#17 - Weaponized Health
Supposedly, we’re the most technologically advanced civilization in history, and yet we’re more confused about health than ever before.
I think much of the uncertainty stems from a war between various factions of dogmatic thinking - mostly online.
But instead of a good/bad face-off between Nazis and Allied forces, it’s more like 8 sided chess with each team making a claim to truth. (I’m sure there’s more…)
You’ve got the silicon tech enthusiasts who want to bio-hack their way to immortality.
Then there is the paleo-ancestral tribe who think that plastic is Satan incarnate.
There is the all-meat faction who think that plants are trying to kill you.
And the all-plant team who rank order dinner morality by how cute the animal face is.
You have the hard-nosed pragmatists waiting for a “Study” to prove the obvious.
And the devout spiritualists who waver between wishful thinking and sheer ignorance.
And the woke SJW’s fighting the racist fascists for dominance in an un-winnable war of moral grandstanding monopolized by corporations and political parties.
Then you have regular people that sit somewhere in the middle of each of these dichotomies, with a slight lean to one side or the other.
These ideologies function like a cancer consuming the host.
They’re incredibly contagious and spread through memes - pieces of truth that can be manipulated to support any conclusion based on the context.
Each ideology is fighting for attention. A battlefield that’s fought by making claims about health. Of the body. Of the planet. Of the soul.
All arguments boil down to “this is bad for you because it’s a sin against the ideal”.
The loudest voices are individuals totally possessed by the ideology.
There is no thought, no question, no hesitation. They know the “truth”.
They use the soap box of social media to shared flavored information about health that creates confusion about what should otherwise be simple questions.
This is weaponized health.
Pieces of truth lobbed as grenades at the “enemy” from echo-chamber bunkers.
But the only victims killed by the shrapnel of confusion are regular people.
Innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to ask what seemed like straightforward questions about how to live.
They are eaten alive by the war machine.
If they’re not scared away by the violence, back to their creature comforts, they often become unwittingly enlisted into one of the armies.
A fresh soldier full of fervent belief about the new “truth” they’ve uncovered.
And so the war rages on.
The only way out is to become an independent thinker. Question everything.
Find the truth in every argument but accept no one side as complete.
You are an N of 1. Your life is an experiment to try different things and report back to the collective with your findings.
So long as you remember that what works for you isn’t necessarily a prescription for universal salvation, you will help slowly snuff out the fire of this war.
It’s messy and uncertain, but it’s the only way to not become another casualty on the battlefield of weaponized health.