He does raise an interesting point though. Is our society making people mentally ill? As capitalism overheats and it turns from meaning simply that the means of production are in private hands to meaning that everything is predicated as to whether it benefits "business" or not.
Look at our current government. They've held a torch to workers rights simply because business leaders said it would be better for them. The result is a much less equal society rife with zero-hours contracts and no job security and the lower taxes the rich want mean that unemployment benefits are slashed so the level of insecurity increases. The promise of all this is that the "wealth creators" get what they want but with some vague and undefined promise that their newly created wealth somehow "trickles down" to the rest of society. This obviously doesn't happen but still the opinion of business leaders will probably swing this election. So far so familiar but does it actually make people ill? Is there a base level of anxiety (which is known to cause depression) in society that is exacerbated by capitalist policies that will actually result in more people going postal than usual? It'd be an interesting study. Not sure how we'd start it, maybe check GP records for prescriptions for either anti-depressants or talking therapies. I'm fairly sure they are up considerably. But finding a link between that and incidents like the Germanwings tragedy is going to take some doing. The main problem I can see being how you would isolate the amount of spree killings caused by societal stress from the any caused by, say, memes of mass murder that permeate society through the media from groups like ISIS. Beheadings are now quite common in criminal endeavors. A squabble between drug addicts in my home town ended up with someone's head being lopped off with a carving knife. I bet it wouldn't have happened a few years ago. It seems the actions of a bunch of maniacs in the middle east has coarsened expectations and desensitised us to more extreme violence. Which, type of influence - if any - could be blamed for the actions of the German pilot? Or was it just one of those things? If there is any truth to Brands argument we'll see a lot more things like that but even then, I don't trust statistical analyses of violent events. Look at what the TMO has tried to prove with them" And I'm surprised that Russell Brand - being a TMer - hasn't realised that mass meditation would be a cure for all this new stress. The TMO always used to say that in our modern world the increase of stress can only be managed by lowering your own base level. It's like he doesn't care about spreading the word any more! Is he getting bored with his practise? Does he not believe the speil that he has undoubtably heard from John Hagelin and David Lynch (who is much more of a TB in things like the Marshy Effect than he ever lets on)? Or is he wisely keeping his mouth shut lest that stain of association ruins his career? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : The loony Brand blames Fox News for the tragedy . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCREVmaRaeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCREVmaRaeg
