Books by Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling, among others, and reports from the World Bank and the UN, all argue that world poverty has dropped dramatically, and the world is a lot better. But they give only a small piece of the story. World poverty has declined rapidly in the past two decades, but according to the UNDP 2020 reports, 600 million people still live in extreme poverty, defined as less than $1.90 income per day. Over a half billion people is a very large number. The worst part of the picture is that most of the extreme poverty exists in Sub-Saharan Africa and that population is rising rapidly. Most presume that since poverty statistics are improving, global well-being must be rising, but it is not. In fact, negative emotional experiences are rising at the rate of 1-percent per year. That evidence comes from the Gallup World Poll.
     From the Gallup World Poll, I discovered that levels of stress and pain, as well as negative emotions, have actually gone up in the past 12 years at the rate of about 1-percent per year.
    The trend-line chart below shows the slow but steady rise in negative experiences across all countries of the world beginning with 2006. People were asked if they had experienced “physical pain during a lot of the day yesterday,” and worldwide a over a third responded “yes.” As the trendline for “pain” shows, this was a rise or gain of nine points (9-percent) above its level in 2007. Feeling pain “a lot of the day” suggests substantial pain and suffering. We can infer also that a huge number of people worldwide are suffering significant pain, and that the number feeling pain was much greater in 2018 than in 2006.

Similar questions asked about “stress,” and about each of the following negative emotions: worry, sadness and anger. “Worry” produced an even higher affirmative response than stress or pain.  From these findings it is evident that daily negative experiences in general are rising across the globe. In the chart the line labeled “Index” is the average of the five negative emotions or experiences. Since 2010, the tendency to suffer from these negative emotions or experiences has risen 8 points. In brief, this measures the percent of people in the world who express an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with life. Although the rise in suffering is not steep, the upward trend of these lines is consistent and remarkably steady. A quick glance at the trendlines in the chart reveal that upward swing in negative emotions and pain and suffering.

    The rising negative experiences of the past decade was the most pronounced in Africa and selected countries in Asia. This is especially troubling in light of demographic projections that predict that many of these countries will see their populations triple in size over the next 75 years. And this rise in population will almost inevitably bring more suffering.   

Implications of Declining Global Well-Being.

    In both every day and academic conversations, the words ‘suffering’ and ‘well-being’ are used as opposites. Suffering equates to negative well-being or ‘ill-being.’ In fact, suffering serves as one of the most powerful indicators of negative well-being. Thus, the rise in global suffering signals a decline in global well-being. 6The Gallup World Poll gives us solid, data-grounded evidence that global well-being has been declining at the same time that economic well-being rises. How can this apparent contradiction between social and economic progress be explained?

    One explanation might be that the steep decline in world poverty largely ended by 2006 but poor peoples’ expectations of rising out of poverty did not end. Another strong possibility is that the rise in hourly wages around the globe has been so small that it has not made a serious dent in global well-being. The evidence many economists have used to show world poverty reduction has been an increase in the daily earnings from less than $1.25 per day to more than $1.25 per day. Because this is roughly equivalent to increasing the hourly wage from 15 cents per hour to 20 cents per hour, the change is too trivial to significantly improve access to adequate healthcare or in other such ways improve wellbeing.

    Perhaps that most compelling explanation is that very small increments in income or wealth alone cannot produce the changes in social and political institutions that are needed to reduce widespread discrimination, inequality, violence, and other violations of human rights. It is easy to make the false assumption that progress in economic indicators automatically improves social wellbeing. However, such a conclusion by policy decision makers will yield failed socio-economic policies, especially those related to social development.

    The discovery that global suffering has been going up has the following implications: (1) Claims of global progress should be qualified by noting the recent rise in suffering and hence the decline in well-being. (2) Humanitarians now have measures of suffering that reinforce the importance of their efforts to reduce suffering. (3) With this and other suffering metrics, it will be possible to better evaluate the effectiveness of programs with the potential to alleviate suffering.

Americans and Greeks Among the Most Stressed   

    In this same study, Gallup found that among the most stressed people in the world were the Iranians, the Tanzanians and those from the Philippines. But so were the Americans and the Greeks with nearly two thirds in those countries reporting to have been stressed most of yesterday. Stress cannot be written off as being part of an highly industrialized or wealthy economy, because none of the other high GDP or high-income countries were highly stressed.

    One clue to American stress is that the most stressed Americans were among the poorest 20% and in the 18-49 age group. Among the wealthiest countries, the United States stands out as having the greatest inequality and the largest share of people living in poverty.

Comparing Pain and Suffering of Specific Nations.

   Gallup’s annual world poll reported in 2019 that Chad had the most “pain-stricken and sad people in the world.” Two-thirds of them when surveyed said that they had experienced physical pain during most of the previous day. And over half said they had felt sad through much of yesterday. In recent years Chadians have suffered frequent killings by Boko Haram as well as other regional fighting groups. Chad is one of five African nations in the Sahel region that has suffered from frequent attacks by militant Islamic groups. Chad, a nation of 13 million, has a reputation as one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world.

   For several years, Iran and Iraq have remained on Gallup’s list of top five countries with the “Highest Negative Experiences,” according to the Gallup Global Emotions annual reports. Not only did these two countries have a lot of people feeling stressed and angry but nearly half reported feeling worried and sad. In the past two years these two countries experienced bombings, mass protests and other chaos producing events over and over. The Iraqi Insurgency continues with mostly Sunni rebel groups fighting the Shia-led Government.  Many in Iran and Iraq suffer from unemployment, poverty and poor access to health services. Both Iran and Iraq as well as Chad have huge refugee populations. The population of Chad is 15 million, Iraq 38 million, and Iran has 82 million.

CONCLUSIONS   

    Perhaps the most important conclusion to draw from these findings is that economic progress cannot be automatically equated with progress in social well-being. Wealth can contribute to quality of life, but it can also add to negative quality of life especially when its growth is one of the forces underlying major social inequality.

    GDP-based economic indicators remain the dominant metrics of human well-being. Adding measures of suffering, as well as other measures of community and societal quality of life would help to refocus upon the other values people care about. Robert Kennedy once said that “GDP does not consider the health of our children.” Neither does GDP reflect our wisdom or compassion. In short, “it measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Gallup World Poll Data. The charts above capture findings from 1,250,000 interviews in 150 countries representing 98% of the world population across the past eight years. In each year and each country a minimum of 1,000 randomly selected adults are interviewed for the Gallup World Poll. Interviews are conducted in respondent’s native language in person or by phone. For this article, the data were retrieved through the Gallup Analytics portal. More details can be obtained from the Poll’s Methodology Report.
Gallup’s “Suffering Index” is based upon a series of questions that measure respondents’ perceptions of where they stand, now and in the future. Individuals who rate their current lives as an average of “4” or lower are defined as ‘suffering.’ All other individuals are considered ‘not suffering.’ Their objective with this index is to identify persons with such extreme dissatisfaction with their lives that they, in fact, are suffering.

By 2020 the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) reported 71 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, half of whom qualify as refugees, and half of them are under the age of 18. An additional 10 million stateless people have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement.

Many additional persons began the journey out of their homeland but died in route to another country. In a world where nearly 34,000 people are forcibly displaced every day because of conflict or persecution, the humanitarian crisis will continue to worsen.

While many view this problem as primarily a problem of the Middle East and Europe, only about 14% of global refugees attempt entry into the EU or other upper income nations (See Stiftung 2017 book in References.) An article by Patrick Kingsley notes how British and other European leaders have made extremely untrue and exaggerated claims about refugee flow into European countries.   The crisis of mass displacement is a global humanitarian problem, which demands global solutions. Prejudice and xenophobic variations across nations make solving refugee issues extremely challenging.

Visionary leadership needs to be developed in setting up strong refugee systems that remain sustainable in part by reinforcing the virtues of solidarity and compassion.

This website does not advocate totally porous borders. Instead we promote humanitarian solutions to the policy crisis worldwide. Here are some concrete steps that can be taken to better resolve the global refugee crisis:

• Organize action toward a discrimination-free world. For examples of initial steps taken, see discriminationfreezone.org and http://discriminationfreeworld.blogspot.com/
• Organize resistance such as protest marches and strikes related to anti-immigrant policies. Examples are the migrant strikes and protest marches in the United States on May 5, 2017.
• Promote another “World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, also known as WCAR. The last conference was held in 2001. It is time to hold a follow up conference.
• Wealthy nations need to pay their promised pledges for refugee aid.
• Advocate widespread education on communicating across cultural barriers.
• Use Climate of Hope approach to building a movement on inter-nation cooperation.
• Support activities that expand world peace. A good example of such activities is Alliance for Peacebuilding, an association of organizations and professional advocates.
• Mobilize support for teaching internationalism in schools around the world. An example of such effort is the Council of International Schools. One of their initiatives is the Global Citizenship project.
• Support and promote Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.”
• Promote action to support Goal 16 (Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.) of the Sustainable Development Goals.
• Raise awareness and offer advocacy ideas for the alleviation of world suffering. See book by that name.

Longer-term, broader social change is needed concurrently with the above projects or proposals. Such social change must address these types of problems: cultivating the roots of socioeconomic development; improvements in education and vocational training; healthcare systems for all citizens and refugees; respect for good governance and the rule of law; respect for deep democracy; and most importantly, systems that support enforcement of civic and other human rights.

References

Stiftung, B. (2017). Escaping the Escape: Toward Solutions for the Humanitarian Migration Crisis. Gutersloh, DE: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung.

This site is the new home for Ron Anderson’s website World Suffering & Compassionate Relief of Suffering. 

Ron Anderson, an innovative scholar of technology and society, and a dear and generous colleague to all who were privileged to know him, passed away on December 21, 2020.

In honor of Ron’s legacy, and in recognition of Ron’s support of The Society Pages, TSP now hosts this website. We will continue to feature the content that Ron wrote and curated, and seek submissions for new posts that reflect Ron’s unique perspective and vision of World Suffering.

Below you will find Ron’s description of this website and its goals and structure, written in Ron’s own words:

“This site has two pillars, understanding world suffering and enabling compassion and other actions to alleviate suffering. Think of compassion as the desire to alleviate specific suffering. Exposure to a situation of suffering shapes how a compassionate person comes to help reduce the suffering of others or one’s self. This site will attempt to lay out the scope and nature of suffering so that we direct our empathy and compassion more effectively. Look at it as an aid to identifying the suffering most deserving of alleviation or even elimination.

Books. Several books serve as resource material for the authors and readers of this site. Written by Ron Anderson, the book  Human Suffering & the Quality of Life, was published by Springer in 2014;  World Suffering & the Quality of Life, was published by Springer in 2015. Like a handbook, it contains articles by 45 authors from all over the globe. Both books discuss how compassion and caring relate to suffering. A third book, Alleviating World Suffering, was published in 2017 by Springer. It has the same structure as the previous one but focuses upon relief and alleviation of human suffering.

Category Tabs. The tabs on the home page can be used to more quickly find the articles on each of these topical areas: Suffering, Compassion, and Wellbeing. A Fourth tab labeled “Resources” contains links to longer reports and articles on one or more of these topics.

The site encourages active dialogues using the comments feature. To leave a comment about an article, you only have to give a name, enter an email address, and write a brief comment.

Facebook and Twitter. World Suffering forwards notices of any new articles to the World Suffering pages Facebook and Twitter. They can be found under the name ‘world suffering.’ Please check out the site pages there.

Editorial policies. Any who wish to add their articles to this site are welcome to submit them for consideration. The guidelines for both articles and comments can be condensed into these three policies

1. We expect tolerance of all social groups except those that promote intolerance and hate, but for them we expect courtesy.
2. Plagiarism is not acceptable.
3. We do not advocate particular religions or political parties.

Deep caring and humanitarian action, not political activism, are our primary objectives. Social policies derived from genuine compassion are especially encouraged. Making the world, and ourselves, kinder and more empathetic takes knowledge, practice, attentiveness and will. Our role is to encourage and support people with this mission.”

Contact Us

Questions and suggestions are most welcome. Contact the site administrator by sending an email to tsp@contexts.org.

The Gallup World Poll reveals the worst pockets of global suffering. On the map above, the darker the nation’s color, the worse the suffering, and the countries in faint color had the least suffering. The map highlights that the most extreme suffering on the globe in 2018 occurred in three geographic regions: Africa, the Middle East, and Southeastern Europe. In this report suffering was presumed if a person said their life was close to “the worse possible life.” It was presumed if a person agreed that they had suffered “pain a lot of the day yesterday.” 

The countries with the greatest amount of suffering in 2018 were Chad, South Sudan, Burundi, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti. You may notice that most of these countries have had a great deal of violent conflict in recent years.

Gallup’s annual world poll in 2018 reported that Chad had the most “pain-stricken and sad people in the world.” Two-thirds of them when surveyed said that they had experienced physical pain during most of the previous day. And over half said they had felt sad through much of yesterday. In recent years Chadians have suffered frequent killings by Boko Haram as well as other regional fighting groups. Chad is one of five African nations in the Sahel region that have suffered from frequent attacks by militant Islamic groups. Chad, a nation of 13 million, has a reputation as one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world.

For several years, Iraq has remained on Gallup’s list of top five countries with the “Highest Negative Experiences,” according to the Gallup Global Emotions annual reports. Not only did Iraq have a lot of people feeling stressed and angry but nearly half reported feeling worried and sad. In the past two years Iraq has experienced repeated bombings, protests and other chaos producing events. The Iraqi Insurgency continues with mostly Sunni rebel groups fighting the Shia-led Government. Many in Iraq suffer from unemployment, poverty and poor access to health services. Iraq as well as Chad have huge refugee populations.

Suffering and social wellbeing vary from day to day and year to year. As suffering results from societal challenges like poverty, violence, and intolerance, we can expect suffering to be increasing across years in some countries but decreasing in other nations. Neither suffering nor other major indicators of the quality of life in societies remain stagnate, although in most affluent countries the level of subjective suffering and related aspects of the quality of life tend to remain fairly constant. Extreme suffering will predominate in countries ravaged by civil war and those with a large number of its citizens trapped in impoverished living conditions.

Gallup World Poll Data. The charts above capture findings from 1,250,000 interviews in 150 countries representing 98% of the world population across the past eight years. In each year and each country a minimum of 1,000 randomly selected adults are interviewed for the Gallup World Poll. Interviews are conducted in respondent’s native language in person or by phone. For this article, the data were retrieved through the Gallup Analytics portal. More details can be obtained from the Poll’s Methodology Report.
Gallup’s “Suffering Index” is based upon a series of questions that measure respondents’ perceptions of where they stand, now and in the future. Individuals who rate their current lives as an average of “4” or lower are defined as ‘suffering.’ All other individuals are considered ‘not suffering.’ Their objective with this index is to identify persons with such extreme dissatisfaction with their lives that they, in fact, are suffering.

Abstract

To those living within the central zones of large cities worldwide, homelessness has become a common way of being. However, in suburban and rural areas it may be hidden or even nonexistent. Despite the extreme wealth of the United States, homelessness has been growing steadily and spiking during economic recessions. Even though it is the homeless who suffer the most and die young, the political, justice and governance systems do the bidding of landlords and real estate development companies. Once a family is forcibly evicted from their home, they become the outcasts of society, targets of abuse and victims of poor health and short life expectancies. Even those who cycle in and out of homelessness become victims of these same tribulations. Few generalizations can be made about global homelessness because of different definitions of homelessness across borders and disagreement on what constitutes a home. What is most visible and problematic worldwide is the homelessness suffered by refugees, asylum seekers, and other immigrants. Due to the sharp rise in refugees from African and Middle Eastern armed conflicts, combined with the growing prejudice toward refugees and migrants, global homelessness will continue to perpetuate human suffering on a massive scale.

A Personal Anecdote

After living for 30 years in the suburbs of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, I moved to the downtown inner city of Saint Paul. During those three decades in the suburbs, years would go by without seeing a homeless person or even non-white persons. Now living downtown, my wife and I both encounter homeless people and ethnic minorities every day of the year because we walk the second-floor skyways to get around downtown and for daily walking. The homeless also like the skyways to keep dry when it rains and warm when it snows. Saint Paul, a city of 300,000 had an estimated homeless population of about 1,500 in 2015 (Wilder Research 2016). The majority of the homeless in Saint Paul hangout in or nearby the downtown area.

Sharing narrow walkways in downtown Saint Paul with homeless people makes me feel part of the whole community, but when they relieve themselves on a carpet or block foot traffic while sleeping in a hallway, it is easy to wish they would to go elsewhere.

The homeless became and remain homeless largely from structural conditions in society such as lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs, and absence of social services for the homeless. In America, many have ignored the homeless except to complain about them and many of us have given up trying to improve their quality of life because we blame them for being lazy, crazy and dangerous.

Only if we spend time with some of them can we expect to learn how to help resolve their problems. Because some of the homeless are dangerous, we work with the City and Skyway Police to let them know about those appearing to violate the City criminal and skyway codes. We also work with a group of volunteers called “Ambassadors,” who befriend teenagers in the skyway to keep gang fights from erupting. It is not easy, but we try to establish a sense of community so that we help each other deal with urban living.          The remainder of this article reviews the big pictures of homelessness in America and around the world, offering some approaches to address the problems head on.

Homelessness in the USA

Dwelling places such as caves and houses protect human life from threats of all types, but especially illnesses due to exposure and other harmful threats. Construction of houses that retain heat and reduce the human susceptibility to pneumonia and other weather-based diseases has increased life expectancy. Despite the obvious benefit of good housing, as the world economy has grown steadily, so has homelessness.

While one can make a long list of causes of homelessness, the greatest historical force underlying homelessness is the rapidly rising cost of housing in large cities. Huge inflation in the cost of housing (both renting and owning) continues at the same time that people have to move from rural to urban areas to find employment.

In this analysis, after considering trends, causes, and solutions of homelessness in the United States, the challenge of world homelessness will be discussed and analyzed. Some indicators of homelessness in the United States are shown in Figure 1. The top trend line represents the rise of homeless children (age 17 or younger) in the USA over the past decade, with a current estimate of 1.5 million children, which includes both children in homeless families and children not living in families (AIR 2014).

Figure 1. Homelessness in the United States over Time

The bottom two lines represent homeless adults, with the first line showing those living in emergency or temporary housing shelters and the second line for those living in other places such as under bridges, on sidewalks, in tents and so forth (HUD 2017). The 2017 count by HUD of the homeless is about 550,000 in the United States.

There has been a slow decline in adult homelessness over the past decade. The decline in adult homelessness while the number of homeless children has risen reflects two factors. One is that the vulnerability of children to being homeless is fairly recent and in part a result of the economic recessions of the past two decades. Another reason for the difference may be that the count of children was done by AIR (2014) and its Center for Family Homelessness, who extracted the estimates of child homelessness from a combination of U. S. Census data and counts from the U. S. Department of Education.

On the other hand, the estimates of adult homelessness were obtained from a single point-in-time survey of American adults staying in shelters or known outside locations during a specific night in January. The fact that their estimates of adult homelessness are so low compared to those for children suggests that many homeless adults were not found for the survey. People who slept in their cars, in a friend’s basement, a domestic violence shelter, a motel, a hidden shanty town, or at their workplace would not have been counted. Furthermore, the adult homelessness count is done by HUD (2017), an agency of the U.S. Government mandated to periodically report to Congress. The decline in homelessness on the part of adults may be due to the mandate that HUD has to build more housing units to be used by the homeless. HUD has to justify its existence by putting up housing units, which may be intended primarily for single adults rather than families with children.

Demographics of American Homelessness

Knowing the distribution of homeless by demographic factors such as income, age, and urban place may suggest policies and priorities for homelessness and housing insecurity. Such analyses can only be found within individual countries like the USA. Global studies do not have enough consistency across nations to make cross-country analysis particularly useful.

In Western countries, the large majority of homeless are men (75–80%), with single males overrepresented. However, the most prominent demographic factor is age, especially children versus adults. In the US, one in five homeless persons is a child under age 18. Most of these children stay in emergency shelters with an adult parent, but increasingly homeless children do not have an accompanying adult.

In the United States, the race/ethnicity of the homeless reflects the racial distribution of the larger population except that non-whites predominate. Nearly half of the homeless are White and 45% Black. Those staying in shelters are more likely to be African American than White.

Worldwide, as well as the United States, the homelessness population lives almost exclusively in cities rather than rural areas. Urban areas unintentionally help homelessness thrive by providing so many places for people to hide or disappear. In addition, cities, compared to the countryside, are much more likely to provide shelters and other services for the homeless.

Causes of Homelessness

• Structural Causes. The rising cost of new housing plus the high costs of maintaining housing are good examples of structural causes of homelessness. Other economic reasons for homelessness include foreclosures on home mortgages, costs related to home utilities, and loss of employment. All of these negative forces often lead to poverty, which tends to drive the pitfalls of homelessness. Forced eviction is another major structural cause of homelessness. (See below.) Underlying all of these economic forces of homelessness is economic structural inequality.
• Personal Causes. A variety of personal factors increase the chances of homelessness, especially untreated mental illness, substance abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, lack of education, domestic violence, institutional commitment such as incarceration, foster care, and injuries. Failure to pay for critical insurance costs is another route to losing one’s house and the ability to pay for critical health expenses.
• Catastrophes and Disasters. Severe tragedies often leave victims without the ability to earn an adequate wage including sufficient money to pay for even very low cost housing. Divorce, job loss, and severe disabilities have the potential to become disasters too.
• Healthcare costs. If illness or injury incapacitates the home owner or makes it impossible to hold a job, chances are that he or she within a very short time will no longer have the funds for mortgage payments or rent. Upon eviction under such circumstances, homelessness cannot be avoided. The most problematic health-related costs are those of mental health treatment.
• Fraud. Unscrupulous mortgage companies and con artists destroy one’s ability to pay housing costs and other basic expenses, often with disastrous results.
• Forced Eviction. Hartman & Robinson (2003) reported that millions of low-income American families each year were forcibly removed, with their belonging, from their homes, even in the middle of Winter. In most other economically advanced nations, laws have been put in place that keep evictions from occurring in Winter’s coldest months (Desmond 2016).

Residential stability produces community stability and neighborliness. But poor families in the United States are involuntarily evicted at such high rates that the family system has little hope for the poor. The laws and law enforcement procedures favor the landlords rather than the human beings that need shelter. Eviction is not just an immediate tragedy; it produces long-term disadvantages, such as loss of jobs, less access to food and healthcare, and increased chances of incarceration. Desmond (2016) describes many such evicted families and the social chaos produced by current eviction procedures. He characterizes the suffering of the eviction system in America as “shameful and unnecessary…and as failing to guarantee a stable home” that meets the unalienable rights promised by the nation’s founders.

Policy Options for Reducing Homelessness

• Major Subsidies of Low Rent Housing. Communities, counties, states, and national, as well as private funds, can all contribute to offering incentives to investors to build apartment buildings with rents that the low-income can afford. Not only is it difficult to get developers to make such investments, but often the communities where subsidized housing is to be built, oppose the building of such units because they worry, often falsely, that property values in their community will plunge.
• Adequate Funding of Shelters and Services for the Homeless. In the typical American City, the funding of shelters and other homeless programs tends to be woefully inadequate. Such underfunding results not only from the crass attitude that the homeless should take care of all of their own needs, but funding is given low priority also because people fear that providing effective services for the homeless will only attract the homeless from other parts of the country.
• Job Training Programs. Emergency shelters could easily be expanded to include job development programs and work skills training for the homeless and chronically homeless. Programs for the homeless keep passing the buck on this service, so job training for the homeless remains rare.
• Establish Programs for Reduction of Mental Illnesses, Addictions & Incarcerations. The homeless population surged in the 1950s when under the influence of Ronald Reagan, mental institutions were closed. Many of the homeless continue to cycle in and out of jail and prison. And many, if not most, not only have become chemically dependent, but earn what little income they have from selling narcotics.
• Finding Hidden Homelessness. Some homeless subpopulations remain elusive and difficult to track. These include those who sleep in their cars, live in motels, those living in dense, overcrowded houses and apartments, and those who “couch surf,” that is, they sleep on other peoples’ couches and floors. Finding these subpopulations and providing assistance will likely reduce costs in the long run because these people for the most part have not yet begun to suffer from drug addictions and illegal activities typical of those in chronic homelessness.
• Implement Community–based Homeless Programs involving Citizens. Government cannot solve the homeless challenges alone. Nonprofit organizations, churches, and citizens need to be held responsible for turning the blight of homelessness into a homeless recovery system. Organizations and money cannot resolve the problems alone. We the people must be willing to change our negative stereotypes, demonstrate compassion and be willing to help. Perhaps the first place to start is with progress for the children who have fallen into homelessness quite innocently.
• Housing First. The homeless often need other social services such as drug treatment, healthcare, battered women’s assistance and so on. The policy of ‘housing first’ calls for attempting to provide adequate housing quickly before trying to provide all of the other services that a homeless person may need. Several hundred American cities have adopted Housing-First policies. In the long run, housing-first may be the most cost-effective policy when combined with job training and other related programs.
• Increasing Refugee Hosting Capacity. One of the most intransigent aspects of the global migration and homelessness challenge is the increasing political pressure within many host countries, especially those in the US and the EU, to stop letting more immigrants into the country and to stop providing them services. Thus, countries like the USA and the UK, which economically are best prepared to host refugees, increasingly are becoming the least likely to host them. Ironically, the countries hosting the most refugees, like Jordan and Lebanon, are economically under stress and unable to provide much for the millions of refugees in these poorer nations.
• Prevention of Homelessness. The longer people live as homeless, the more they become involved in drugs, crime, and other at-risk lifestyles. Therefore, from the standpoint of human and social capital, the quicker at-risk persons can be placed in longer-term housing, the healthier the society.

Housing Insecurity

Homelessness is sometimes called ‘housing insecurity,’ even though insecurity implies a broader range of risk taking than homelessness. Housing insecurity is an important concept in that it represents a state of economic insecurity such that the occupants may face difficulty in making the financial outlays needed to rent or own one’s home.

While the Gallup Poll does not ask about homelessness per se, it does ask if respondents “have enough money for shelter,” a good measure of housing insecurity. Using this indicator, in the United States from 2007 to 2016 the percent at risk for shelter rose 10% (from 2% to 12%.) Worldwide during that same period, those at risk for shelter went up 5% (from 18% to 23%.) While economic indicators for this period grew stronger giving the wealthier more income, prosperity did not trickle down to those who needed it for such essentials as shelter.

So far in this discussion, the focus has been on the United States alone. Now we consider homelessness worldwide, which is a much broader topic. Global homelessness is different principally because the developing world has a much more difficult time avoiding homelessness than does the developed world.

The principle reason for the greater challenge of homelessness in the developing world is migration pressures due to war and persecution. This results in very large flows of migrants looking for asylum, refugee status and a more secure environment in which to raise children.

World Homelessness

In addition to the Gallup Poll’s housing insecurity indicator, the Gallup World Poll has had a housing question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to provide adequate shelter or housing for you and your family?” While responses to this question indicate the difficulty many have with finding enough resources to pay for housing, it does not fully capture the volume of people who live in a state of “hidden homelessness,” those who do not have a residence or an address because they live in such places as under bridges or sleep on somebody else’s couch.

Fig. 2. Forcibly Displaced People Worldwide in Millions by Year (See note below chart.)

Note: At the tip of each bar is the count of people who have applied for asylum on the grounds of needed protection from the rules of their home country. The light shaded portion of each bar represents the count of refugees, and the dark part of each bar gives the count of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

Perhaps most seriously missing from the housing security indicator of housing risk are those whose status is ‘refugee’ or ‘immigrant’ and who live in temporary structures like tents. In addition, there are nomads and gypsies, who travel continuously and live in meagre tents with minimal and temporary protection from the harsh weather.

Fig. 2. Forcibly Displaced People Worldwide in Millions  (See note below chart.)

The Figure above shows the count of people who were forcibly displaced from their homes, which in 2015 added up to about 65 million people. This count includes people who remained in their country, so they are labeled ‘displaced,’ and those who were able to reach another country, which means they were labeled ‘refugees.’ Those considered to be ‘asylum seekers,’ are those who hope to officially be considered refugees. Technically, those considered to be refugees have been found by the host country to be deserving of international protection and assistance.

The legal definition of homeless varies from country to country, and among different jurisdictions in the same country or region. Nevertheless, the last time a global survey was attempted, in 2005, an estimated 100 million (1 in 65 at the time) people worldwide were identified as homeless. More recently, the UN concluded that 1.6 billion people live homeless as squatters or live in temporary shelter, all lacking adequate housing (Habitat 2017).

Most countries provide a variety of services to assist homeless people. These services often provide food, shelter (beds) and clothing and may be organized and run by community organizations (often with the help of volunteers) or by government departments or agencies. These programs may be supported by the government, charities, churches and individual donors. While some homeless have jobs, some must seek other methods to make a living.

Figure 3. Global Homeless Migrants Trends.

Begging and panhandling are some of the income options for the homeless, but this option is not viable for homeless who lack the necessary social skills for this type of work. People who are homeless may have additional conditions, such as physical or mental health issues or substance addiction; these issues make resolving homelessness a challenging policy issue.

Goals for the Reduction of Homelessness

Several UN projects including the project on Sustainable Development Goals, which has been abbreviated to ‘Global Goals,’ articulate highest priority goals for global human improvement. So far, only one Global Goal specifies housing issues, Global Goal No. 11. It advocates: “Making cities safe and sustainable means ensuring access to safe and affordable housing, and upgrading slum settlements.” From this analysis of homelessness, we can specify four additional goals or sub-goals for housing as follows.

Goal H.1. Prevent and end chronic homelessness • Chronic homelessness generally is defined as continuous homelessness for at least 12 months or 12 months of episodic homelessness over three years. To avoid the permanent damage of chronic homelessness, major steps need to be taken. For example, HUD in the United States, between 2010 and 2017 installed nearly 100,000 more permanent supportive housing (PSH) beds dedicated primarily for people with chronic patterns of homelessness.

Goal H.2. Prevent and end homelessness for youth and children as well as their families • As noted earlier, research found a rapidly rising number of children in homelessness in the United States. Children are particularly vulnerable to negative consequences from homelessness, so this is an extremely important goal.

Goal H.3. Set a path to ending all types of homelessness • As already noted, many different variations on homelessness exist, including their causes and the consequences. This goal specifies that comprehensive solutions are needed because of the wide variation in the nature of the problems of housing insecurity.

Goal H.4. Develop Strategies to Induce Wealthier Nations to Host more Immigrants • The five wealthiest countries are among the nations least likely to host a proportionately large number of refugees. In contrast, the five countries that host the most refugees are all relatively small and poor.  This rising flow of migrants into wealthier countries is often blamed for the increasing rise of nationalism among the wealthiest countries.

Over the past 10 years, research has been conducted to determine whether the wealthy or the poor are more likely to feel compassion and generosity toward poor people who need resources to live healthier lives. The strong conclusion of these research studies is that the rich are less likely than the poor to be generous and compassionate toward the poor (Grewal 2012). So, it is not the pervasive nationalistic ideologies that account for the rejection of the homeless by the wealthier groups and countries, but the lack of empathy on the part of the rich, which accounts for their failure to help those in distress (Daniels 2014).

Conclusions

A home is not just a physical space, but a social space that can provides roots, identity, security, a sense of belonging and a place of emotional wellbeing. Thus, houses provide critical contexts for maturing safely from infancy to childhood and later transitions to adulthood and beyond. The homeless have a much higher chance than home-dwelling Americans to be at risk of addiction, suicide, mental health, incarceration as well as individual risk factors such as family conflict, divorce and weak support networks (Lee, Tyler & Wright 2010).

Recent estimates of the homeless population in the USA suggest that about 550,000 live as homeless on any one night. But these one-shot studies miss a lot of the squatters, those living in well-hidden areas. Homeless people and homeless organizations are sometimes accused and convicted of fraudulent behavior. Homeless criminals have exploited their status with identity theft and tax and welfare scams. These incidents, of course, lead to negative stereotypes for the homeless as a whole. Most countries provide services to assist homeless people. These services often provide food, shelter and clothing and may be organized and run by community organizations (often with the help of volunteers) or by government departments or agencies. These programs may be supported by the government, charities, churches and individual donors. While some homeless have jobs, some must seek other methods to make a living.

The concept of the American Dream builds upon the stability and solidarity that having and keeping a home provides. The American Dream shifted over the past 65 years from protecting people’s homes to protecting the landlords right to exploit their renters. Desmond (2016) proposes that the housing system be rebalanced by expanding our housing voucher program for all low-income families and that landlords not be allowed to decide not to rent to the homeless with vouchersd. Ironically, most housing subsidies in America now go to those with upper-middles class incomes, not the low-income households that really need it.

Desmond’s 2016 book, Evicted, tells story after story of the intense, multi-dimensional suffering that poor, mostly minority families experience when they and their belongings are literally pushed onto the sidewalks in front of their homes, often in the dead of winter, by bullying sheriffs. In these situations, those doing the evictions have all the power and work on behalf of the land owners, not the home occupants.

According to Willse (2015), “Homelessness is a crowded house full of so much death and disease that there is hardly room enough for what should be a great excess of social and political shame.”

References

American Institutes for Research (AIR). (2014). America’s Youngest Outcasts: A Report Card on Child Homelessness. Waltham, MA: The National Center on Family Homelessness at American Institutes for Research.

Daniels, A. (2014). As wealthy give smaller share of income to charity, middle class digs deeper. The Chronical of Philanthropy. Accessed on 12 Dec. 2017 at https://www.philanthropy.com/issue?cid=UCOPNAVTOP

Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. NYC: Crown/Archetype.

Grewal, D. ( 2012) How Wealth Reduces Compassion. Scientific American. Accessed on 21 Dec. 2017 at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/

Habitat (2017). The Case for Habitat. Habitat for Humanity. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017 on http://www.habitatmidohio.org/about-habitat/the-housing-crisis/

Hartman, C. & Robinson, D. (2003). “Evictions: The Hidden Housing Problem,” Housing Policy Debate. 14: Pp. 461–501.

Lee, B. A, Tyler, K. A & Wright, J. D. (2010) The New Homelessness Revisited. Annual Review of Sociology 36, Pp 501-521.

Link, B. G., Phelan, J, Bresnahan, M, Stueve, A, Moore, RE, Susser, E. (1995). Lifetime and five-year prevalence of homelessness in the United States: new evidence on an old debate. Am. J.  Orthopsychiatry 65, Pp. 347–354.

Ortiz-Ospina, E. & Roser, M. (2017) – ‘Homelessness’. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Accessed on 14 Dec. 2017 at https://ourworldindata.org/homelessness

United Nations (2008). UN-HABITAT Unveils State of the World’s Cities Report. London, UK: UN-HABITAT.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). (2017). The 2017 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. Accessed on 14 Dec. 2017 at https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/5639/2017-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us/

Wilder Research. (2016). Homelessness in Minnesota: Findings from the 2015 Minnesota Homeless Study. Saint Paul, MN: Wilder Research. Accessed on 20 Dec. 2017 at https://www.wilder.org/Wilder-Research/Publications/Studies/Homelessness%20in%20Minnesota%202015%20Study/Findings%20from%20the%202015%20Minnesota%20Homeless%20Study.pdf

Willse, C. (2015). The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Like a bomb explosion, the number of American deaths from opioid abuse has quadrupled in four years to 66,000. Globally, there are about 200,000 estimated opiate-related deaths, in most cases avoidable, according to the report released on June 22, 2017 by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The Addiction Explosion & Deaths of Despair

On a global level, heroin seizures remained stable. However, seizures spiked in 2015 in the United States, where opioid abuse is particularly acute. The country now accounts for nearly a third of all drug-related deaths worldwide. America has about 4 percent of the world’s population — but about 33 percent of the world’s drug overdose deaths.

How did this epidemic happen in the United States? The US has always been ahead of much of the world in opiate-related overdose deaths — for a variety of reasons. For one, Americans are relatively wealthy, so they can afford to buy drugs. But there also appear to be cultural and socioeconomic factors at play, driving a broad increase in “deaths of despair” — such as suicides, alcohol, and drug overdose deaths.

According to an article at the website Vox, “if you ask experts what these causes (of despair deaths) could be, you can expect them to name, well, basically everything — a weak social safety net in the US compared with other developed countries, poor access to health care in general, subpar mental health care and addiction services, manufacturing jobs moving out of the country, cuts to local government services like parks and recreation, individuals losing a sense of spiritual or existential meaning, and so on.”

Another major reason the epidemic started in the United States, is that pharmaceutical companies heavily marketed to American doctors, but more significantly, they saturated the media with opioid advertisements to consumers, which has not been possible in most other countries. Furthermore, Big Pharma marketed opioids for chronic pain, even though the evidence for their effectiveness with chronic pain is very slim, and their potential for causing harm very strong.

Prescribed pain killers like oxycodone and hydrocodone are not the only culprit. Deaths from an opiate cousin, heroin, have been even more prevalent until recently. In America, the rise of deaths from heroin and fentanyl has been much faster than from opiate overdoses.

Opiates are generally prescribed for pain, but mental depression is an even greater motivator than pain for both prescription opiates and heroin. Several researchers now believe depression, one of the most common medical diagnoses in the U.S., might be a major cause driving many patients to seek out prescription opioids and to use them improperly. Mark Sullivan (2012), a professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington, concluded that depression tends to exacerbate pain, making chronic pain last longer and hurting the recovery process after surgery. “Depressed people are in a state of alarm,” he said. “They’re fearful, or frozen in place. There’s a heightened sense of threat.” That increased threat sensitivity might also be what heightens sensations of pain (Khazan 2017).

Not only do people with depression tend to be more pain-sensitive, the effect of opioids can, for some, feel as mood-elevating as an antidepressant. “Depression is a mixed bag,” Sullivan said. “People can feel sluggish and uninterested, but they can also feel agitated, irritated, and anxious. They feel both unrelaxed and really unmotivated at the same time.” Sullivan and other researchers from Washington and California in 2012 found that depressed people were about twice as likely as the non-depressed to misuse their painkillers for non-pain symptoms, and depressed individuals were between two and three times more likely to ramp up their own doses of painkillers. Adolescents with depression were also more likely, in one study, to use prescription painkillers for non-medical reasons and to become addicted (Khazan 2017).

A different group of researchers found that depressed people were likely to keep using opioids, even when their pain had subsided and when they were more functional. “If the emotional pain, the depression, is never properly diagnosed or treated, the patient might continue taking the opioid because it’s treating something,” said Jenna Goesling (2015), an assistant professor in the department of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan.

These researchers found that mood disorders nearly doubled the risk that a person already using opioids would continue to use in the long-term. “People are treated like innocent victims when they present pain complaints,” Sullivan said. But depression, wrongly, “feels like more of a personal failing than being in pain.” After all, it’s easier to explain not being able to get out of bed because of a bad back than crushing sadness.

Depression is widely under diagnosed and untreated, and the shortage of mental-health providers is especially acute in rural areas where the opioid epidemic has hit hardest. Goesling (2015) pointed out that we could get closer to untangling the messy connection between pain and depression by improving access to mental health care for people who have chronic pain.

The Republicans’ new 2017 tax and health-care bill, however, doesn’t do that. Not only does it make major cuts to Medicaid, which in some states pays for half of all addiction treatment cases, it also will allow states to stop forcing insurers to cover mental-health treatment. If it is driven—at least in part—by depression, opioid abuse should be seen as a cry for help. “People have distress—their life is not working, they’re not sleeping, they’re not functioning,” Sullivan said, “and they want something to make all that better.”

A review of the relationship between depression and opioid misuse by Khazan (2017) concluded that mental depression appears to be the largest cause of both overuse and abuse of opioids. The conventional wisdom views opioid addiction and abuse as the fault of over prescription and weak will power. However, the evidence points to an epidemic of depression and perceived meaninglessness as the best explanation for the rise in opioid and heroin addiction. Tragically, at the same time as deaths from opioid and heroin addiction rise, new federal and state cuts are being made in budgets for mental health research and treatment.

Opiate Deaths Reflect Rise of Social Despair

As I discussed in a short article on the WorldSuffering.org website, Case and Deaton (2017) found that midlife mortality from ‘deaths of despair’ since the year 2000 had risen sharply in the United States among White non-Hispanics age 50-54. Meanwhile, during the same time period deaths of people age 50-54 declined in Germany and France. And in Sweden, the UK, Canada, and Australia the trends were flat or steady.

In my previous article, I argued that these stresses arise out of a loss in meaning by a culture caught in excessive, self-centered consumption. In 2015, researchers reported that life expectancy was falling in middle-aged, middle America. Professors Case and Deaton concluded that these deaths of despair were a function a sense of hopelessness bred from a long run stagnation in wages from those with little education, low income, and middle age.

White Americans for generations have found meaning in their lives by aiming to give their offspring (and their children’s children) a better, more comfortable life. No wonder those in this social demographic feel a sense of despair and meaninglessness from knowing their children and grandchildren will be even worse off than their parents and grandparents.

Our nation’s future well-being depends upon reducing the tremendous inequality of wealth in the United States. Huge disparities in income or wealth tend to diminish the meaningfulness of one life within such societies. No wonder that middle-class Americans die early from combinations of despair, anger, obesity and addictions.

Can the America Survive an Epidemic of Despair and Anger?

Over this past year, American society as revealed in the media appears to be locked in constant anger, meanness, unhappiness, and even despair. People at opposite political extremes refuse to work together and rarely do they engage in dialog. The main political narratives claim that the ‘other side’ is to blame for everything wrong with society. That belief leads them to get all of their news and “facts,” from a media silo consistent with their political viewpoints.

Not only does such a society perpetuate greater anger, fear and other negative emotions, but the future for their offspring looks bleak indeed. With the absence of civil society and caring neighbors, what incentives do we have to work together in common causes? Are there not fewer incentives to help our fellow human beings in dire straits? Are there not fewer reasons to remain sober and live a full and meaningful life? Those that take up lifestyles of excessive substance abuse, have little reason to live. Their increasingly meaningless lives make them much more susceptible to despair and suicide.

The World Health Organization (2017) estimated that in 2009, 23.5 million Americans aged 12 and above required addiction treatment. Worldwide their estimate is that 230 million suffered from addiction, and the total social cost of that addiction adds up to over a half Trillion dollars. In addition, deaths due to addiction spiked even higher after 2015.

That America’s rise in deaths due to opioid/heroin overdosing is a very recent epidemic that has to be visualized to comprehend its suddenness and its tragedy. The figure below shows with the line of dashes the thousands of opioid deaths per year. For the past four years, the number of deaths has doubled each year. In 2016 there were 20,000 opioid deaths. This does not include heroin deaths, which until 2015 were even more prevalent than opioid deaths. In 2016 there were 16,000 heroin deaths.

The solid line represents the percent of the American public who said “drug/alcohol abuse is the most urgent health problem facing this country” as asked by the Gallup Poll in the United States. Not until 2014, was the substance abuse problem considered serious by the public. Within a year’s time it has become a man-made disaster. Unfortunately, the media and the politicians do not yet recognize that leading causes of this epidemic are depression and despair, not just over-prescription or lack of will-power.

Meaning and Purpose Therapy

Research on the meaning of life for different types of people has produced the non-intuitive finding that meaning is more important than happiness because a life filled with purpose and meaning yields a deeper happiness than possible from pleasure alone. Alcohol and drug addiction represents the epitome of pleasure-seeking, yet it yields the user only a sliver of pleasure and fleeting episodes of low-grade happiness. Research reveals that a major drag upon the well-being of heavy substance abusers is depression, which traps the user by making substance abuse easier, further magnifying depression, despair and anger. Can our social and political system survive a society dominated by anger and despair?

Can addiction and meaning co-exist? An addicted person can persist in a purpose such as helping others, but over time the most meaningful activities will be squeezed out by the demands of feeding an addiction. This is especially true of addictions to substances that cause physical dependency like alcohol and opiates. While addiction sometimes encompasses excessive eating, the dependency and side effects of addictive chemicals is far greater, so in this discussion, addiction refers to substance abuse including alcohol.

Addiction is both a product of depression and a producer of more depression. Addiction to alcohol, and other addictive substances results in even deeper depression and possibly anxiety and uncontrolled anger. The addict feels like being in a dark place, trapped in loneliness, guilt, anger and obsessively trying to get chemical ‘fixes.’ Such a state makes it very hard to think about meanings and purposes other than acquiring whatever makes them feel a “high.” Paradoxically, a lifestyle of feeding an addiction that makes one feel momentarily happy, very often ends in clinical depression.

Activities such as caregiving, which give one purpose and meaning, help ‘immunize’ us from addiction. Also, after treatment for addiction disorders, recovery tends to be more effective and long lasting if someone in treatment acquires a greater sense of purpose and meaning.

Social work professors Diaz, Horton and Malloy (2016) conducted a study of severely addicted persons in a treatment center and found that the lack of ultimate meaning in life, an important dimension of spirituality, is associated with alcohol abuse and drug addiction, as well as other mental health problems including anxiety and depression. Likewise, meaning of life intervention and training has been shown to assist making recovery more successful. The researchers discovered that the following meaning-oriented activities: creative arts, serving others, integrating selfhood through meditation or prayer during addiction treatment helped those recovering to recover more rapidly. Their conclusion was that treatment for addiction should include activities for training recovering addicts in how to develop greater purpose and perceived well-being.

Psychologist Paul Wong and his associates (2010) specialize in meaning therapy and have given a variety of suggestions for treating addiction with meaning. They state that

“Your life has intrinsic meaning & value because you have a unique purpose to fulfill. You are endowed with the capacity for freedom and responsibility to choose a life of meaning & significance. Don’t settle for anything less. No matter how confusing & bleak your situation, there is always beauty, truth, & meaning to be discovered; but you need to cultivate a mindful attitude and learn to transcend self-centeredness.”

They say an addict should “let compassion be your motive and may you see the world and yourself through the lens of meaning & virtue. You will experience transformation and authentic happiness when you practice meaningful living.”

Strategies for Recovery

The following strategies assist recovery from addiction, but they apply to anyone who wants to add more meaning into his or her life. First, whenever you have a choice to make during a day, choose on the side of increasing meaningfulness and strengthening purpose. This will produce the direct benefit of making your activities and relationships intrinsically more satisfying. In other words, authentic happiness will follow from authentically meaningful goals and actions.

Second, re-authoring your life by switching from your tendency to play the part of victim to playing the part of victor. For example, if you feel put-upon by your children needing your time, remember the privilege of having the children and how special they are.

Third, think of your life, not just in terms of interpersonal connections, but in terms of community and contributions to society. You may be surprised how much better you feel about yourself and your life by merely contemplating the way in which you link to the goodness of your larger community and society.

Beginning the road to greater well-being should start not only with a commitment to focus on meanings but to restructure our daily routines. Sometimes, the process of adding meaning simply involves reconstructing the way we think about the contribution we make to others as well as ourselves.

References

Case, A. & Deaton, A. (2017). Mortality and Morbidity in the 21^st Century. Washington DC: Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

Diaz, N., Horton, G., Malloy, T. (2016). “Attachment Style, Spirituality, and Depressive Symptoms Among Individuals in Substance Abuse Treatment,” Journal of Social Service Research 17 (April), Pp. 1-12.

Goesling, J., & 6 co-authors. (2015). Symptoms of Depression Are Associated With Opioid Use Regardless of Pain Severity and Physical Functioning Among Treatment-Seeking Patients With Chronic Pain. Journal of Pain. 16(9), Pp 844-51.

Khazan, O. (2017). How Untreated Depression Contributes to the Opioid Epidemic. The Atlantic (May 15). Accessed on 15 Nov. 2017 at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/05/is-depression-contributing-to-the-opioid-epidemic/526560/

Sullivan, M. (2012). Depression and Prescription Opioid Misuse Among Chronic Opioid Therapy Recipients With No History of Substance Abuse. Annals of Family Medicine 10(4), pp. 304-311.

UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime), (2017). World Drug Report, 2017. Accessed on 11 Dec. 2017 at https://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/

Vox (2017). America leads the world in drug overdose deaths by a lot. Accessed on 11 Dec. 2017 at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/28/15881246/drug-overdose-deaths-world

World Health Organization. (2017). World Drug Report 2017. Retrieved on 14 Nov. 2017 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.708.9802&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Wong, P. T. P., Nee, J. J. & Wong, L. C. J. (2010). A Meaning-Centered 12-Step Program for Addiction Recovery. Retrieved on 14 Nov. 2017 from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.708.9802&rep=rep1&type=pdf 

Hate and hatred describe extreme dislike at a deep emotional level. Anything can be the object, but we suffer most when the object of hate happens to be a person or a people. We all suffer more from social hating because so often it forms the platform from which prejudice and discrimination, if not torture and other inhumane actions, spring and spread to others.

Typically, anger and prejudgment gang up around an object of hostility, which leads to mobilizing attacks against the presumed perpetrator. Such attacks may be verbal and/or physical including killing, torture and other inhumane actions. This essentially describes the model of hate outlined by psychologist Aaron Beck in his 2010 book, Prisoners of Hate.

Not only does hatred eat away at our virtues and other mental states, but it can make us more susceptible to physical diseases and injuries due to fighting and war. Researchers have discovered a “hate circuit” in the brain that maps the parts of the brain affected by hate and the decision to act upon that hate. Other researchers found that even short periods of hatred lead to greater immune deficiency.

People sometimes minimize hatred because they concentrate upon anger alone. Negative feelings first evolve into anger as annoyance and hostility arise from not getting what was wanted or expected. Then as one not only feels upset by another person, but attributes blame to that person, the negative emotions escalate to hate, which is intense or passionate dislike that not only arises from hostility but a desire for revenge.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of hate appears when neither anger nor hate can be contained. Hate escalates or deepens when the hater accuses the other person(s) of guilt and complicity. Then feelings and a desire for revenge intensify because the other person’s actions are interpreted as moral transgressions. How else could a mob stone a woman to death because of sexual behavior; or hang a black man from a tree on the basis of a rumor nobody checked out.

Hatred and Violence in a Texas Church

This past weekend, on November 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley at the age of 26, killed 26 people at church in a tiny town in Texas. Millions of people watched thousands of hours of radio and television time with hundreds of journalists speculating about the motive of the shooter.

Yet, the shooter had multiple motives, one of which was deep hatred and intense anger. Even after the news media discovered that the shooter had feelings of revenge against his former mother-in-law, who attended that church, the media still never mentioned the word hate. Nor did the media mention much about irresponsible failure to curtail acquisition of automatic rifles (machine guns) as a cause of the tragedy.

The President and many others said the problem or cause was mental illness. Underlying this premise was the presumption that anyone with such anger and hatred would necessarily be mentally ill. Yet, if anger and hatred really do indicate mental illness, then the nationalists and racists that occupy the White House are mentally ill.

Why are the media producers afraid to allow talk of hatred, anger and a culture of violence as causes of the mass murder? Even after uncovering that the shooter had, in anger, nearly killed his former wife, his infant son, and a dog with his fists, they still did not acknowledge that Kelley was driven by anger, hate and revenge.

Why don’t we think to blame a violent person’s killing on what the perpetrator was feeling, namely extreme hatred intertwined with deep anger? Hatred and inability to regulate one’s own hatred are two of the major root causes of violence.

Leon Fink in the December 2017 issue of In These Times, note that after major disasters, American media focuses the majority of its on-air time on stories of grieving families, heroic deeds and collective sympathy. He concludes that the broadcast and print media both “neglect the power of the people as a whole to effect change. The public sphere and the community are presented as weak, absent or feckless.”

Hate Crimes

Hate crime, also known as bias-motivated crime, refers to harm done toward others who are perceived to be members of a social group seen as undesirable. Often victims of hate crimes are racial minorities or members of an unusual gender identity group.

Omar Mateen, a 29 year- old man who murdered 49 people and wounded numerous others in Orlando, hated gays and those identifying as transgender. A New York Times article indicates, the shooter had a chilling history that included talking about killing people, beating his former wife and voicing hatred of minorities, gays and Jews.” In this case, the patrons of The Pulse, a Gay club in Orlando who were enjoying an evening of revelry, when shots rang out, were part of the LGBTQ community and the majority were Latino.

Healing Hatred

The most important question is how hatred can be healed and replaced by positive emotions. Starting first with the big picture, societies that purposely develop social solidarity have a major advantage over loosely knit communities and societies. Social solidarity reinforces humane values such as caring and compassion.

Unfortunately, many of us find ourselves in hate filled neighborhoods and societies where hatred continues to grow or fester. And we do not have the luxury of educational systems that always protect our children from become immersed in hatred, prejudice, and discrimination. Never-the-less, there are paths that can be taken to escape at least some of the hatred around us.

Aron Beck in Prisoners of Hate identifies some strategies for escaping the clutches of hatred. One is to consciously deactivate the hostility mode whenever it is triggered; another is to avoid thinking in terms of dichotomies such as good and evil; and thirdly, remember that most beliefs underlying social discrimination are based upon inaccurate, untrue beliefs or stereotypes.

One of the best methods for escaping the clutches of hatred is through spiritual contemplation or meditation. For example, Buddhist meditation practice starts with allowing any thoughts and memories to arise into consciousness. As memories of hatred arise spontaneously, they can be consciously examined and then dismissed out of mind. Practice in such exercises has the potential to begin to heal the destruction caused by hateful thoughts and feelings.

Finally, the routine practice of forgiveness indirectly reduces hate. Hatred and forgiveness cannot co-exist because each one is logically incompatible with the other.

Hate at the Global or Macro Level

A recent article on this website, entitled Setting Priorities for Amelioration of Global Threats, and another entitled A New Framework for Suffering-Alleviation, offer a conceptualization of goals and risks that makes it easier to set priorities for global policy and action. This briefly expands on that framework with the focus upon hatred as a major underlying cause of some major global problems.

Even though estimation of the magnitude of world suffering remains rather primitive, it still reveals an enormous amount of suffering globally. The framework implicit in the following table identifies various types of global suffering, each one tied to a global goal that has already been identified as a high priority human right. Each global goal and its row in the table represent a separate source of human suffering, if not now, in the future.

The entire set of global risks contained within the list in the Table would represent the totality of suffering except that this is a short list and the amount of suffering attributable for each source overlaps with other sources.

Our main concern here is the extent to which hatred, and the violence that follows, account for the suffering associated with the risk inherent in the global goal. Hatred serves as an underlying process for several of the global risks including climate displacements, wars and armed conflicts, social inequality, social discrimination and barriers against asylum seekers.

This is a cursory glance at some core sources of suffering associated with major global goals as defined by major sectors of the United Nations. The institutional arenas associated with five of the goals targeted to alleviate associated suffering are infused with problems like racial discrimination and barriers to the entry of immigrants. In other words, institutional hatred is a barrier to the reduction of suffering resulting from such unsolved world problems as racism and extreme nationalism.

A final conclusion from this analysis is that the healing of hatred is a challenge that needs to be addressed at all social levels. Starting with the individual and the interaction of couples and going on up to nations and the world, each of these levels of global society is made worse by individual or social hatred.

As many people add to the suffering generated by hatred of various types at the larger levels of society, it is easy to disown the problem. Rather than try to hide from the problem of hatred, we as individuals should stop and reflect whenever we feel hatred or anger arising. Then we can focus our attention on the hate until it releases, which then makes to possible for hate to dissipate and disappear.

Do you allow the ‘Golden Rule’ to rule your life? Or do you let the pursuit of gold consume your life? The Golden Rule is the popular moral principle of doing things for others that you would like done for yourself. The pursuit of gold is a metaphor for the life of accumulating wealth. Technically, the gold hoarders can follow the Golden Rule, but few do so because the Golden Rule outlaws identity politics, which implies that some racial groups are better than others, and therefore we only need to be concerned about a select group of others.

Instead of focusing on the wellbeing of all people, identity politics takes up the causes of a particular identity group such as a racial or a gender group. While the causes of these identity groups sometimes are valid and just, focusing most political energy on them detracts from the moral and political implications of the Golden Rule.

In the Twenty-first Century, politics has accepted two directions that undermine, if not destroy, the Golden Rule: identity politics and the rule of gold.

Replacing the Rule of Gold with the Golden Rule

Even though amassing great wealth would seem to be the secret to happiness, economic research has discovered that after one has accumulated enough wealth to live at an average comfort level for their society, more wealth does not produce greater happiness.

Why then do so many wealthy people keep trying to increase their wealth far beyond what they need? Some are trapped by greed and simply want the status and fame that come from owning a big pile of gold or its equivalent. Some are trapped by fear and worry because losing their wealth would make them feel powerless. Others are driven by obsession with the symbols of power: cars, airplanes, expansive vacations, servants, and on and on, because they think their lives would feel meaningless without them.

Those trapped by the chase for gold ironically could find peace and freedom from obsession by simply following the Golden Rule, which stands for being generous and kind toward others. Broadly speaking, it refers to an attitude of concern for others on par with one’s concern for one’s self. Narrowly speaking, the Golden Rule states “Do unto others what you want them to do to you.” This was taken from the Torah but made famous by Jesus of Nazareth as quoted in the New Testament (Matthew 7:12).

This message, promoted by many religious communities around the world and by groups such as Charter for Compassion, promotes compassionate action toward all others. Theoretically, if everyone followed the Golden Rule, avoidable suffering would disappear. In fact, the meaning of the rule is so subject to flexible interpretation that its potential for widespread betterment of the world is vast.

The Golden Rule in its original form remains ambiguous, but other admonitions in the New Testament clarify its meaning. Take for instance, the Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” What resounding support for basic human rights is explicitly stated by Paul to the early Christian Church in Galatia, a region in central Turkey.

Identity Politics

What Is most remarkable about this admonition from the Apostle Paul is that it is a total rejection of identity politics, under the assumption that the highest moral priority is the equality of humans across all identity groups. Losing sight of this primary moral principle has made identity politics problematic. Issues like equal pay for equal work, sexual harassment, ‘Black lives Matter,’ and transgender accommodation, are all legitimate and important causes, but the focus of attention should be the equality of human beings and their human rights.

One of the great ironies of contemporary politics is that among the greatest supporters of identity politics are the fundamentalist religious groups that lobby, and even kill, for total rejection of the rights of people who are gay, transgender, racial minorities, women, and other religious group members.

Identity politics was totally rejected by Paul in the New Testament, yet many fundamentalist Christians totally overlooked that principle in their lynching of Blacks, gays, the transgendered, and abortionists. On the other side of the political spectrum, many liberals focus upon these identity groups, forgetting that the justification for their causes is the general principle of human equality and the need to treat all others equivalent to oneself.

At the heart of the Charter for Compassion, the Golden Rule stands out, deeply inspiring many disparate groups and individuals. This is from the Charter: “The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves…[I]n our divided world, compassion can build common ground.” Truly liberal and ethical human beings seek, not the dominance of one social group, but the equality of all social groups.

Wattles* (1996) sums up the challenge: a strict interpretation of the Golden Rule would lead one to openly accept people of all nations, races, ethnicities, and social classes. However, many people who give lip service to the Golden Rule do not consider it relevant to their obligations toward people who do not look or act like themselves.

How a Nation Quickly Self-Destructs upon Forgetting the Golden Rule

A survey in October 2017 by the Univ. of Maryland and the Washington Post asked 5,000 adults what they “blamed for causing dysfunction in the U.S. political system?” The two most common answers, with about 95% each were “Money in politics,” and “Wealthy political donors.” In other words, the hoarders of gold and misuse of the power derived from wealth can lead to a corrupt, ineffective political system.

The poll was taken nine months after the current presidential administration took over. In fact, 14% of Americans said they view the ethics and honesty of politicians as excellent or good, revealing a 25% decline in the perceived ethics and honesty of politicians.

The Charter for Compassion

The Charter for Compassion has been working with a number of representatives who are all committed to spreading the core idea of the Golden Rule into the lives of as many people as possible. The first paragraph of the Charter for Compassion states: “Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.” Stephen Vasconcellos-Sharpe, editor of Salt Magazine, wrote: “The golden rule is the most basic foundational principle. It’s a game changer when applied.” We desperately need simplicity at this time. Not more words that add needless complexity and barriers of prejudice and discrimination between social groups.

 *Wattles, J. (1996). The Golden Rule. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press.

Meaning as used here refers to thinking, caring and acting with purpose. Purpose refers to goals whereas meaning consists of the personal values underlying those purposes. Some interpret meaning and purpose as externally defined by an external philosophy, religion, or ideology, but the definitions used here view meaning and purpose as internal, personal attributes. The most central attitude and activity that produces greater meaning is that of caring. In particular, caring about and for others, when done without duress, frees us from meaninglessness more than any other human pastime.

People interacting together come up with shared values and beliefs that help each individual choose and pursue one or more purposes for living. These purposes make up that which we call “the meaning of life” or meaning for short.

In the past decade, considerable research, mostly by social psychologists, has helped unravel the importance of meaning for personal and social development. The research has also discovered a strong relationship of meaning with happiness. In general, greater meaning results from the following: acting with stronger purpose; concern for the common good; caring for family, friends, and strangers; coherence of purposes; and attention to ultimate concerns, such as where did we come from and where are we going.

The following assumptions follow from the research done on personal and social meaning:

(1) Purposes and actions have greater meaning if they include caring for others and our natural environment, without sacrificing essential care for ourselves.

(2) Meaning may be greater if one’s focus is upon spiritual concerns, but not necessarily religion.

(3) Meaning is greater when one’s purposes and actions have greater internal coherence or integration, which some call cognitive consistency.

(4) Meaning is greater when one’s purposes and actions yield greater impact or influence upon the greater good.

In short, meaning increases with each of these four elements, which serve as four separate dimensions. So, to maximize meaning, you would maximize all four dimensions. Thus, the greater each of the meaning components for any given person or society, the greater the overall meaning for that person or society.

Emily Esfahani Smith helped clarify questions of meaning. She observed “a growing new movement, one that is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the good life.” Her research shows that the search for greater meaning is far more fulfilling than the pursuit of personal happiness.” Like so many who write on the topic of meaning in life, she strongly advocates doing things for others as the best route toward meaning and contentment with life. Her last chapter tackles the challenge of finding meaning in retirement. She notes that research finds that a sense of purpose declines with age and the transition to retirement. This emerging emptiness leads some in later life to seek radical changes like connecting with volunteer projects or seeking out new activities.

Meaning, Purpose & the Life Course

The role of meaning and purpose evolves over the life course. In childhood, the adults and older children in our lives, our parents especially, stand by ready to answer questions or give us advice and direction. Thus, their beliefs and values initially weigh more than our own. We look to others even for answers to questions like: What do I want to be when I grow up?

Upon reaching adulthood, we have much more freedom to choose our purposes and images of what we will become. But still we may ask: What do I want to do with my life? In midlife, we may have time to take stock and ask if our values and meaning in life are sufficient to give us the capacity to fulfill my self-defined purpose.

In later life as we make the transition to retirement or slowing down, we still have the challenge of deciding our direction, our goals and how we will continue to pursue our purpose while slowing down the pace of our lives.

Finally, as we confront our mortality. we need to accept death as a part of life. Unless we scale back our purpose and goals for living in accord with the demands of later life, we may not leave behind an inspiration to new generations to continue the purpose and meaning we have worked hard to define and pursue over our lifespan.

Meaning and Spirituality

As used here, the concept of spirituality means one’s deepest values, ultimate concerns and a sense of awe and reverence toward the universe. The practice of spirituality typically includes meditation sessions or prayer with contemplation of inner concerns and relationships with others. Sometimes these experiences are called self-transcendence and inner growth. Spirituality can occur with or without religious beliefs and rituals.

Gerontologist Robert Atchley promotes the idea that “among elders, service to others can be a spiritual experience.” His premise is based upon the reality that service stems from the impulse to care. The key is to be spiritually grounded while serving others and to avoid the trap of self-centeredness.

Mindfulness is a practice of being fully in the here and now. Such intense awareness of the present moment aids the preparation to serve others. Basically, the practice of mindfulness involves meditation where the focus of one’s attention resides on one’s breathing, a visible object, or anything except what randomly pops into your mind. More advanced forms of this type of meditation use slogans to focus your thinking and feeling upon desired traits like compassion, kindness, and so forth. Some view aging as a spiritual path because the difficult later-life challenges of loss, meaning and mortality engage transcendence, inner contemplation, and other spiritual processes.

Meaning and Happiness

Meaningfulness is an essential ingredient of well-being and deep happiness. Thus, the recent research findings that happiness and meaning produce different behaviors appear counter-intuitive. Research by Smith found that greater meaning in life but not happiness is correlated with helping others. The same is true of giving, deep thinking, and being wise or creative. Thus, these factors may ultimately lead to greater happiness but only because they increase the meaningfulness of one’s life. So, if you had to choose between happiness and meaning, the research shows that meaning pays off more. This, is probably even more true for the older and oldest adults because if they had not learned to be happy at younger age levels, happiness may be elusive. The major exception is if elderly people concentrate upon building greater meaning and meaningfulness.

Some theories of aging suggest that happiness and subjective well-being tend to improve as workers move into retirement status. For many, this rise may be due to thinking of retirement as a liberation from tedious work. Support for this comes from two very large national surveys in the USA. These studies found that retirees, compared to workers, experienced less anxiety and distress and higher happiness or well-being, which supports the perspective that retirement tends to be liberating compared to work. Retirees had a lower sense of control over their lives than did workers. Further research of this nature might uncover more about meaning in retirement.

Implications

Among English speakers, the words “meaning,” “purpose” and “spirituality” lack clarity and consensus. This essay has defined these concepts in simple language and revealed how important purpose and meaning are to a successful life. Spirituality is important too, but the concept and the impact of spirituality on purpose and meaning are so complex that they are not addressed here. The role of purpose and meaning in later life, including retirement, are very important in determining a “successful” or peaceful and stress-free end of life. Maintaining humanitarian and caring values and actions is very important to a successful and gratifying life.

The first half of 2017 has tossed the world order into a new set of vulnerabilities not previously experienced. We have been previously threatened by high risks of nuclear war but not simultaneously with giant storms generated by rapid global warming. All out nuclear war and climate catastrophes produce such devastating damage and death that humanitarian considerations give these threats highest priority for preventative measures. In other words, the suffering from these possible future events is so terrifying that measures to curb their probability in the future are critical for present day decision-making.

In addition to these future sources of catastrophic suffering, there are a number of current sources of suffering such as poverty, hunger, and disease. In the analysis that follows, we take on the challenge of identifying and prioritizing both of these types of catastrophic sources of suffering. This appears to be the first time this prioritization has been attempted. Hopefully, there will be many more such attempts. The importance of tackling this challenge is based upon the fact that the reduction of suffering tends to be viewed as a moral issue, not just a matter of politics or convenience. It also is based upon the fact that most of these sources of suffering are expanding in their reach, both now and in the future.

Future Sources of Suffering

While war and climate change at the present moment are causing suffering, death, and destruction, their potential impact at some point in the future is likely to far exceed any such tragedy in recent generations. Adding nuclear weapons to worldwide wars and unmitigated global warming adds a new order of magnitude to suffering and creates pathways toward extinction.

Global Warming

In September 2017, the United States and Caribbean nations have been attacked by two of the largest and most powerful hurricanes in its history. Millions of people were temporarily displaced.

A few days before this, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh experienced catastrophic hurricanes and flooding, leading to huge displacements and well over 1,400 people killed. The principal causes of these storms and flooding has been the extremely high temperatures of the ocean water and the high level of moisture in the air. Both of these factors result from destruction of the protective atmosphere around the earth. And the principal source of that erosion is the sharp rise in carbon density, producing rising global temperatures and in turn rising glacier melting.

As many scientists forecast the possibility of worldwide death and destruction by the year 2100 from unabated global warming, the primary threats of nuclear war and global warming threaten survival of the human species. Such human destruction would produce a magnitude of world suffering never previously realized.

Projections of future climate change suggest further global warming, sea level rise, and an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events and weather-related disasters. Effects of global warming include loss of biodiversity, stresses to existing food-producing systems, increased spread of known infectious diseases such as malaria, and rapid mutation of microorganisms. It has been suggested that runaway global warming (uncontrolled climate change) might cause Earth to become impossibly hot like Venus. In less extreme scenarios, it could cause the end of civilization as we know it.

The potential for, and high probability of, such extinction of the planet, including most of human life, has been forecast by numerous expert scientists who are summarized in a report by David Wallace-Wells in the New York Magazine on July 14, 2017 entitled The Uninhabitable Earth.

This report predicts that teens of today will live to see most of their fellow human beings dead or dying because of the following forces: 1) deaths due to heat resulting from the carbon and methane gases released by the melted polar ice masses, 2) loss of most agricultural land for growing food due to unprecedented droughts where most food is grown, 3) climate plagues following the release of pandemic-producing bugs, parasites, and plagues frozen now in the polar ice, 4) unbreathable air because of rapid saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which will not only make us sick but create significant impairment of cognitive abilities, 5) poisoned oceans from acidification, loss of coral reefs, and death of many marine species, and 6) permanent economic collapse because of loss of most of the workers of the world and the natural resources needed for making items most desired by what is left of the consuming public.

Atrocity of Nuclear War

Nuclear weapons have only been used by the United States against Japan toward the end of World War II. Two bombs were dropped killing 120,000 people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fear of nuclear attacks by the Soviet Union led Americans in the 1950s to build and stock ‘fallout shelters’ in many commercial and residential buildings.

The magnitude of destruction from a nuclear war, of course, depends on the unique set of circumstances including the wind and weather, which can carry radiation around the globe and remain suspended for decades. While preoccupation with nuclear war became a Western fear and obsession, only a tiny fraction of the people alive in 1945, remain alive today. Thus, deep fear of either fallout or death from nuclear war are hard to find.

The loss of memory regarding the extreme destruction and devastation of nuclear attacks means that relatively few people worry about the consequences of nuclear war with North Korea or other nations. A public opinion study by Stanford University political scientist Scott Sagan (2017) found that a majority of Americans readily accept the deaths of millions of civilians in another country. Furthermore, they readily accept a nuclear attack of another country as long as it minimized the loss of lives of American soldiers.

As a result of the North Korean standoff with the United States in September 2017, President Trump and his generals have conceived of a plan to build so called ‘mini-nukes’ or ‘low-yield’ nuclear bombs. The purpose of such weapons would be to terrify our enemies, but the secondary effect would be to increase the likelihood of nuclear war.

Additional Sources of Contemporary Suffering

This set of threats and generators of suffering are catastrophes for which we have estimates of suffering, specifically annual prevalence’s of deaths and displacements. These sources annually affect about a billion a year from poverty to an estimated 5 million a year from water pollution. These types of sources of suffering can be prioritized by simply estimating the number of persons annually experiencing extreme suffering due to each of the sources listed. Priorities 3 through 8 in Table 1 were produced using these proceedures.

A ‘think tank’ called the International Crisis Group concluded: “From the global refugee crisis to the spread of terrorism, our collective failure to resolve conflict is giving birth to new threats and emergencies. Even in peaceful societies, the politics of fear is leading to dangerous polarization and demagoguery. These problems like refugee migration and terrorism can be called secondary threats because they are less likely to kill or maim massive numbers of people than would nuclear war and unabated global warming. Included among these secondary threats would be illnesses, gender-based violence, economic depression, water and air pollution, unemployment, inequalities, and so forth. Unfortunately, statistics are not available on the number affected by some of these sources of world suffering.

The global threats listed above are not complete or comprehensive, but nonetheless their destruction and suffering are enormous and daunting. The list in Table 1, of primary and secondary world threats, parallels the list of “Global Goals,” which were originally called Sustainable Development Global Goals. Some of these Global Goals are listed in the Table. Note in the table that when the official goal is stated as a positive or desired global feature, the negative form of the secondary threat is given in parentheses.

For the priorities 3 through 8, their priority order has been determined by the number of persons suffering extreme harm from each source. Priorities 1 and 2 are more difficult to evaluate because the future is filled with contingencies. Catastrophic global warming has been ranked higher than nuclear war because it probably will be much more difficult to return the earth to its normal functioning than it will be to deter global nuclear war.

Human Rights and Global Goals

Another perspective on global suffering emerges from the analysis of human rights. Specifically, any given instance of suffering can be linked to the violation of one or more human rights. Furthermore, the nature of human rights represents how global goals guide the alleviation of suffering. Each type of global suffering is tied to a global goal that identifies a human right. For example, the human right to food has driven the formulation of ending hunger as a Global Goal. And what drives the human desire to end hunger is the knowledge that widespread hunger yields great and extreme world suffering.

Intense human suffering that violates a specific human right provides a more compelling rationale for the human right than does the traditional ‘natural rights’ argument. Human rights are legitimated by their intimate link to suffering within this framework.

Relief of extreme global suffering has moral priority over enhancing the general well-being or happiness of the population. Finally, selected Global Goals define priority purposes and meaning for the planet. Suffering thus establishes the close bond between human rights and global goals.

Karl Popper concluded that “Human suffering makes a direct moral appeal for help,” but does not call for increasing the happiness of those already doing well. From a moral perspective, well-being and suffering are not just ‘two sides of the same coin.’ Human rights are much more concerned with avoiding the terrible than with achieving the best.

Human rights are primarily focused on preventing the worst forms of suffering like cruelty. Other violations cause less suffering, but should not be forgotten. According to Andrew Fagan, “the ethical imperative of human suffering” provides a foundation for the formulation of human rights. This is especially true for the subset of human rights referred to as ‘economic, social and cultural rights.’ But it is also true of those rights designated as ‘civil and political rights’ as well.

Roberto Andorno and Christiana Baffone, in Suffering and Bioethics (Oxford Online 2014), build a case for human rights being the primary intersection between human dignity and human vulnerability. If a vulnerability such as racist discrimination undermines the normative value of human dignity, the victims deserve the protection against suffering that a human rights principle can offer.

Conclusions

This analysis has revealed that world suffering, at least in its most extreme forms, helps us set priorities for both reducing suffering and for building a better world society. To evaluate and choose the most effective suffering-alleviation actions, it is necessary to review the major institutional sectors of global society, Then, one should look for the suffering-alleviation activities by which societies tend to neutralize the rough edges and severe pain of suffering and prevent further avoidable suffering.

While any individual is free to opt out of engaging in suffering-alleviation, our analysis reveals that worldwide many different organizations, programs and individual participants take a great deal of shared responsibility for relieving our own suffering as well that of others.

None of these sources of suffering identified here are trivial. For example, racial hatred and discrimination occurs on a daily basis, hindering progress for millions of people around the world. From denying individuals the basic principles of equality and non-discrimination to fueling ethnic hatred that may lead to genocide, racism and intolerance destroy lives and communities. The consequences for society are grim if people do not consider avoiding racial discrimination as well as the other Global Goals emphasized here.

The framework proposed here reveals the intimate, powerful link between suffering and associated human rights. Suffering that violates a specific human right legitimized the human right and the declaration of the human right makes the suffering more serious. Suffering thus becomes the missing link between human rights and global goals.