the tyranny of "healthy"

[firecat]

Originally posted as a comment in this entry of the very thoughtful journal of keryx. Somewhat edited and expanded here.


keryx writes:

Is the way our culture beats people with the healthy stick really about [an entirely demented concept of] what's good for you? Or is it about conformity?

It's definitely about conformity, but even more than that, it's about control, and moral judgement of others.

Even though this is supposedly a scientific information age, people still feel on some level that being not healthy means you did something wrong and you're being punished for it.

Health is in fact mostly a matter of luck (chance, genes, environment). One can have some influence on one's health conditions through behavior and environment, but one cannot absolutely control them and one cannot pick which health problems one is going to have to deal with. But people desperately want to believe that their health is entirely in their control, and part of sustaining that myth is to look down on people who are farther away from the health norm than they are, and believe "they did it to themselves." The other part is to look at their own health status, largely influenced by chance, and believe "I made this, I am this healthy entirely because of my own choices."

People do the same sort of thing with poverty. Even though there are enormous social and economic forces keeping poor people poor and rich people rich, people look at poor people and want to believe "They're there because they're lazy." And people look at themselves, if they aren't poor, and want to believe "I am a self-made success through hard work and sacrifice."

Note: I see this has come out implying that everybody always thinks this way. I don't really think so. But I do think these are general trends and attitudes that are part of the social fabric, and everybody who is part of the social fabric is influenced in some way by these beliefs.

Comments

[snippy]

I'm with you on health. On ssm lately some people have been discussing bad things, and a couple of nasty ideas like getting sick is a message to slow down and take care of yourself, having chronic stuff means you're doing something wrong, or bad things that happen to you are karma, are getting tossed around without contradiction because "everyone knows it's true." I happen to believe most of my health problems are about how I was treated as a child (e.g., second hand smoke, inadequate nutrition, inadequate loving care, little dental or medical attention, lots of blaming me for what was going on) not what I've done for myself as an adult.

I'm less with you on poverty, perhaps because I'm one of the people who made it out and would like to take some credit for that. But I don't think of people as lazy--my mom was not lazy, not even the days we didn't eat. What I think is that they make bad choices, or just plain choices that I wouldn't make. And I think sometimes they don't have any good choices, and sometimes they don't know how to choose good over bad, but mostly they've been trained by society to choose bad for themselves--and that last issue we could actually address.

(None of this is to disagree with your main thesis, which is that most people look at other people in the most negatively judgmental way possible, while at the same time giving themselves all the benefit of the doubt and all the credit.)

[firecat]

I think people like you who make it out of poverty deserve a lot of credit because it's very difficult.

I also think that because it's very difficult, it's wrong to assume that people who don't make it out of poverty are making "bad choices." (As you mention.) They probably are making average choices rather than exceptional ones.

I also agree with what you say about society's training people to stay in poverty.

I think in part this happens because there's lots and lots of information pushed at people about "what you should do" to fix something -- and usually it's far more than you actually can do. But there is much less information about "how to prioritize." That's because teaching people how to prioritize involves teaching them how to think, and society doesn't want people to think, because then they'll stop conforming.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I'm not disagreeing with your thesis, but I'm curious who you are refering to when you point the accusatory finger at "society?"

[firecat]

There really isn't any "who." "Society" is a conglomeration of mainstream beliefs and pressures and realities. It's maintained via inertia and fear of change and the combined pressures of people who benefit from it in various ways, or think they do.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

With society being a rater nebulous target, do you have any suggestions for how to either manifest changes in those combined pressures or how to make the inertial mass work for, rather than, against change?

[firecat]

No.

Do you?

[snippy]

They probably are making average choices rather than exceptional ones.

Um, yeah. I know this intellectually but I haven't integrated it. Believing this fights with the "you are nobody special" thing my mom says in the back of my head.

And having lived through some of it, I can identify when people are piling up too much to do or in expectations, on someone who is struggling to survive, not even attempting to thrive yet.

I know that I wouldn't have had even the opportunity to make it out of poverty without the limited social welfare we had in the US when I was a child. I think upping the safety net to the point where more than just the exceptional people could make it out of poverty is possible.

theferret posted a day or so ago about going out for a luxurious, memorable meal, and advocated everyone doing it. But when people on food stamps want to have steak once a month, even if it means eating beans for two weeks, they're castigated by the people who think that kind of choice is what keeps people in poverty. That is not that kind of choice--that is the kind of choice made by people who have given up on getting out.

[firecat]

Interesting. I have no problem reconciling "I made exceptional choices" with "I am nobody special." "I am nobody special" is an axiom that remains true no matter what I do.

I wish the safety net were being improved rather than destroyed.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

You make persuasive points, but I want to offer one niggling (possible) disagreement. I Am Not A Health Professional, but I would say that getting sick can be related to any one or more of:

• Environmental conditions (exposure to contagious illness, toxin, or allergy trigger)
• Bad luck, either individual or familial (autoimmune conditions like arthritis, genetic conditions like Parkinson's)
• Anything which can lower one's resistance to infection, such as poor nutrition, insufficient rest, etc.
• Poor health habits like not washing hands
• Psychosomatic causes
• Other causes that I'm not thinking of at the moment.

[firecat]

It doesn't look to me like we are disagreeing. You can influence some of those things by making short-term and long-term behavior choices, but you can't influence others.

[snippy]

Most of those, however, are not negative moral judgments of the sick person. They might be areas to look at for prevention and treatment, but they are not reasons why the person deserved to get sick. (Washing hands, now, I'll give you that one--learned that the hard way.)

And the people who seem to be blaming the victim would count "bad luck" as karma, or a message of some kind.

A lot of that stuff, the individual has no control over. Like, second hand smoke when I was a child, which I believe led to my allergies and asthma. Moving a lot as a child (one year I lived in at least 6 different places and attended 4 different schools), which I believe contributed to my getting sick a lot even as an adult. Poor nutrition as a child, which I believe has affected my health as an adult in many ways, including that food represents safety to me in a very basic way--whenever anything hurts, I eat, because it always used to be actual hunger. Managing the effects of a past I had no control over takes up a lot of my current time and energy.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I want to apologize; I was trying to be, um, inoffensive, and succeeded in being unclear.

I wanted to take partial exception to a couple of nasty ideas like getting sick is a message to slow down and take care of yourself and make the argument that getting sick *can be* a message to slow down and take care of oneself. It isn't always, by any means, or even most often, and my intent in making that claim is not to make moral judgments but rather to suggest that all aspects of, forgive me for the newagism, wellness be addressed.

[firecat]

I guess how I'd put it is "overdoing it can contribute to getting sick" and "slowing down and being more mindful of what you're capable of can influence how fast you get better when you are sick, and/or how often you get sick."

I wouldn't say "getting sick is a message," because that implies there is a conscious entity outside yourself sending the message, and beyond that, that getting sick is a punishment for overdoing things or not taking care of yourself. Getting sick isn't a punishment from a conscious entity for something you did. Sometimes it is a partly a consequence of something you did.

One thing I struggle with these days is that I get sick when I exercise too heavily. Clearly I need to exercise more lightly -- but there's such a prevalent social message of "exercising gives you better health" that I feel like I'm not taking care of my health when I try to exercise at a level that doesn't make my health worse. Argh!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with the gist of what you're saying. I did notice what seemed to me to be an asymmetry in your position, though. On the one hand, you say you 'wouldn't say "getting sick is a message," because that implies there is a conscious entity outside yourself sending the message', but on the other hand, you say 'society doesn't want people to think', which also implies a conscious entity. I can see from your response to rmjwell that you don't actually attribute consciousness to society, but it occurred to me that using the metaphor could skew your perceptions somewhat and perhaps make the social pressures harder to deal with. I know I find it easier to set them aside if I construe them as [my reaction to] a conglomeration of unhelpful circumstances rather than as a collective, quasi-intentional entity making demands upon me.

[firecat]

Good point.

The two aren't entirely symmetrical: Although opinions I attribute to society aren't really opinions of a single conscious entity, social pressures are promoted and reinforced by conscious entities -- people and organizations that have specific goals. On the other hand, bacteria and viruses and immune cells and cancer cells also have "goals" (or perhaps "functions") in a sense, but they aren't conscious entities.

Still, it would be more accurate if I didn't speak of society as a single conscious entity. I believe it helps me free myself from some of the messages that aren't good for me if I do partly think of society that way, while remaining aware that it's a metaphor. But I'll have to consider whether that's really true.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, bacteria and viruses and immune cells and cancer cells also have "goals" (or perhaps "functions") in a sense, but they aren't conscious entities.

That's a good distinction, too.

I believe it helps me free myself from some of the messages that aren't good for me if I do partly think of society that way, while remaining aware that it's a metaphor. But I'll have to consider whether that's really true.

I know what you mean, I think - the metaphor somehow makes it easier to see what the overall tendency of all the aggregated pressures is, IME. The problem with it for me is that it can also all too easily lead me to fail to differentiate sufficiently between different contributing factors, and to view whole groups of people as Part of the Problem rather than seeing them as individuals.

[firecat]

I see the metaphor of "society" and the analysis of individual factors contributing to the whole as different tools. It's of course possible to overuse a tool or use it for the wrong purpose.

I think groups of people who share similar tendencies to create social pressure in particular directions are part of the problem. The people who have those tendencies are also individuals and need to be acknowledged as such. But I think in the US at any rate, there's an overemphasis on individualism at the expense of understanding how groups moving in particular directions create pressure. My attempts to create social change usually involve addressing people as individuals. But there are also ways of creating social change that involve acting on whole groups, and I think they are sometimes valid.