A part of the Jedi’s theory about our sick fascination with weight and health.
The problem with embracing the culture of victimization is that we have also embraced a culture of blame. After all, you can’t sue fate. Somebody has to be responsible for anything bad that happens, right?
But I only can blame (sorry, couldn’t resist) a little of the current state of this game on that mindset. I think there’s a bigger issue, and it’s one I don’t even want to point out, since I’m not the fan of religion in its organized form that I often appear to be as I defend it. I may not be a churchgoer, but I think there’s something very healthy about a strong faith in a force that’s beyond human control.
I think this is the sickness that we’re suffering from, and it becomes worse and worse as we take our faith away from God or fate or whatever you want to call that power and transfer it to humanity: we believe that we can control everything. And I think this is what leads to the viciousness of the current moralizing, which continues to get more and more overwrought the more secular our society becomes.
And oddly enough, this belief has taken on the character of a sort of superstition, and now instead of praying that we’ll be blessed with a long life, or making an offering to a goddess or a saint, we diet and run and lift weights and count on that to protect us. Sadly, there is something in the human animal that wants to demand that others must share the same belief system or forever be other, open to demonization. And thus we blame people for their own disease processes in the misguided belief that if we just do something differently from what they do, we will be protected from the scourge that they have suffered.
Hatred of fat is simply fear of death.
We repackage it so that it looks rational. This is especially convenient because we mostly claim to worship rationality anymore. There’s nothing wrong with believing in science. Science is a good thing, a very good thing, an absolutely amazing thing. But it just stands there with the facts. We’re the ones who twist those facts into our strange new morality where having a less-than-perfect body is something that causes deep shame.
We don’t control nearly as much as we think we do.
I’m pretty sure that reading Accidental Verbosity has made me fat.
Posted by dave on 05/16 at 09:41 PM
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