Part 2 of 4
You would think affluence would result in better health, and to an extent it does. What you have to understand first is that our modern world is all about tradeoffs and not the idea of continual progress. The mainstream narrative would have you believe that we are progressing forward as a species on all fronts with no setbacks or side-effects. This is absurd. First of all, there have been setbacks forever including the Dark Ages of Europe where they abandoned centuries of advanced civilization to go live in bogs and small forest tribes. Second of all, there have been many bad side-effects. Fossils of ancient hunter-gatherers prove that humans used to be more robust, taller, and had better teeth. In fact, a lot of our dental problems arise from malnourishment and underdeveloped jaws that force the lower teeth to be crowded out.
Modern farming and subsistence on a grain-based diet has led to an atrophy of human health. You can argue that modern medicine has saved us from a plethora of horrible diseases like the plague, smallpox, measles, cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid, but you could equally argue that better sanitation saved us, that these are diseases caused by civilization and overcrowding and an atrocious lack of sanitation. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never suffered from measles, plague, and smallpox because they never lived a sedentary life in overcrowded slums living amongst pigs, chicken, rats, and fleas.
Recently, big ag has sold us on overconsumption of industrial dairy and GMO grains. As a result, most of us have become overweight, sedentary and unhealthy. Just as bad, the petrochemical, pharmacological complex has convinced us that all ancient remedies and medicines are worthless and you should simply pop a pill to fix all your maladies. What this book proves is that this approach has failed us miserably, and we should not only embrace pre-civilization remedies and medicines but methodologies as well. A big part of that methodology includes the mind-body connection, that we can mentally make ourselves sicker and at the same time, we can mentally make ourselves healthier.
In alpha groups, animals that are not at the top of the pyramid suffer from stress and higher cortisol levels. This is reflected in human society. 99% of us are at the bottom of the pyramid and suffer from stress and higher cortisol levels. The plethora of health ailments for the masses is indicative of living in an unequal, pyramid structure society. One of the greatest sources of stress is overcrowding. This is also why factory animals are notoriously susceptible to infections and sickness, and why consuming their meat also makes us susceptible to infections and sickness. While certainly hunter-gatherers experienced stress, they had a brilliant solution for dealing with stress, they worked harder. If they were hungry, they spent more time hunting or gathering, and successful hunting or gathering would reduce their stress. For civilized humans, while we may work more, the work itself is often a source of more stress in overcrowded working conditions with an ever-present supervisor hounding us to be more productive. In the modern world, working more service industry jobs results in facing more unpleasant customers and bosses. So we equate not working hard with being less stressed and more healthy which backfires too, because this means we don’t exercise.
Crowding students into huge schools is a great source of stress, and I suppose if they were preparing us to live in an over-crowded society, they succeeded. On the other hand, the rich enjoy a much less crowded life experience from childhood through to old age. Their children attend much less crowded private schools. They may have a condo in a big, over-crowded city, but they can escape on the weekends to a house by the beach or in the countryside. Instead of playing basketball in a crowded urban park, they play golf with wide-open landscape. Instead of crowded like cattle into economy class on airplanes, they enjoy roomier First Class or private jets.
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Hidden in the book and not really expounded upon is an incredible finding. “One study followed more than 12,000 Danish adoptees and found that mortality in their forties depended on the social class of their biological father, but not their adoptive father.” While this doesn’t totally solve the nature versus nurture question, it does point to the incredible power of epigenetics. There is no other explanation for this. If you come from a poor family, and you’re adopted into a rich family, you don’t suddenly acquire the same health as the adopted family. The suffering of your parents and their parents and grandparents undermine your health no matter how well you were fed or treated by your affluent adopted family. In essence, you can be screwed even before you take your first breath of air. The demons that chase us may in fact be the demons that chased your parents, your grandparents, and your great grandparents.
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The book brings up a really good comparison between exhilaration and fear and how one leads to enhanced performance while one leads to decreased performance and damage control. Someone who is excited and exhilarated has dilation of peripheral blood vessels and the heart works more efficiently. When you have prey within grasp, you get a jolt of adrenaline to close the distance and go in for the kill. However, when you are fearful, you are acting like the prey. In this case, peripheral blood vessels constrict and “…our heart beats less efficiently, so less blood is being pumped around the body. This serves to minimize blood loss if we are caught and injured. But it impairs our performance and strains the cardiovascular system, because the heart is forced to work harder to push blood around the body. In addition, there’s a surge of the stress hormone cortisol, as the immune system prepares for injury and infection.”
This is the logic behind Muhammad Ali and his mind games. In some instances, he knew that his opponent was stronger physically. If he undermined his opponent’s confidence and triggered his anger, he could get them into a fearful response to the match instead of an excited or exhilarated response. Anger is an expression of fear. By going after their egos, he was not only making them angry but also fearful of having their egos damaged. This would not motivate them to be stronger but rather trick their bodies into thinking about damage control rather than closing the distance on prey. If they viewed Ali was threatening to their egos with his bombastic insults and self-aggrandization, instead of viewing him as prey, they would view themselves as prey and Ali as the dangerous predator. It was genius. Arguably when Ali messed with Foreman’s mind, he forced him to quit boxing and find god. Foreman likely always considered himself the apex predator and was shocked when Ali made him feel like his prey.
All our lives, we’ve been tricked into believing that we are prey, that we ought to be fearful of everything in life, and as such, our stress levels are through the roof. When we are children, we are taught that school can destroy our lives. If we don’t get good grades, we will be forever relegated to low-skill, low-pay jobs. Our lives are ruined. The second we step on to the school campus, our heart rate increases, cortisol floods our system, and we brace ourselves for attack and injury. We are constantly reminded by quiz scores that we can destroy our lives forever at school. Instead, we should be viewing school as an exciting experience full of challenges and opportunities. What will we learn next? Whom will I befriend next? Instead, we’re fearful of the next bully, the next failed quiz, the next forgotten deadline, the next bad grade, etc. I remember how excited I was to enter middle school which seemed like a fantasy world with personal lockers and a huge building and sporting opportunities. It didn’t take long for me to start disliking middle school, the overcrowding, the bullies, the uncaring teachers, the exams, and the grades.
At work, it’s the same deal. We are given performance evaluations not to measure and improve our performance but like grades, we are judged and evaluated to instill a sense of fear in us. We are the prey not the predators. Our supervisor is the predator. We must be fearful of them or else they can punish us or withhold benefits like promotion. Just like in life, we are servants to a master, and the supervisor-employee relationship is a reminder of this. The fact that we all live in fear of losing our jobs, not getting good grades, not getting a promotion, not being liked by our boss is all an indication that someone else has established dominance over us, and we have implicitly consented to this arrangement by playing their game and living in fear.
The fact that most Americans are unhealthy is indicative of both the fact that we have been trained from an early age to obey (and we will not eat better and exercise unless a master comes along and tells us to) and that we live in perpetual fear of failure and judgment. This double whammy causes us to eat junk food and not exercise, to assuage our perpetual state of fear with high-carb foods that turn into sugar and sugary foods. Stress rewires our brains to make us more susceptible to addiction. If food isn’t our drug of choice, it’s binging on social media, video games, shopping, alcohol, or drugs. Or just as bad, it’s being a workaholic. If we lived in an egalitarian society, we wouldn’t be living in a perpetual state of fear. We would all be predators enjoying the excitement and exhilaration of life and all its opportunities and challenges. We would all be hunters or gatherers instead of the hunted or domesticated. We would consider hard work and exercise the solution to stress and fear instead of recreation, eating, addiction, and distraction.
If we have a master-servant relationship, a hunter-hunted relationship, we need bullies to remind us that we should be living in a perpetual state of fear. We need bullies in school. This is why bullies are not all shipped off to military or disciplinary schools. We need violent criminals and sexual predators. If there aren’t enough of them in society, we create them in prisons by mixing in the nonviolent criminals with the violent criminals. This is why we allow prisoners to beat, sexually assault, and kill other prisoners as well as lift weights. We need terrorists to terrorize us. In addition to the oil, this is why we support the Saudis who support terrorist groups who hate the US. We need wars and global conflict. We are not free, independent citizens enjoying the plethora of opportunities and challenges in life. Rather, we are domesticated servants who must be constantly reminded that we are servants.
The genius is that we never directly see our masters, and they never discipline us. They use intermediaries: henchmen, hired agents, terrorists, criminals, school bullies, and supervisor bullies. In fact, when Japan occupied Korea, they used Koreans to bully and terrorize other Koreans, and the Korean henchmen were usually worse than the Japanese masters. The more money we give government, we don’t get rid of their henchmen, terrorists, criminals, and bullies. Quite the opposite, the more money we give them, the more they can pay their henchmen, and the more they can indirectly support and fund terrorists, and the more violent criminals they can create by expanding their prisons and increasing law enforcement personnel and presence in poor communities. It’s almost as if our masters whip us and in voting for another Democrat or Republican and paying more taxes we reply, “Thank you master, may I have another?”
In fact, you could even call it Stockholm Syndrome. We can’t get rid of government which constantly harasses and threatens us and spies on us, so instead, we try to placate and befriend government to avoid the harshest treatment. Of course, many people know that to avoid government’s wrath you simply jump to a higher income bracket which leads you to paying more taxes. It’s a pay-for-protection racket. If you’re making minimum wage and not paying much in taxes, you get treated the worst and harassed and bullied the most. When you send your kids to private school, not only are you paying for better education, but you’re also paying for the privilege of protecting your kids from public school bullies and more apathetic, bullying teachers as well. The difference is most marked in sports where public school coaches overly rely on yelling and threats of punishment whereas private school coaches are more supportive and laid back.
In both physical and mental tests, we perform better if we see them as challenges and opportunities instead of threats. So you might argue, why wouldn’t our schools and society want us to perform better? We would become harder workers and more productive. Wouldn’t that make their businesses more profitable? You miss the point completely. In addition to being better performers, we inevitably become smarter, wiser, less gullible, less fearful, and less obedient. Perhaps at first, you would experience a boost in productivity, but then something strange would evolve. You would then see workers demanding more. They would demand more autonomy, less restrictions, less supervision, more trust, more compensation, and better working conditions.
If the job requires little skill, the choice is clear. You prefer someone who performs at a lower level but is significantly more obedient and passive. Sure they make mistakes and aren’t as fast, but the person who’s superefficient and is a high performer, you simply don’t want the cost of them complaining to other workers, organizing them, and then demanding better working conditions and benefits. This is one reason why employers don’t like overqualified applicants. Someone who is college-educated will invariably cause more problems in low-paying jobs. It’s just not worth their added boost to productivity.
It’s a shock that happens to a lot of high-performance students when they enter the work world. They may well have enjoyed school and viewed it more as a challenge. Once they enter the work world, their high performance gets them nothing. They are viewed with suspicion and fear. Their supervisor is thinking that they will either become disobedient and uncontrollable or they think the person will simply take their job or surpass them. Either way, the supervisor cuts them down with the performance evaluation downgrading them in subjective categories like leadership, teamwork, communication, professionalism, and problem solving. In reality, the categories should be called: obedience, conformity, passivity, servitude, submissiveness, unassertiveness, and obsequiousness. Imagine that, a boss raving that his best employee scores highly in submissiveness and servitude. Of course, this would be way too obvious.
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