How Not to Feel Better
Many people still labor under the belief that the best way to make one feel better, is to make one feel worse -- and so while nothing has changed, the fact that one felt terrible before, makes one feel much better afterwards. That is the effect that toxic people have on us -- when consulting them for advice on how to feel better. They inform us of all the things that could be worse -- and then convince us, that the worst possibilities are now the actual realities.
Not only do many of these people work in the “health” fields but particularly in the many fields of information propagation -- convincing us we absolutely need them, creating a co-dependency and lifetime demand for their services -- which henceforth, must never be questioned, under penalty of death. In some societies and cultures, such shamans (witch doctors) even feel they have the right to personally execute the death sentence themselves for this disobedience. In more civilized societies, the temptation to insist on such absolute control over the lives of others, some also cannot resist.
But surely, a measure of health and well-being for every individual, should be the decrease in the need for others to live a truly independent life -- this absence of compulsion, obsession, obligation and coercion, the feeling that one should be doing any other than they are doing, for the sake of another.
However, in reading much of the health literature, what is overwhelming and distasteful is this message that everything one is doing is wrong, and in fact, at the highest level of proficiency and achievement, so much more could be done. So despite the fact that one may be the “strongest man in the world,” or the “best built person on the planet,” what is often striking in knowing such individuals is that overwhelming sense of increasing inadequacy that drives them to lose all perspective on these things. There are many advisers around them who will only be too glad to accommodate their sense of failure that they did not come out ahead, each and every time -- just as it is with everybody else.
Such advisers will demand that the President of the United States, must have absolutely perfect hindsight, foresight, and insight -- in order to live up to the expectations they have for him, in determining these expectations for everybody else as well. Their education and training consists entirely of convincing everybody else that that is their agreed upon role for themselves -- as the “official” guardians of all that is “correct” in this world. Questioning their authority, is not even to be thought.
That is their exclusive First Amendment Right -- to control all the opinions of everybody else. It says it right there, just after the Tenth Commandment. Others may go along, thinking those know something they don’t -- having been early convinced that such person’s ability to intimidate all others is definitive proof of their infallibility.
Health practitioners and advisers who pass themselves off as God, should rightfully be liable for misrepresenting their competence and expertise.
posted by Mike Hu @ 6:52 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
One of the more disturbing trend s among a lot of communication professionals, is this perceived right they think they have to control and manipulate the thinking of everybody else in society. Marketing and promotion have become at the extremes, outright deceit and manipulation -- of which the lines have long ago been totally trampled.
This kind of authoritarianism formerly seen among a few professions and professionals, have now been adopted by all those who think they can get away with it and pull it off. The first line of defense used to be the mainstream media, which has become a poor defense because they are likely to be the most gullible and susceptible to these techniques of manipulation -- because they are uniformly indoctrinated. There is no diversity of perspective in the professional schools that provides the failsafe in having different assumptions, experiences, insights and perspectives. Therefore, what fools one, will fool all.
And that is why the Internet has become a superior sieve for information; where people are coming from, is likely to be from many differing backgrounds through which real information has to run the gauntlet. It is way more demanding and brutal than a small jury of one’s similarly educated peers and fellows. Presumptuous people immediately find the reception humiliating; the totality of consciousness does not care who one thinks he is, or those in his self-selected pecking order agree he is. The jury is universal knowledge and experience. And because of having to withstand the greater rigor of that challenge, is likely to have greater validity -- verifiable to everyone, regardless of their narrow field of expertise, and their certified right to challenge.
Discovering truth is the universal experience in every field -- no matter what the subject. It is not that every field and discipline has entirely different rules for validating information. We owe that realization to the revolution in information processing -- that no matter how complex the inquiry, every question boils down to the simple one of, “Is this true or false?”, until it no longer needs to be asked. The manipulators are hoping you will never ask, and inquire very deeply -- and that you will simply trust them, because they know better.
So the first thing one should recognize right off is that those who have nothing more to recommend them than their certificates and credentials, don’t have much going for them -- but are very impressive to people who are phonies also. Authentic people validate themselves in everything they do -- in their manner, in their method; everything adds up and validates their being -- and not that they have very secret, specialized knowledge that contradicts everything else one has learned about the world. In fact, it is very likely that the expertise of these “certified” people, is to fool people into thinking they have an expertise that is not self-evident and obvious.
A lot of people think that just because they have a certificate in education (writing, speaking, journalism, social work, exercise, private investigation, etc.), is enough to make them a good teacher -- or any kind of teacher at all. Particularly in the 1970s, there was the phenomenon of credential inflation -- whereby refuse workers became sanitation engineers, and instructors became education professionals. Everybody was a professional certified by whatever group of associates thought to monopolize that field of economic activity first.
In such a time, certification as professional exercise instructors took flight -- making the much maligned physical education teacher, king of the hill reincarnated as exercise physiologists. Those most impressed were the cerebral types to whom physical activity was an alien world and foreign language. Much less impressed were the world champions of every sport who recognize only what a person can do as valid and validation -- and not what smart people claim they know.
However, there were a few beginning to make this connection -- between the mutually exclusive worlds of the physicality and the mentality. The basis of their claim was, as it has been for thousands of years, self-evident truth, and not the primacy of explanations and the pretensions of professional societies. They made one critical mistake in their organization, which has since been the fatal mistake of many other professional and trade organizations -- to eliminate and keep the best and the brightest out, as those beyond their control and who did not need them to be recognized as the premier authorities on such matters. These were people capable of walking into a room of similarly interested people and with their command of observation and insight, prove themselves momentarily as the leading authorities.
That occurs in every field of activity and interest. That’s really what sports is all about. Not explaining the game -- but playing the game, whether one could explain it or not. Quite often, the best at it are not even conscious of what they do that others do not -- because they’ve always done it that way, and thought everybody else could too. That’s all they’ve known -- and don’t know how to be any other way.
Most of the good coaches know that their first task is to pick out the world champion before anybody else does. The con-artist will try to convince a person who never will be, that if they just follow their instructions and commands, they can be anything they want to be. They prey on the wishful-thinking of those who think that is all there is and enough to make their wishes come true -- in an Age of Delusions and Illusions.
You seem to be the definitive site for refurbished treadmills -- which is going in the opposite direction I'm going, or most people hope to.
I think the kind of conditioning apparatus one uses, conditions their outlook on life and world view, and so it wouldn't be the treadmill -- of expending maximum energy to go nowhere. And besides, optimal conditioning should not be mindless repetition -- as might have been the prototype for conditioning oneself in the 20th century -- to work on an assembly-line.
Instead, the conditioning desired for the 21st century is to create stimulus that keeps one optimally challenged, and thus, growing throughout life. That requires brief but challenging moments with plenty of rest and recovery. The body grows and responds to "quality" and not "quantity" of experience.
That's why people deteriorate -- no matter how much they do. Because the secret is not "how much" they do that keeps them vital, adaptable and flexible,
but "how well" they do anything.
Writing is to be measured not by how many words one writes, but what is said with as few words and as well as possible. Movement is beneficial not because of the quantity of it but how well even the finest movement can be executed.
The emphasis in conditioning should be fine and not gross motor control -- because the fine implies the gross, but not vice-versa. In order for me to send a message to my fingers to move, I have to go through the shoulders, biceps, forearms -- to the tips. But if my focus is only on movement at the shoulders or at the heart even, I'm not sending out brain impulses beyond that focus.
Brain-nerve impulses are not transmitted by radio frequencies to the point of movement, but have to flow along the neuromuscular development of the human body. That's why the focus must be on theextremities rather than the heart -- and the treadmills only focus is the heart, which is meaningless as far as any indication of human expression and functioning in a meaningful way.
Lots of people only have heart function -- which is obviously not enough to define well-being.
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