Page 175 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Social Marketing as Social Control 167

Redefining Health: The World Health Organization

But why, as an ontological position, must everything under the sun be
political? Why is this assumption made? The most important reason be-
hind the argument that everything is political is that, for those with ambi-
tions to save the world, the most direct avenue for putting plans into action
is through the administrative and legal apparatus of government. According
to World Bank data, the annual gross domestic product of the United
3
States in 2011 was a staggering $14,991,300,000,000. This means that,
on average, the United States produces $41 billion in economic products
and services each day. This is a veritable goldmine for lawmakers, moral
entrepreneurs, or anyone else with an interest in righting wrongs or repair-
ing areas of society deemed worthy of attention. Wouldn’t it make sense to
figure out some way of skimming a little off the top of this juggernaut that
is the United States economy? Wouldn’t it make sense to take a little from
everyone to help those whose life circumstances fall short of our highest
ideals?
Consistent with this ethos is the assumption of the deeply political na-
ture of health, which in turn leads to the expansion of the definition of
health from the individual level to the collective level. This project has
been in the works since the establishment of the World Health Organization
(WHO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, in 1948. The original
definition of health formulated by the WHO, still in force today, is “a state
of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the
absence of disease or infirmity” (Riediker & Koren, 2004). At about the
same time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was devel-
oped, which called for going beyond the basic negative rights established
in the United States Constitution—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
ness—to include “rights” to dignity, identity, security, a living wage, health,
housing, asylum, marriage, voting, rest and leisure, education, and full
social participation (Morsink, 1999). To reach this utopia, there would
obviously need to be massive amounts of wealth redistribution, which
could not be obtained through traditional charity, where people decide, on
a case-by-case basis, to give voluntarily out of the goodness of their own
hearts. Since launching this ambitious international project to rethink and
remake the concept of health, the WHO and all its adherents have
embraced a political approach in striving to make their aspirations a real-
ity, and to soften some of the harsh realities of this wealth transfer or redis-
tribution from the perspective of average citizens who typically would
want no part of it, they have used rhetorical or persuasive devices, whether
in the form of social marketing, nudging, public health, behavioral