Ciudad Juarez, a city on Mexico’s border with the US state of Texas, is described by Ed Vulliamy as “the most murderous city in the world” (Guardian Weekly , July 1/11). The 40,000 homicides claimed so far by Mexico’s recent drug war didn’t all occur in Ciudad Juarez. But enough were committed there to make the city a focus of attention and a symbol of socio-economic failure, a glimpse into a future in which the quest for profit is pursued to its logical extreme. Put simply, a demand for drugs exists in America and Europe, a supply is available, and competing entrepreneurs are eager to meet need of the market place.

The drug cartels don’t dirty themselves with messy killing. Like a corporation that hires an advertising or public relations agency to promote a product or project, they hire gangs to do their work. Shootings, beheadings, mutilations and torture are increasing in frequency and brutality. The killers proudly post their atrocities on YouTube, linking their identity to their own gruesome method of killing. In the marketplace of illegal drugs and murder, they brand themselves with their particular form of violence. Morality is irrelevant. The system is fed by market share, profit and pride of service. In Vulliamy’s language, it is “capitalism gone mad”.

The residents of Ciudad Juarez have adapted to the war occurring among them. Malls are open for shopping. Restaurants serve meals throughout the day. In the cool evenings, people gather to eat, drink and socialize. The only difference, Vulliamy reports, is that the eery “semblance of normality” is “punctuated by gunfire”. The bloodshed, torture and violence has become so normal that ordinary people barely notice it.

But other people have noticed Ciudad Juarez. Like a flash of light in the dark, it illuminates and reveals. The co-existence of chaos and order in this Mexican city can be related to an event at a New York Wal-Mart in November, 2008, when a security guard, unable to climb to safety on nearby vending machines, was trampled to death by a mob of 2,000 “frenzied shoppers” who pushed in the doors and stampeded to the bargain specials (Ibid. July 8/11).

And events in Ciudad Juarez can also be related to brutal international trade and monetary forces that are undermining the autonomy of individual nations, thereby rendering democracies less and less able to determine their own policies and futures. In another Guardian Weekly article, Democracy is No Match for Market Power, Gary Younge asks, “How can we render democratic engagement viable at the national level within the context of globalization?” (Ibid.). If market forces predetermine economic and social policy, why bother to vote – which is Younge’s explanation for declining voting rates in most modern democracies.

In another event that echoes the morality of the drug war in Ciudad Juarez, Younge describes a law passed unanimously by the Haitian parliament in June, 2009, which raised the daily minimum wage to $5.00 per day. The US corporate interests that make high-end brand apparel in Haiti protested the increased wages. According to a WikiLeaks document, a senior US embassy official argued that the law “did not take economic reality into account” (Ibid.). Political pressure and intensive lobbying forced a special concession on Haiti’s garment industry – the minimum wage would be $3.00 per day.

A related force in the capitalist free-market economy, Vulliamy argues, is fuelling the slaughter in Ciudad Juarez. “Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora…”. These “bonded assembly plants” that once payed “rock bottom wages” to fill America’s supermarkets are now being closed because labour is cheaper in Asia. In a “city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market” (Ibid., July 7/11), the unemployed are being hired by the drug cartels to secure territory and market share. “It’s a city based on markets and on trash,” notes a local photographer. “Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash” (Ibid.).

What happens to people and to societies when everything they do is measured by economic value? What happens to morals and ethics when the market transposes key social structures into materialism and consumerism? What then happens to the bounds that keep societies civil? If people are treated like “trash” by free-market capitalism, do they eventually adopt these same values and abandon the civilizing bounds of decency and humanity? And to those who want to protest this degenerating process, Vulliamy poignantly as, “How can you march against the market?”

Vulliamy argues that Mexico’s drug war is different than other wars because it is simply the struggle for market share gone amok. “It belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left… is greed.” The Mexican drug cartels are merely the logical extension of a free-market economy. They have been living the “North American free-trade agreement long before it was dreamed up”, merely practicing what multinational corporations practice – albeit with somewhat less restraint and subtlety.

But not necessarily. The compounding environmental crisis presently facing our planet is another outcome of this same “belligerent hyper-materialism”, a system that is eminently successful at making profit while inflicting murderous ecological ruin in the process. Like the people of Ciudad Juarez, we too have become accustomed to an eery “semblance of normality” that is “punctuated by gunfire”. We shop and eat and socialize amid environmental mayhem, making the best of a situation that seems beyond our ability to change – hoping, all the while, that the stray bullets don’t hit us.

Post Script: The present “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has spread to cities around the world is an attempt to “march against the market” and correct some of the political, economic and social problems created by abject greed.

Ever get the feeling that our environmental problems are just too big to solve? Ever cringe when hearing of another “unprecedented weather event”, when reading of another species on the verge of extinction, or seeing headlines of another sobering report from climatologists, biologists or toxicologists? Ever feel numbed because the onslaught of gloomy forecasts is overwhelming? Ever suspect that the entire environmental mess could be a fictional concoction designed by conspirators to overthrow the economic system that has brought us prosperity? Welcome to a psychological condition called “well-informed futility syndrome”.

“Well-informed futility syndrome” was first identified in 1973 by the American psychologist Gerhart Wiebe who was examining the response of television viewers to the real-time Vietnam war news they were receiving in their own living rooms. The more they saw and learned about the disastrous complexity of the issues, the more paralyzed they felt by a sense of futility.

Denial is futility’s close relative. Peter Sandman, an expert on risk communication, describes how we intuitively avoid information that elicits uncomfortable feelings. Because we don’t want to confront fear or guilt, we reflexively exercise the mental gymnastics that avoid confrontations with such emotional experiences. So we follow the easy way out when we receive any uncomfortable messages that contain incongruities or inconsistencies. As Sandra Steingraber notes so succinctly in her powerful book, Raising Elijah, if we are told we have a dire environmental problem (such as mass extinctions or melting icecaps) but the proposed solutions seem so trivial (such as buying new light bulbs or recycling office paper) then the discontinuity between the problem and the solution provides the opportunity to conclude that the problem is not so dire. Denial combines with futility, she writes, to create a “retreat into silent paralysis”.

Denial, futility and paralysis all combine into a syndrome that results in inaction, a forestalling of plans, initiatives and undertakings that would begin to address the multiple waves of environmental problems coming at us. And the irony is that this inaction only increases the severity of the syndrome – very much like denying the existence of credit card debt only increases the accumulation of interest charges, or getting depressed about feeling depressed only increases the severity of the depression.

The cure for the “well-informed futility syndrome” is action. But not just any action. While conscientiously bringing reusable shopping bags to the grocery store is important and careful recycling helps to solve environmental problems, the cure to futility is in the larger thinking that addresses the root causes. Our environmental problems are the symptoms of something deeper that’s amiss. Unless the structural faults are corrected, the problems will continue to bedevil us. We can attempt to rehabilitate a salmon stream but unless we curtail the clearcut logging of watersheds, all efforts are likely to be useless. We can sandbag a rising river but unless we reduce the greenhouse gases that are activating the hydrological cycle, the torrential rains will guarantee future floods. We can search for cures to cancer but unless we reduce the levels of chemical contamination permeating our civilization, our successes will be frustratingly small. We can devise more ingenious ways of drilling for oil but without a decrease in our dependence on it, the social, political, economic and environmental costs will continue to escalate.

An increasing number of people are successfully counteracting the “well-informed futility syndrome” by becoming environmentally active – particularly in countries like Canada where the national government is doing so little to alleviate a rising sense of helplessness. Action is the only escape from the grip of paralysis. So people form salmon enhancement societies, naturalists clubs and conservancy organizations. Others become involved in the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Sierra Club, Ecojustice, Common Sense Canadians, CoalWatch, the BC Sustainable Energy Association, and the Living Oceans Society. Support for more activist approaches offered by Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Society remains solid. The list continues to expand as the frustration in a well-informed public continues to build. It even includes the Raging Grannies – some may regard them as entertaining eccentrics but they are invariably mature and experienced women who are repositories of tradition and wisdom. They are merely trying to change behaviour that is ruining our planet’s ecology and risking the foundations of our civilization.

Those who are activated to counteract the numbing and paralyzing effects of the “well-informed futility syndrome” are simply responding as best they can to a complex problem that is not being adequately addressed by the agencies and governments representing them. Their actions, however rational or extreme, however practical or bizarre, are their responses to a pervasive feeling of frustration and helplessness to a problem that is not being solved.

As a child, Steingraber recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s when American school children were taught to protect themselves from a nuclear attack by taking cover under a desk. The fear of annihilation by a Russian attack was real and immediate in those Cold War years. When asked about their future lives, all her classmates thought they would die from an atom bomb – except for one optimistic girl whose parents were engaged as peace activists.