This hegemonic idea of wellness has, however, zero intellectual substance. Once upon a time, people who spoke Latin used to say “mens sana in corpore sano”, which meant at least that a healthy mind was as important as a healthy body, and sometimes that the whole point of having a healthy body was to have a healthy mind. But we live in the age, instead, of the official promotion of “mindfulness”, the aim of which is to calm the mind to a state of bovine acceptance, where nary a thought will trouble it. The modern idea of wellness is opposed to deep thinking. Instead it encourages us all to become happily stupid athletes of capitalist productivity. “Our concern,” the authors explain in general, “is how wellness has become an ideology.” And this is particularly revealing in “the prevailing attitudes towards those who fail to look after their bodies. These people are demonised as lazy, feeble or weak-willed. They are seen as obscene deviants, unlawfully and unabashedly enjoying what every sensible person should resist.” The common answer in our day is all too revealing: the poor and degenerate don’t deserve decent housing or a basic income; they just need to be taught how to cook. the pressure to be well operates as a moralising command and obliterates political engagement. The body, for adherents of wellness, becomes the only “truth system”, and the withdrawal into it leads to “passive nihilism”. If we are all obsessed with being well individually, the book warns, we will not be well together. This. OH THIS.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:50:10 +0000
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