To live a simple life

I’m at the internet café again. Perhaps I’ll get connected at home soon. So I am going to write something fast. I will try to express something before my time runs out! (I mean before the time I have paid for runs out, not my life, though that applies too.)

There have been some news items lately in the UK about research studies which predict that in the next 20 or 40 years half the population will be obese. The second of these studies explained that it is not our fault: evolution cannot help us adapt quickly enough to new living conditions – in which junk food is cheap and we don’t need to do a lot of physical work to survive; and children don’t walk to school and their parents are scared to let them out to play and they sit indoors playing on computers or video games.

It’s a familiar story and not one which usually inspires me to any reaction, but I saw that there was a new element: it was expected that government must do something to solve the problem on behalf of the people. There is a context to this: in the UK the Health Service is free and so the Government cannot afford the cost of obesity and its effects on health. Accordingly they add even more legislation, further reducing individual freedom and responsibility. I don’t argue with this. I don’t believe in “the law of the jungle” if it means that the rich can become powerful and the powerful can become rich. I always identify myself with the wretched of the earth.

But—this is the crux— I have trust in the natural man and woman. I don’t think governments need to tell us what to eat, how to bring up our children and how to keep ourselves safe. Governments should not insist on the labelling of food but stop the manipulation of ideas which makes people eat disgusting things like processed foods, which no self-respecting savage from the jungle would touch.

I shall continue to practise rather than preach. I want to demonstrate in the laboratory of my own life that it is possible to follow instinct and live healthy and sane and harmless.

The problem with being ordinary is to accept the given values of your community. The report into obesity concluded that the people who got fat were simply going along with the crowd, practising “normal” human behaviour, including being influenced by TV advertisements, doing what their neighbours do and enjoying the fruits of their affluence by riding in four-wheeled carriages instead of walking, just as a rich man would have done in past centuries.

I don’t argue with their findings. I just think it is terrible if there are more rules and if we get even further from instinct.

In me it is easy because I am practised in not following the crowd. K thinks I behave differently on purpose. It is true I question authority, I despise the crowd. But I greatly respect the ordinary man woman and child and their innate wisdom.

What we call civilisation is dangerously near collapse, on several fronts. Nature wants to straighten things out. Global warming is dangerous for civilisation but it would be good for nature if the oil runs out and we have to live locally on local resources and ditch much of our energy-dependent technology.

I just want to live simply in my neighbourhood.

This was an experiment in trying to express myself without premeditation in a few minutes. Bear with me. The time is running out!

17 thoughts:

Sophia
Hi Vincent, Your stream-of-consciousness experiment was successful! This was a very interesting post to me, as I have lately been thinking about evolution (again). I never thought about what could happen to evolution if everyone became obese. Who knows, maybe many thousands of years from now, our kind will have evolved into having even more metabolism than we have now in order to burn off the extra calories we’ve been getting. We’ve been doing so wonderfully with adaptation all this time, after all! This was a very thought producing post. Have an excellent weekend!

Jim
So they want, (they being whoever), the govt to take care of this, but the govt is about to be (if they have their way), replaced by Global Corporate Structures which will replace Nationalistic understanding and allegiances and ties, and they will be EVEN MORE concerned with ‘economy’ as in consumerism, and they will be even less concerned with this easily replaced resource called ‘people’ and ‘workers’ and so forget help about this problem, there will be none coming? I am not sure about this, there is much (thankfully) opposition to this ‘in-process’ change. Sophia is right, you did a great job here, fast, very fine post in your very fine manner Vincent.

Davo
Thank you, Vincent .. have been dangerously close to sanity collapse .. but yup, this post restores my faith in .. [the next chapter] ..

Vincent
Thanks for comments Sophia, Jim & Davo. I’ve been writing a more elaborate post at home but it seems to say much the same as what I have already written.My internet supplier has not even started to process my order apparently due to a “database problem” so it could be weeks till I get a home connection. I shall assume this deprivation to be a divine gift, separating me from an addiction and thus allowing change to happen. Blessings to us all, Vincent.

Kaushik
Vincent: This post is so different from the others but I enjoyed it nevertheless. When I landed at JFK I was so disappointed to see so many obese woman going around. It was a big let down from my visit to Scandinavia where woman have such strong legs and so great structures. And now after 2 months I know with a diet of Pizza, Coke and Fries cannot get any better. As for government regulation I don’t think it is feasible in any way. A skull face has become mandatory in India on cigarette smoking but unfortunately smoking is on the rise. But you touch upon 3 of my most interesting things: 1) Health in context of our changed life 2) Industrialization’s impact on Sustainability 3) Evolution

Kathy
I enjoyed your post! I loved what you said here: “But I greatly respect the ordinary man woman and child and their innate wisdom”. beautiful

Vincent
thanks Kaushik & Kathy for comments on different aspects! today I am back in the café but not in the mood to write a post, just read,,,

Paul
I know what you mean. I have more trust in the ordinary person than in government too – or business. I guess the problem is, you have to organize people into big groups to accomplish certain kinds of tasks and somehow the people who rise to leadership positions in big groups often seem to be not so great, to say the least. Maybe it’s the old saying about power corrupts…

Jim
I too, just to add a few words to these comments, want to simply live and get along in my neighborhood. But see, things have changed in the USA, now a neighborhood is a marketable product, and it and its’ ingredients has to be ‘shaped’ and molded into a saleable ‘look’ and ‘odor’. And the judge of this product, the manipulators of the markets are of one mind, and sterility is the outcome, and so, lost is the ability to simply exist in simplicity. Tragic, and I hope it bites its’ dust, before it expands to enclothe the globe, this idea I mean, this evil blight of individuality and originality and freedom in diversity. Sorry but I am still fuming.

benny
Hello Vincent, I remember reading a recent news item that said,’ obesity is socially contagious.’ More than nature, nurture seems to be at the root of the problem.benny

Vincent
Paul: “you have to organize people into big groups to accomplish certain kinds of tasks”. That’s true but the problems are caused not “when you have to organise people” e.g. after a natural disaster but when you manipulate people all the time using their own weakness to do so. Were I dictator, I would ban junk food. But even as I say it, I know that in doing so, I would be attacking “prosperity” itself, because it comes from “big business” and junk food is the natural output of big business.

Vincent
“As for government regulation I don’t think it is feasible in any way. A skull face has become mandatory in India on cigarette smoking but unfortunately smoking is on the rise”. Yes, Kaushik – it’s too late because when the cigarette manufacturers began to have trouble in USA, Europe etc they targeted Asia and of course they would do anything to stay in business.

Vincent
Kathy: thanks. But against the innate wisdom of humans is our naive innocence which thinks that (as in the parable of Jesus) a loving father will not give a scorpion if we ask for a fish, a stone if we ask for bread. We believe in the essential goodness of others and when the advertisements declare they have our interests at heart and arouse our sentimentality, then our common sense

Vincent
Oh Jim, leave the USA! it is not for sensitive souls like you any more. It is doomed to destruction, as you are feeling and declaring in your Jeremiads. Come here, to this town, be my guest, see how this neighbourhood is not being marketed. It is almost like the fruit tree whose fruits nobody bothers to pick up—an obscenity frequently occurring here. Apples fall from trees and nobody wants them, they go to the supermarket instead. It makes me mad!

Vincent
Benny, “socially contagious” is a powerful idea, and it would be very easy for an old man to decry all the contagions rife today. Obesity itself wasn’t even my original point, but the nurturing by government which does more to undermine parenthood than has already been done. But parents have already abdicated parenting to television and other “cultural” influences. So government steps in and proposes parenting classes and cookery classes (which it foolishly banned a few years ago). It all makes me want to go and find my roots in the great Australian outback, where the Aborigines used to wander with their sticks to bang and hollow sticks to blow through, and chant their Dream Time lore; making ancient music and painting their bodies with variously coloured ochre. But they were the most vulnerable of all to the contagion of civilisation.

ghetufool
sometimes, i also think what if oil runs out suddenly. wouldn’t that be great? back to basics. but i am risking my life being labelled as an anarchist.

Vincent
Yes, Ghetufool, I am thinking that frequently because the ugliness of what the oil has produced—the cars, the greed, the expectations, the erosion of Nature—stares me in the face daily. We are living in a a society which cannot distinguish catastrophe from blessing.

To live a simple life

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