Your health can impact far more than your own life, even the lives of everyone else around you. What are the 10 reasons civilization may collapse because of your poor health?
10. We Can Pay Old Age Pensions Or Healthcare But Not Both
The gray wave of Baby Boomers born after World War 2 are retiring, followed by a smaller cohort of tax payers in much of the developed world. Pension payments to the elderly are increasing because of their numbers and their longer life expectancy. We are also seeing more money spent on the elderly as a result of both longer lives and more expensive interventions to help them live longer. This creates a massive problem for the entitlement state. We can pay the pensions for those living to ninety or their healthcare to maintain the active lives they expect – but we cannot expect to do both and pay the national debt and have any money left over for anything else.
The irony is that old people are the most likely to vote, support various candidates as phone bank workers and contribute to elections. Society could collapse simply because those relying most heavily upon the system are the ones working hardest to support those in power. And society cannot sustain itself if all programs focus on the elderly. As Japan, Europe and other heavily socialist systems have witnessed, very high taxes lead to a below replacement birth rate. Society suffers a death spiral when the next generation has even fewer workers to support the growing gray overload – until the economic system collapses.
9. Early Retirement For Ill Health Breaks All Entitlement Systems
Many of those who retire early do not do so to enjoy a decade of travel and leisure. They worked at physically demanding jobs and are no longer able to do the labor. Those most likely to claim Social Security early are those with a high school diploma or less in education, used to thirty years of manual, unskilled labor.
They don’t have the skills or even the intelligence to retrain for much more than make-work, and they make more staying at home on the dole than they would working for minimum wage. The end result is a triple whammy for the entitlement system. They exit the workforce, no longer contributing even minimally to the tax base.
They rely on Medicaid until they can claim Medicare, draining that healthcare system. Their poor health drains all medical systems they rely upon. When people do not take care of their health and have to retire early, we end up with an entitlement system collapse. For the United States, this may occur when the Social Security Disability Income system used by those retiring early from ill health runs out in 2016. When the SSDI checks bounce, we’ll seen over ten million people lose their primary source of income – at a time when all the other entitlement systems are running dry.
8. Antibiotic Resistant Diseases
Antibiotic resistant tuberculosis is on the rise in India, Russia and Africa. It is driven in part by poor medical supervision of antibiotic usage, because those who get TB don’t finish their full course of drugs or fail to receive the whole course. It is further accelerated by the growing population of organ transplant recipients and HIV sufferers, a group with depressed immune systems that regularly contract hepatitis, TB and other serious illnesses. They get infected, receive treatment and sometimes fail to eradicate it fully.
We end up with antibiotic resistant drugs in a population that heavily uses our medical system, seeing doctors and visiting hospitals regularly. Instead of quarantine to control the spread of these diseases, they sit in ten different waiting rooms to see specialists and talk to the back office regarding payment for services. The World Health Organization recently proclaimed we were about to face a post-antibiotic era, where diseases that were once major killers like TB are about to come roaring back without any good treatment option. Imagine a killer flu without Tamiflu or TB that kills millions as it once did. In a world where half the population is now urbanized and international travel is routine, a highly contagious antibiotic resistant disease will rival the Black Death.
7. Failure To Vaccinate
A falsified study in the 1990s led to a mass movement against vaccinations. People in the West in the millions decided not to get the MMR vaccine and others. The end result is a resurgence of mumps, measles and other diseases, spread by illegal immigrants and their American born children who routinely travel home for the holidays before bringing these diseases back to the American school system. Whooping cough generated more cases in California in 2013 than occurred in the U.S. for all of 2010.
The problem isn’t just due to the fear that the mercury preservative in vaccines will cause autism. Polio is coming back in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria. The doctor who found Osama Bin Laden was doing door to door vaccinations and vaccinated his children, before reporting the 9-11-2001 mastermind. The Muslim leaders in that part of the world have responded by calling for the deaths of vaccination workers. They aren’t just killing Westerners trying to eradicate diseases like polio.
In March, 2014, Salma Farooqi was tortured and killed for giving polio vaccines. The use of vaccines without complete coverage leads to a small population in which the disease can incubate and evolve. We saw this with chicken pox, evolving into a disease with more respiratory symptoms and fewer lesions that has mutated far enough to infect vaccinated children. We risk a massive pandemic of serious illnesses like measles, polio and others with such large holes in the vaccination program, giving the disease time and hosts in which to mutate.
6. Super-STDs
The CDC released a horrifying statistic that one in four adults has a sixually transmitted disease. It is true that many of these cases are herpes, a non-life threatening illness. Antibiotic resistant gonorrhea was reported by the CDC in 2014. We have a population that readily engages in sixual contact with strangers, without adequate protection as demonstrated by the current STD rate. Many people go untreated for STDs because they don’t consider them a serious problem, spreading it to others.
HIV, syphilis and gonorrhea are rising among homosixual men because they’ve decided as a group to resume the free sharing lifestyle of the 1970s because even terrifying diseases like HIV are likened to a modest health problem. This is a serious mistake. Sixually transmitted diseases like Chlamydia can render people sterile. An antibiotic resistant STD literally gone viral poses the risk of creating mass sterility, in addition to general misery.
5. Too Weak To Defend The Country
The American military recently reported that around three quarters of all applicants fail to meet its fitness tests. Some are too fat. Some have conditions like asthma that exclude them from service. Others have ADD and ADHD, and the military doesn’t want them if they are medicated. Poor health on such a wide scale could cause civilization to collapse simply because we can’t defend it against the barbarian hordes, such as Muslim terrorists who want to force everyone to go back to the 7th century except for cell phones and the internet.
4. Importing The Barbarians
One of the admitted reasons for large scale migration is to bolster the working age population. Citizens don’t have as many children to replace themselves in the labor force as is needed to prop up the entitlement system, so we import workers from abroad. They have children at a faster rate than natives, further bolstering the population. It seems like a win-win scenario, adding to the work force today and tomorrow. There is an unspoken downside. Large scale immigration prevents assimilation. There are neighborhoods and towns where someone can walk blocks without hearing English.
Caucasians have gone from 90% of the population to less than half of the children under the age of five in three generations. One of the problems with a large mass of unassimilated people is that they remain loyal to their community, whether the homeland or simply their own ethnic block here. And a large Hispanic voting block that sees itself re-conquering the Southwest has no desire to pay higher taxes so that blacks can have reparations or old white people can have cushy retirements and nicer nursing homes. It isn’t the end of civilization per se, but it can be the end of the American culture.
3. Everything Is A Mental Disorder
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been growing with each release. Changes over time include the elimination of homosixuality as a mental disorder, softening of the criticism of pedophilia and debate as to whether thinking you were born in the wrong body is even a metal disorder. Of greater import is the medicalization of normal life conditions. Are you still in deep grief regarding the death of a partner of fifty years a year later? Now you’re six months past acceptable interval of deep grief, here’s a happy pill.
Throw too many tantrums? Oppositional defiant disorder, here’s your medication. Shy? Social anxiety disorder. We have moved to the absurd situation where a quarter of the population is classified as mentally ill, and almost everyone could count as such at some point in their lives. The book “Brave New World” was an empty dystopia ruled by an elite that solve many problems via soma and other pills. We’re moving in that direction with each version of the DSM.
2. Obesity And The World War
The U.S., Europe and Mexico have reached the ironic situation of having more overweight people than those of normal weight. There are a billion malnourished people in the world, and a billion and a half fat people. The overweight are centered in developed nations, while the starving are in developing and Third World countries. The Arab Spring coincided with a spike in wheat prices, driven by a combination of poor harvests and environmentalist mandates for corn ethanol and palm fuel oil in the West.
As much corn was used to fill one gas tank as could feed a poor person for a year. America’s obesity epidemic ensures that more food stays in the country to feed its already fat population than exported to those overseas. The next bad harvest won’t affect Americans directly; they have the money and food stamp program to keep its people fed. However, you can be sure that the next bad harvest will lead to more world turmoil that will be made worse by bad economic conditions world wide. We could end up with a new World War driven in part by starving people in the third world who would have stayed content if they’d had a lot of the food consumed by our obese.
1. Too Distracted To Care About A Dictatorship
Too many people are driven to distraction today to be involved in politics. Or they take the easy way out, such as sending text messages with a hash tag, as if sending a message about feminism and Boko Haram does anything to liberate the girls kidnapped by Muslim terrorists or save them from sixual slavery. Those who would be politically active are easily labeled paranoid and drugged into compliance. We end up with a population too distracted by television, video games and legal drugs to stop the rise of a future dictatorship.