A collective Case of Deflection
Half of the U.S. population is affected by a chronic disease epidemic, and the deteriorating health situation in the West is increasingly impacting the rest of the world. New knowledge and debates about the underlying dynamics could have significant future implications, but political obstacles have hindered a systematic approach to identifying the root causes of this health disaster.
This research neglect is not due to a lack of public interest. By 2024, more than a million copies of The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté had been sold, in which clear connections between illnesses and toxic culture are described. The determinants of poor health are viewed here as capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. Sharyl Attkinson’s book Follow the Science (2024) offers a critical perspective of the major economic interests linked to the Western Health crisis. Vaccines, nutrition, and pollution are other conventional explanations for health problems in Western countries.
Many widely accepted interpretations seem influenced by political leanings. They absolve Western culture of responsibility and divert attention towards human inequality, suffering, trauma, victimhood, vulnerability, and healing. The West is permeated by a victimhood mentality and offers everyone the opportunity to relinquish personal responsibility for their health status and the welfare of their children. As a result, health issues cannot be addressed directly and candidly.
The MICUL model examines health by focusing on the main drivers affecting the evolution of Western culture and exploring if they can be the real reason behind its health problems. Political developments over more than a century have made it easier to answer this question: Western culture is significantly shaped in the U.S. by college-educated elites, media, feminist cultural critique, academia, Marxism, and postmodernism.
This perspective helps illustrate why fundamental changes in the West are entangled with shifting reproductive patterns, waning interpersonal relationships and social bonds, poor early childhood development, cultural polarization, lack of rational thought, and growing complexity. The MICUL model explains how cultural transformations are key to understanding Western diseases. Achieving such insights requires looking in the right places and asking the right questions.
The key recognition is that humans have biological and psychological limits on the conditions under which stable, harmonious, and healthy cultures can develop. Western diseases arise and spread when these tresholds are surpassed, as predicted by the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.
Main Catalysts of Western Diseases
Prostate cancer interacts with the nervous system and manifests differently in younger and older men. Its prevalence depends not only on era, culture, geography, and the level of Westernization but also likely on behavioral patterns. Any causal interpretation must include the effects of mind and culture. This study identifies twelve distinct pathways through which mind and culture can harm the prostate and highlights three cultural core aspects in the development of Western diseases:
- Reproductive patterns: Associated keywords include: sexual selection, sexual conflict, sex ratio, sexual revolutions, promiscuity, sexual signaling, hypergamy, contraception, and reproductive technology. Hidden harmful effects of sexual selection (as defined by Charles Darwin in 1871) and cultural sexualization are dubbed here as reproductive stress.
- Social relations: Associated keywords include: singlehood, meaninglessness, dating crisis, loneliness, family dissolution, peer pressure, toxic relationships, oxytocin malfunction, and social stress.
- Early childhood development: Associated keywords include fatherlessness, child abuse, and maternal stress.
In 2021, 7.2 million U.S. children were registered annually as victims of abuse, according to americanspcc.org, among which 76 % were victims of neglect.
Much of the current knowledge of Western diseases is disturbing and calls for an honest, comprehensive review and increased public awareness.
A vast amount of unused information has been accumulated during recent decades, and the MICUL model is built upon studying biological correlations that have previously escaped attention.