212. double punishment
Our collective narrative — the stories passed down through generations to help the next succeed — has become lost amid a rapidly advancing world. No longer can we agree on a path forward, as a result, our health suffers. All this stems from a profiteering medical system that seeks to “better” humanity by further disconnecting us from our natural past, and what gave us the strength and vitality to thrive up to this point, instead creating greater discord within our body.
We’ve been misled in thinking that there is no knowledge to be drawn from our past that can improve our health, when everything in life, and especially science, has been built upon the foundation that came before it. What works sticks, what doesn’t sloughs off. Now we are led to believe that the best way to capture health is NOT to look back to what gave us strength and vitality in the past, but to look forward to what science can manifest. That medicine has the power to save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. All the while we casually walk down the path of double punishment, losing who we are, along with the health we are trying to reclaim.
educated beyond our intellect
10,000 years ago we didn’t know the difference between our ass and a hole in a tree, and we certainly didn’t know anything about macronutrients, inflammation, cholesterol, ketones, supplements, and fasting was just something you did until you found your next meal. I’m assuming there were no diet fads other than stuffing your face when you find something to eat, which seems to be pretty popular again. AND YET, we were healthy enough to meander all the way to modern times where NOBODY can make any decisions without the guidance of a fitbit, calorie tracker, personal trainer, nutritionist, physic and a fucking magic 8 ball for when you can’t make up your mind.
Intuitively, I think we have lost something along the way. For example… all animals, except for humans, seem to inherently know when they need something nutritionally — just look at my fictional cat “Bootsy", the fluffy carnivore I adopted. He eats ONLY MEAT, except when he doesn’t. Why? Because there is some intuitive or instinctual mechanism that switches on when he needs to eat grass so that he can settle his stomach.
As humans we may be a little different. What we lack in intuitiveness, we gain through trial and error, which eventually becomes wisdom. If you stumble upon some purple berries you’ve never seen before and convince your caveman friend Gronk to eat some, then he dies, you enter that into the collective wisdom. DON’T EAT SCHNOZBERRIES. Same goes for sticking your head in a beehived, swimming with crocodiles, and playing in traffic. You only do it once. If you live, you never do it again. The result is 10,000 years of trial and error.
This brings us to modern times where, amid our ever-changing world, we have largely dismissed all our ancestral wisdom. Instead, we have come to rely on a medical system that seeks to advance health by disconnecting us from our natural past, all the while creating greater discord within our body’s. It has deceived us by saying that we are bound to a past that we know little about and linked to a future that is largely a mystery. That we are powerless. That it can save us from ourselves, if only we take this or cut that out. The double punishment is that in this deceptive process, we are losing who we are, along with the health we are tying to reclaim.
This line of thought, of dismissing ancestral wisdom, of reductionist thought, is nothing more than being educated beyond our intellect. We’ve developed a lot of fancy tools to quell a lot of fancy problems that wouldn’t have been necessary had we heeded the wisdom of our past.