Liverpool Football Club made history this month when it won its 20th match of 21 in this season’s English Premier League, smashing all previous records.
Liverpool Manager Jurgen Klopp does not have the most expensive squad of players in the world. He has a multi-cultural group, whose success is built on a simple ethos; they stick together and play as a team.
Among the most cherished of Klopp’s ideologies is the belief that never in history has a divided group won anything.
Sports is a microcosm of the society. Our major risks are from within and they have fundamental impacts on our health.
For instance, a landmark paper by Harvard academics examined the links between divisive attitudes to African Americans and death rates.
They surveyed 39 states and measured racial disrespect by calculating the percentage of people who thought that the poorer jobs, income and housing that Black Americans had were because “Black people had less in-born ability to learn” or because “most Blacks just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.”
They found Black Americans had higher mortality rates in states where there was more disrespect and that these changes in mortality were also found for the white population. A 1 per cent increase in the prevalence of those who believed that Black people lacked innate ability was associated with an increase in mortality of 360 per 100,000. Racial disrespect is bad for everyone.
Different sorts of disrespect and divisions are on the rise in Canada. The politics of fear and divisiveness characterize local, provincial and national election campaigns. Islamophobia has increased, and, though Canadians have generally rejected racialized far-right politics others have been successful by peddling other divisions.
Both the special provincial needs of Alberta compared to others and attempts to split rural voters from city dwellers have been fertile areas. This is despite the difficulty in finding evidence of real differences across Canada in what people need or what preoccupies them. Whether you live in the West, Central, East, urban, suburban or rural areas, dominant worries are affordability, safety, global warming, transportation, retirement and health.
If you take fear and division and add a dose of cynicism about experts and government you produce an excellent culture medium for anxiety. Anxiety is bad for our health. A smoker loses on average 8.5 years of life. Anxiety can decrease your life expectancy by 7.
Not surprisingly, we are hardwired to decrease our anxiety.
From the time we are born our brains are taking in information and that helps us to decrease fear and anxiety. We use information we get from our life experiences to develop schema or mental maps of how the world works. These help us to understand things that happen to us and predict what will happen next. When things seem more predictable, we feel more in control and we are less anxious.
Another way we cope with anxiety and fear is to form a pack or group of like-minded people, yet another is to protect your own. Both are easily exploited for political gain but neither works well for us; they are cancers that eat away at our health and our society. We end up more anxious.
The more we produce social silos, the less we trust each other and the less we are willing to invest in society. That produces a more unpredictable environment with fewer supports and less of a social safety net which makes us anxious.
And if people in one province are told they cannot trust others, or we are told we cannot trust our neighbours, institutions and government the world feels less predictable, we become more anxious and our health deteriorates.
Political leaders who peddle fear and divisiveness are bad for our health. We will all lose socially if factions and provinces decide they want to walk alone. Divided we fall. And this is likely to have negative economic consequences in addition to the social ones.
Liverpool is a multi-cultural team which is winning and breaking records using unity as a key weapon in the face of others who are better resourced.
Over the next few weeks as our parliamentarians return to full business, I hope they remember that.
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