Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Or, for a more global and somber analogy, we could reach back to the deadly consequences of European expansionism in the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, and still ongoing. The number of indigenous people killed in this “single, multi-century, planet-wide exterminatory pulse,”25 whether by bullets, disease, or mass deportations, has been estimated at fifty million.26 But when the shooting stopped, the survivors were often left suffering from what could be a fatal malaise, characterized by alcoholism, depression, and suicide. This was the background for anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 Tristes Tropiques: decimated native cultures, stripped of customs, rituals, or traditional means of subsistence, left listless and dispirited by their encounter with the West.

This is an underestimate by at least a factor of two. China and India alone are 100 million+.