the quick actions of my mother because there was no ambulance, and the actions of the ER nurses who stepped in when the attending physician left me on the floor in the waiting room not breathing.
This experience woke me up. It showed me that average middleclass people will just let you die. It was also my rite of passage. It did not make me "woke." I did not go sky divin' and rocky mountain climbin'. In fact it made me see what I'm trying to tell you now. It is one of the most important things you can ever learn. Most people live in an affluent haze of underdevelopment.
It was like night and day. I saw how this affected my mother and then the rest of my family. I could clearly see who cared and who didn't. I could clearly see why "racism" is perceived to exist. I could easily see the nonsense of partisanship in how no real conservative patriot is allowed to support large corporate monopolies over social communities that flavored and speckled the heartland and in those protesting for Bernie Sanders or climate change while still being a cigarette smoker, paying for cable or Netflix, buying coffees before protesting, and then filling up their tanks of gas before going home to their air conditioning.
You might call that irony. I call it pathological arrested development due to a lack of core learning trials and rites of passage caused by affluence.
The right has their versions too. The U.S. military operates the longest standing socialist institution on the planet all at the support of the clueless average rightwing conservative and their overtaxed dollars. Children also don't pay for their own public schooling but they receive it for free, so, that makes them commies. Right?
But this isn't a political conversation
There are obvious characteristics on both sides of the aisle. So this must be a people problem. Not a party problem. A lot of what are "tells" of modern affluence pathology are commonly swept under the rug. In modernity arrested development got defined down to a jobless man with a joint. That definition was built to point at the one person in the room with no power to defend himself.
If you think that every poor person is exactly where they want to be and choose to be then you're an idiot.
In Suniya Luthar's own APA approved paper affluence pathology begins at 70k/yr. That's not my number. If you're a hater of mine then you probably thought I invented that number in the title or I had AI come up with it but you'd be wrong. There is no AI on the planet right now that naturally outputs many of my opinions in my writings and that's easy to prove by talking to any one of them.
Even the best AI can not correctly identify affluence pathology much further than most people I've talked to over the years. The funny thing is that I fed several of them my talking points from as far back as 2012 on this and not one can refute me or my logic. This is the same in every coffee shop or campus argument I've even been in. No human can refute me here and neither can AI on an opinion that AI doesn't even take by their own training.
That argument is this: pretty much all of you are in arrested development.
The litmus test: If you can't play 2 or more instruments, speak 2 or more languages, play 2 or more sports, do math in your head, and meet a 12th grade level at every human 12th grade subject then you are noticeably disadvantaged in this debate from the start.
That's just the start, what is a whole human? What is the whole assessment of where a normal non-disabled person should be?
According to ADULT literacy and numeracy as well as IQ numbers roughly only 30% of people would meet my litmus test. But factor in all forms of human intelligence like creativity, emotional reasoning, and social intelligence and the number plummets to the single digit percent.
No AI will say that to you. Nor will they come up with that argument for you. Its not how they work and explaining why for someone if they don't already know is a whole separate article. As I hinted at above, its in the details of their training.
That little litmus test is just for 12th grade passing education. If you went to any real music class you were supposed to touch at the very least a recorder and a piano. If you went to any gym class you were supposed to teach every sport at least once in a year. You notice in the paragraph above I did not state one needed to be a genius at everything. However, its not enough for positions like judge, 1st responder, journalism, doctor, lawyer, politician, social worker, etc. and maybe positions like grocery store clerk or barista are excluded but not their managers or business owners.
The truth is actually astounding. Almost no person in society is cognitively at the level they should be in order for our society to be normal or the expected average and so you can forget about thriving. Older generations just started calling out the younger generations for this but its calling the kettle black.
When you actually splice down literacy the amount of books required to be read is pretty interesting. You account for each text book in each subject and each grade. And then you account for required extra books read for courses and lessons. And then you account for an expected allotted overage from that of books that are part of expected extended reading programs. Ours growing up was called Accelerated Reading and we were required to read 2 extra books at any given time above what our classes had for us. AND THIS WAS ENFORCED AND CHECKED ON A REGULAR BASIS. And these books had to cycle every two weeks.
When you actually do the accounting the number of books a person has to read in order to be a normal functioning adult in important roles in society is something north of one thousand because it factors in college books.
Do the math per grade and per subject on your own and you will find that even average members of society should have around 500 books read by adulthood.
The worst offender is genuinely the specialist. Adam Smith knew it. The expectation is that one meets this baseline first and then specializes which is not what's happening when professionals can't understand other professional categories such as a neuroscientist not understanding politics or a lawyer not fathoming the compound exponent.
Now ask yourself: how many adults do you know fit the bill?
My numbers to the question are above and easily checkable with Google(PIAAC 2023 for the 30%, and Gallup 2021 has American adults averaging 12.6 books a year, with the steepest drop among college graduates). No AI has been able to put a serious hole in my argument. Nothing beyond numbers, names, and dates.
Come at me.
