I recently stumbled upon the Chris Jordan 2008 TED talk wherein Chris made artwork out of our collective unconscious behaviors. With a smoking skeleton and pills formed into a surprising circular array, he exposed the following and other punishing statistics…not to punish us, but to inform us.
- 400,000 people died from smoking in 2008.
- 65,000 teenagers would start smoking in one month in 2008
- 213,000 Emergency Room visits resulted from prescription drug abuse
How are we doing against these data today? More importantly, if the unconscious behaviors Chris exposed in artful form come from our individual denials, is there something we can do about it? Not only do we bear the cost to our national psyche, but also to our healthcare costs, and unnecessary loss of life for our young people.
We’re moving in the wrong direction.
- 443,000 died from smoking in 2011, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC)
- 114,000 teenagers started smoking in one month in 2011 (CDC)
- 1.4 million Emergency Room visits resulted from prescription drug use in 2011 (Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration).
I am reminded of the novel Lord of the Flies. I think the book, published in 1954, has been required reading in the California high schools for decades, and tracks closely to Chris Jordan’s reflection of our collectively destructive detritus. The Lord of the Flies author, William Golding, states that his novel’s theme is “an attempt to trace defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.”
Chris’s and our question of ourselves is: How conscious are we as individuals? What can we change today about ourselves that will change society, but more importantly, make us better individuals? Change is hard. Becoming conscious is the first step.
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