Obese Global Psyche

[Guest guest]

I just wanted to thank you for being able to join this valuable circle

of friends sharing their love and concern for humanity and the earth.

I look forward to the ongoing exchanges.

 

Here, what I am trying to bring to your attention is a new rationale

for a different approach to the new health care challenge in the

world: MENTAL OBESITY

 

ABOUT ME

I am an author in `Social Naturopathy'. You may wonder what it is.

Well, this is an attempt to understand the ailment of the society

that is chronically sick; and this is an attempt to find ways to

treat this social sickness—NATURALLY and HUMANLY.

 

 

A Society under Depression and the relevance of SOCIAL NATUROPATHY

 

One may suddenly conclude that the greatest American contribution to

the world is Atom Bomb. But, in my vision, the greatest American

contribution to mankind is NATUROPATHY. You name anybody who can be

considered as somebody of this great alternate system of medicine,

they are all Americans. Almost all those who are considered as the

pioneers of Nature Cure, Natural Hygiene, Hydropathy, Naturopathy

etc., and also, all great Hydropaths and Naturopaths in the world,

are all Americans. Fr. Silvestre Graham, Dr. Russell T. Thrall, Dr.

Sylass Wear Michel, Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, Dr. John H. Tilden,

Bernard Max Fadden, Dr. Herbert M. Shelton are all standing very tall

in theses lists. Which means, even though many consider America

having generated many problems in modern world through modern

science and technology, particularly through the field of Allopathic

health care system, America has also generated enough sources and

methodologies for the solutions of all these problems through Nature

Cure, Natural Hygiene, Hydropathy, Naturopathy, and other Back-to-

Nature Philosophies.

 

Today the growing relevance and popularity of many Alternate Health

Movements, like Naturopathy, are proving to be god-sent opportunities

to save modern society that is very much on the brink of an advanced

state of decay and disaster.

 

 

What rules the world today is a big monster called helplessness, fear

or human cowardice. It is indeed frightening to realize the sordid

reality that the significance or relevance of man has touched such

abysmal low that it is safe not to hazard a guess on that score. The

civil society is shrinking fast. Many writers are observing that our

civic culture is increasingly becoming meaningless.

 

But, " Mere survival is an affliction; what is of interest is life,

and the direction of that life " , wrote Guy Fregault When man's

physical body loses its immunity to fight problems of virus and

bacteria that have entered his body, he succumbs to incurable

diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer etc. Likewise, when human

mind loses its immunity to fight problems and crisis that have

entered his social/spiritual life he loses his interest in life which

then become lackluster; he soon succumbs to passivism or dormancy.

 

May be the decay has reached a state of no return. The long chronic

slave mentality brought out by the long spell of colonialism and its

later evolution as the tyranny of the high-tech market capitalism, as

well as the Marxist machination, (as its counter effect) have all

left man with little natural ingredients or resistance to register at

least a belated, and even feeble protest. Today the people are very

difficult to be rectified or debugged, that they tend to be more

sinned against than sinning, that they can more easily be cheated and

fooled. In post-modern world it is only actors, market models,

fictional goodies or `heroes', especially the film stars, who can

set the tone in every field of society, including in politics.

 

But `a cat in gloves catches no mice'; modern man steeped in

consumerism has suddenly become the idlest variety of the human

species known in human history. In modern era many unprecedented

developments that are unfolding today seem to be pointers to this

stark reality that modern man is fast elapsing into a chronic stage

of passivity and dormancy. Defeat of Thought by French philosopher,

Alain Finkidkrant and Closing of the American Mind by American

philosopher, Allan Bloom clearly vindicate this mortal reality on the

spiritual/intellectual front.

 

Feelings of hopelessness, chronic apathy, and low energy levels are

some of the crippling symptoms of depression. Depression can appear

as a consequence of a life change such as poor health, divorce, death

of a family member, or loss of work or it may insidiously unfold

without a clear cause. That's because depression is commonly

intertwined with a vast number of diverse conditions and illnesses.

Modern man is sick—both physically and mentally. For this disorder,

the well-known adage, " sound body-sound mind " reveals a simple basic

truth.

 

But what is ailing the modern mind? Modern history may be described

as an era of cultures formed by various addictions. The very concept

of addiction may have lost its meaning considering its prevalence to

almost all strata of population in one form or another, and which, in

the process, has rendered a whole people and a whole civilization as

its victims in the wake.

 

Today the situation has become such alarming that man cannot complete

a single day without the helps of a hundreds machines attached to him

or he being hooked to them, thanks to the emergence of market, both

as the sole distributor of these modern `inconveniences' (and that is

how Mark Twain described these modern mechanical systems of

conveniences), and also as the leader of modern man. If we can

believe advertisements, what matters to these people most is the

personal ownership of machinery: cooking machines, blending machines,

driving machines, picture machines, sound machines, tooth-brushing

machines, computing machines, machines to kill insects, deliver

intimacy, send messages through wires or the naked air, entertainment

machines, shooting machines, and many more mechanical extensions of

our physical self. Indirect control over even more ambitious machine

seems to matter a lot, too: flying machines, bombing machines, heart

and lung machines, voting machines, and a great variety of other

mechanical creations.

 

Mechanization is the story of a planet's life being badly hit by

synthetics, the non-cyclic residues generated and left by an irritant

species called modern man. This is the story of how man has become

an enemy of his own species; how man is fast eaten up and destroyed

by his own enemy species within the same species; how modern man,

thus being anti-nature and anti-human, is only helping his own enemy

species; how man in the process is destroying other friendly species

in nature that is otherwise essential for sustaining the planet's

very life process.

 

Formerly everything evolved cyclically. This means there was no

waste as such. Waste from man was food for other species in nature.

But in the synthetic age of today, everything evolves non-

cyclically. Which means waste is no more cyclical – waste remains

multiplying and keeps on accumulating. Waste from man and man-made

system are not only no food for other species and nature but are also

poisonous or injurious to all life forms due to its non-cyclical

manifestations.

 

All living systems have a way of mutually feeding off each other. In

nature there is no net waste product unlike in the industrial system.

One system's waste is the input of another. Nature has neither

purpose nor design in the sense in which the human mind uses these

words. Yet it has a great beauty and symmetry and an abiding sense of

integrity of its own. Non-linear characteristics of living systems

can never be captured by mathematical equations based on modern man's

management systems. Nor are they totally predictable or controllable

in the sense in which the classical mechanical systems would have

liked it to be

 

Waste from man and man-made systems, since the last 50 years, fill

the planet's limited biosphere to the extent that it not only

constitutes more than a thousand folds of what man had left, as

waste, on earth for millions of years before, but also that it is all

set to remain non-biodegradable for the next tens of thousands of

years to come, for example, plastics. And the most threatening

reality about this mortal fact is that this waste creation is a

highly accelerating process and thus the massively threatening de-

life process.

 

 

But now coming on addictions, how can the world fight addiction when

it is surviving just on the tax collected from those who sell these

addiction, a major portions of which comes from none other than what

we call " modern conveniences--mechanical addictions " . And this

pathetic state no-win-situation has become a reality when market has

become the leader of man.

 

The market and science raised modern man the way they raised their

counterparts in the animal world, for example, the broiler chicken or

the g.m. tomato in the world of vegetation. All these modern

technology-raised materials, including modern man, too have many

things in common. For example, modern man, like his counterparts, the

broiler chicken and the g.m. tomato, may be big in quantity (obesity

wise or otherwise), but far less in quality. Modern man may have

taller buildings, but has only shorter tempers (zero tolerance); he

may see things thousands of light years away, but has problems to

cross the street to meet the new neighbor; he may have more experts,

but has far more problems; he may have more medicines, but has less

well being. He may have more degrees, but has less sense; more

knowledge, but less judgment; more kinds of food, but with less

nutrition. These are the days of two incomes in families, but more

divorces; of fancier houses, but broken homes

 

 

And this in the story of how this disease of an era has rendered man

a social addict to the prevailing systems, as more and more market-

friendly and less and less man-friendly; ending up more as a machine

that uses man--than as a `tool-using animal' that he was for hundreds

of thousands of years. Thus it is evident that most of the life style-

induced diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer etc. can only be

tackled socially, and not individually. Here I am taking the case of

obesity, as an example.

 

OBESITY

 

Terrorism today is a highly temporary and preventable problem that

can be tackled either by the world or by the terrorists themselves,

for example, through change of hearts for which there are enough

possibilities. But what about a threat to mankind that is not only

permanent and unpreventable but also is killing millions of people

the world over every year that only goes on spiraling every year, and

spelling doom for the mankind, as a species, in a very short span of

time from now.

 

Yes, obesity is killing an average of about three lakhs of Americans

every year and the figure is steadily increasing. Now if we take the

toll by diabetes and cancer, the twin diseases for which obesity in

the prime cause, the death figure may well exceed a million in

America alone, in a single year alone. Now tobacco too is linked to

obesity, as both have their origin due to addictions, obesity may be

described as the disease of modern era that is all set to mark the

end of the human history on this planet in the immediate future, not

necessarily in its present form but in some newly emerging

complicated forms of obesity.

 

An estimated 129.6 million Americans, or 64 percent, are overweight

or obese And since the late 1970s, the number of obese adults in the

United States has grown by over 50 percent. Today what we identify as

obesity may be yet another disease or a more problematic ailment

tomorrow, just as it was considered not only not as a disease in the

not-so-distort past but was treated as something virtuous, healthy

and worthy.

 

A few decades back obesity was considered something great, for

example, in some quarters, as a symbol of power in the world,

especially in this part of the third world. Those who became over-

weight were those who could afford to eat more food that was the

wealthy then. Those sections of fat people were meant to be as

belonging to the section of the wealthy, as part of the oligarchial

sections of then society and hence a symbol of wealth and power.

 

 

But, why do almost all the hitherto remedies for obesity not only

just fail but also complicate it further?. Why is it not only

limited to human but also to the other species, to his society, and

thus the whole planet, as well?

 

The answer to this question is not just multi-disciplinary but is

also multi-dimensional.

 

1. Failure to see the Totality of the Problem. The basic reason

is our failure to see the totality of the problem. It stems from the

fact that almost all the present-day de-obesity attempts and

remedies are highly superficial, and they address only much less than

one present of the problem, even when such remedies happen to

succeed, the eventuality of which too in rare. Obesity is not just

one disease or one malformation. It is the chronic conditioning of a

number of diseases and malformations have their roots not just in

one's food or life styles but also in his genetics, environment and

even in his culture.

 

2. Solution to this problem is taken up by the same forces and

methodologies that created this problem in the first place.

Here it is seen that obesity is a disease of the modern era, the main

trends of which are mechanization, market economy and addictions of

all sorts. Today almost all the present day synthetic (scientific)

remedies, like the over the counter medicines, weight reducing

exercises and other food limiting strict regimentations, surgery and

the likes of the Mc Donald's types of `de-obesity fast food

remedies, all prove not only ineffectual for long term effect but

also counter productive in many respect. Although many companies have

anti-obesity therapeutics on the market, current treatments based on

impairing fat digestion by inhibition of lipase, or central

regulation of metabolism and appetite, have not shown reliable long-

term success. In addition some are associated with serious side

effects, which include increased heart rate and blood pressure.

 

..

3. Beyond the Individual's Control. Increase in the prevalence of

obesity is the result of several economic changes that have altered

the lifestyle choices of people, especially the people of the

developed world. Hence these choices are beyond the individual's

control. There simply cannot be any individual or even sectarian

solution to a chronic problem that is more social than material, more

civilizational than individual, more environmental than individual,

more global than sectarian, more fundamental than anything

superficial, and more mental/spiritual than physical/material. Here

even the so-called holistic remedies too will have only very limited

roles to play if the approach in on individual basis.

 

Here it is also relevant to ask why naturopathy too is proving only

partially effective. It is because remedies for these problems have

to come from the mind. What we see as the health problems of the

body, outwardly, are only just the symptoms. Unless we treat them

both mentally and physically, no basic cure is possible?

 

 

A Whole Civilization under Addiction

 

 

JUST a few years ago, researchers were astonished to find that the

number of people suffering from hunger or malnutrition worldwide was

equivalent to the number of overweight or obese people - about one

billion each. Recently, the London-based International Obesity Task

Force revised the estimate of overweight people to 1.7 billion.

The problem of obesity in the United States is known throughout the

world. In 2000, the economic cost of obesity in the U.S. was over

$115 billion. Many families endure daily worries over diet-related

diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure. The

effect of Western culture can be demonstrated by the fact that

adolescent obesity increases dramatically among second- and third-

generation immigrants to the US as they adopt the American diet and

lifestyle.

 

 

And the number one culprit for the obesity of the human body is the

growing addiction to fast/junk food culture.

 

Now, there is a parallel development on the mental health sector: the

growing 'obesity of the modern human mind'-- the development of a

mechanical or synthetic mind-set. And the culprit here is the same

fast/junk `food for the mind', `food' with no real `nutrition' for

thought. An example today is the successfully marketed modern pulp

fictions.

 

 

As the sparkers and wheelers of new ideas, books are indeed the foods

for the mind that keep it healthy, just as the nourishing

(natural/organic) food is to the human body. But it is a pity that,

like the emergence of the highly tantalizing and health-damaging

synthetic fast/junk foods damaging the human body (for example,

obesity), the fast creeping of a parallel `fast/junk foods for the

mind' is damaging the human mind, as is evident in the quickening of

the shrinking thought process in late modern age. The result is the

growing `obesity' of the mind, the thoughtless mind, the mind without

conscience or soul, the mind that is getting only mechanically

activated without a thought, the mind getting enlarged as if it is

growing like a tumor-- the development of a synthetic mind-set.

 

For example, like a highly promising wonder drug hitting the market,

the new books like the Harry Potters' and the Jurassic Parks' are

generating such fantasy and artificial Disneyland worlds that their

arrivals intoxicate the would-be-reader before he even reads it.

Market seems to have completely downed man as it rules the roost at

its zenith. It seems to stop at nothing in exploiting the addiction

traits of the modern mind as it has done in exploiting the addiction

traits of their body.

 

Harry Porter/ Jurassic Parks' are the new `Coke' (opium-type

substance-filled fast foods) for rejuvenating the ailing and the

young minds. Like any other super-market boosted fast food remedies,

this too may arouse instant thrills for the minds, only to weaken it

further as the inevitable hangovers set in, like fast food causing

innumerable problem for the body like, diabetics, hypertensions,

obesity etc. The fiction filled instant thrills imposed on innocent

young minds by the crazy greedy market, it is certain that the likes

of Harry Porter/ Jurassic Parks' are going to be one of the final

nails to be stricken on the coffin of the sinking mind now on the

death bed.

 

The world gets the Harry Potters' the same way it once welcomed

the `discovery' of Coke, Pizza, broiler chicken etc. Mc Donald's.

Tyson Chicken and Coca Cola suddenly became sensational brands once

they first appeared in the market. But today it is heard through many

newspaper reports that increasing number of Americans are queuing

before their courts with cases seeking damages by suing fast food

chains of restaurants as the culprits for their obesity and other

health problems like stress and cardiovascular diseases. Now I don't

know how much time it may take for Americans to sue to publishers of

Harry Potter and Jurassic Park for damages to the mind of their

children as well as the minds of this age--the shrinking human mind

and the growing `synthetic' mind

 

Long subjected to cheap consumerism, modern man has been made an

addict to everything in ready-to-use packages and in style. Like fast

food, he cannot resist anything superficially tantalizing. He is not

much bothered about the content so far as it is in world class

package. And what we call world class packaging is all that go with

aggressive selling and the mind-managing techniques like style, big

name, `big name' sponsorship, awards, high advances, trade marks,

high technical qualification, and tantalizing `news' favoring the

product etc.

 

The market force wants these writer to do with words what it wants

Michael Jackson to do with light and sound, what it wants Maradona to

do with football. The market force wants them all to be spin-doctors

hoodwinking the gullible onlookers, readers, man-on-the-street or the

common man, and thus sending the sale proceeds graph going into

tailspin.

 

Today ample natural resources are generally wasted in the production

of a multitude of products: processed foods, cosmetics, synthetic

drinks, electronic machines and drugs, which undermine human health

and well-being and promote physical and mental decline. Finally, the

system of market economy, by controlling the medical system, is

promoting the over-prescribing of many unnecessary drugs that

aggravates the situation systematically.

 

Never before, in the history of humanity was there a greater

production of products, which are more or less unnecessary and

harmful to human health. And all this for a simple reason: to make

profit. Never before there were people who used more addictive

substances, like alcohol, cigarettes, psychiatric drugs and

narcotics, sugar, coffee, excess of meat, and other over-processed

fast foods, all of which contribute to human degeneration and

decadence.

 

For millions of years man ate food made by nature which thus made him

the crown of all creation. However, for the last few hundred years he

ate food prepared partly by nature and partly by man, and he slowly

started to become partly ill. For the last few year decades,

however, man started to eat food produced not only not by man nor by

nature nor even in nature but food produced by machines and in the

assembly lines--factories. The tragic result is that this practice

has robed his status as the crown of all creations and bestowed him

the status of slave – " the tool of his own tools " . He is now

completely sick –both mentally and physically--and he is being

rendered untreatable by nature as well, and is all poised to extinct,

as a species, in a few decades from the planet.

 

Obesity: More a matter of the Mind

 

The theory behind obesity is that many people fail to lose weight not

because they cannot stop eating but because the brain will not let

them do so. Previous studies have shown that once a person gains

extra weight, the brain 're-programmes' itself to accept this as

normal.

 

Putting it differently, the theory behind it is that modern world

fails to shed its vitiation process, not because it cannot stop it,

but because the `worldly wise' (market-led) global brain will not let

it do so. Therefore, before we can develop good medicines to stop the

obesity epidemic, we need to understand how the body's own hormones

regulate appetite and body weight.

 

According to studies of the British Professor Jonathan Seckl, an

expert in molecular medicine at Edinburgh University, any subsequent

attempts to reduce the weight are then interpreted as a threat to the

body's survival.

 

As a result, the brain automatically slows the body's metabolic rate

to reduce the burning of calories. Scientists involved in the study

hope to find out exactly how the brain does this but think they

already know why - evolution.

 

" Back in man's hunter-gatherer days, or even in Britain in the Middle

Ages, starvation was common, " says Professor Jonathan Seckl, " So the

body learned to turn off its metabolism and go into survival mode so

it could live through the famine. Now when somebody is obese and they

try to lose weight, they immediately feel hungry and the body reacts

as if they were a five stone weakling. It tells the brain 'I am being

starved' and starts to retain calories like crazy. "

 

Evolution lagging behind

 

Professor Seckl believes although famine has been almost unheard in

the developed world for many years, evolution has yet to catch up.

 

More and more people are obese. This means that while food is

plentiful, our brains have not yet re-programmed themselves to

recognize that it's not always necessary to kick-start survival mode

when food intake drops.

 

Thus it is evident through all these studies—both scientific and

naturopathic--that any effective remedy for the life style-induced

chronic diseases like OBESITY, DIABETIES, and HYPERTENTION etc. can

only be found through SOCIAL NATUROPATHY.

 

We must distance ourselves from the mechanical paradigms of

management mode of thought to the learning NATURAL mode of the

thought process; a learning of about the living organizations--

something far more deeply interfused with all living beings… a

sustainable, nature-friendly, alternative mode of social

dispensations from the current model of the mechanical, industrial,

mass market, global-command-systems mode of a global society of only

artificial—inanimate—materials..

 

 

There's only one guarantee about the future of your health: our

commitment to change is much more important than any miracle drug.

Becoming `addicted' to our own healing It is psychological and

spiritual health -- the very opposite of addictive behavior -- that

seems to be the key. For which it is necessary that we prepare the

mind, change the mind—but easier said than done, especially in a

mechanical age known for its mindlessness or soullessness!!!

 

We must change our social behavior through a journey of self-

discovery, for example through workshops that are based on spiritual

change, or that create joy in place of anxiety.

 

 

Environmental Interventions

 

There is no doubt that the causes of obesity include genes and

environment. To slow the obesity epidemic, environmental

interventions offer the greatest and most rapid uptake and impact.

Yet research on assessment and implementation of such interventions

has had relatively little support, and hardly features in many of the

present-day position papers on obesity. This situation therefore

strongly points towards the global imperatives of a bold and

significant strategic shift towards a more holistic and actionable

obesity research programme centred on social, behavioral, and public-

health oriented researches.

 

 

 

 

My work, as an author

 

P.S. You can read me, as an author here:

http://www.fireflysun.com/book/authorsunite.php

 

My first book was an attempt to expose the fallacies and dangers of

PROFESSIONALISM in basic and creative social sectors like politics,

education and health care.

 

For an example, a decisive step in the formation of the modern

medical establishment was the founding of the American Medical

Association (AMA) in 1847, which capped decades of struggle to

transform a diverse, unregulated array of practices and practitioners

into an exclusive, credentialed profession. Resistance to

professionalizatin, which was widespread in the nineteenth century,

was collectively known as the Popular Health Movement (PHM). Like its

post-1970 descendant, the Alternative Health Movement, the PHM

comprised a diverse array of supporters who shared distrust or

outright paranoia toward institutional medical authority. Today, the

split between the profession and the public is more pronounced than

ever: the AMA is reputedly the strongest and richest lobby in

Washington, while the Alternative Health Movement has grown into an

institution in its own right.

 

The widespread damage done by unbridled professionalism in other

creative social sectors is no different.

 

My second book, now on its finishing stage, is an attempt in

explaining and redefining the growing pathology of the culture of

today's market-led mechanical life. It is about the adverse and

catastrophic effects of commonly-practiced mechanical life styles,

its mortal addictive traits and the highly adverse withdrawal

effects that have rendered modern humanity highly passive--as slaves

of his own making: the machines and the prevailing hi-tech market

systems. When people become chronic users of most of the hi-tech

modern conveniences and get addicted to commonly-practiced mechanical

life styles, they develop a

sort of a `chemical' dependency to market mechanization and they, as

a whole society, remain emotionally immature, without ever knowing

these mortal realities. The highly commercialized and market-led hi-

tech systems may take only minutes to decide and `advice' what kind

of solution you need in the form of a product or an expert service,

for a temporary problem, but you can end up an addict to it by taking

it for months, years, or for a lifetime

 

Yes, it is difficult but true to realize that we have been " duped " by

a system we were taught to trust in

 

This book is an attempt to show how the ecology of the Earth's life

support system is disintegrating; how the modern society is

literally undoing the work of organic evolution; how the institutions

we have created are destroying the livability of the whole world; and

how modern man, for the moment's pleasure and escape, is fouling his

own nest. In this effort to explain the high relevance of SOCIAL

NATUROPATHY today, I am taking up the case of OBESITY, just as an

example.

 

 

I hope that the subject, the theme of this book will ultimately

emerge as the one quite near and dear to the heart of every reader,

for it is all about people, like you and me, here and now. And I hope

to hear your opinion on SOCIAL NATUROPATHY.

 

Regards,

M.J.John

www.fireflysun.com/book/john.php