The Health Care (Obesity) Problem

The flaw is the thinking that fitness is merely "quantity" of activity rather than "quality" of activity.

This is expressed as the moronic notion that simply burning more calories is all that is required to be fit -- rather than the insight that random, mindless activity will not result in a world-class fit population.

People's fitness has to be organized around a desire to improve -- and not just be active and busy -- wasting energy, time and money.

World class athletes are the opposite of the fitness profiles promoted by the fitness (sports medicine) industry in that they are notable for their efficiency and economy of movement -- rather than movement for movement's sake -- just to burn as many calories as they can with no real organizing principle or purpose in doing so. You can't be fit just for fitness's sake -- you have to want to improve at a specific activity (purpose), and not just go through the motions thinking that is enough.

That's true of any learning and activity -- it has to be meaningful, sustainable and orients the whole psyche for improvement -- rather than just treadmilling, and the innumerable activities and movements with no real world usefulness. Then activity and every other thing in life becomes arbitrary, random and meaningless -- a politically correct person's paradise in which outcomes are merely averaged.

Lost in these studies, is that some people are actually improving spectacularly -- often with little time, energy and effort to do so -- devoted to such activities in that conventional mode of thought. Obviously the old "progress through the miracle of brute force" approach taught by the physical educators and fitness professionals are an obvious and spectacular failure -- of which, like bad education, more is not the solution but the essence of the problem. Nor is throwing more money at the problem -- which is usually what these studies are all about.

There needs to be a fundamental rethinking of this process for success -- rather than the customary and predictable failures.

They mistake "health care" for "health," which are the inverse.

So we spend more on health care, and that health care (system) makes everybody worse -- just as we spend more on "education," and the students need -- more education.

Obviously that is not the right kind of education or health program(s) but institutionalizing the problems -- which predictably gets worse, until eventually there is some kind of epiphany that wakes people up that the present solution is the problem. But usually by then, there is an entrenched monopoly who wants nobody to offer any alternatives -- but their certain death spiral.

And that is the kind of society we've become, and the people manifest -- these obese people who don't care, can't tell any difference, and have been instructed to believe that nothing makes a difference, and they have no alternatives but to accept their fates as the next 911 victims.

And so we only see in the media these stories of people overwhelmed with their multiple difficulties of life -- and never any examples of people succeeding at anything. It's just become a dysfunctional bloodbath supporting more money and jobs for increasing dysfunctions, dependencies and codependencies as the American way of life.

And then we can look forward to 30 years of "life" on extraordinary support systems -- that ensure that our hearts keep on pumping even though nothing else works, and there are no further signs of consciousness -- as the "health care" ideal.

We need everybody to become "experts" (masters) of their own lives.

In the Age of Information, that becomes entirely possible.

What is the failure of these times, is the old way in which there are a few people who do all the thinking (and talking) for everybody else, which keeps the people uninformed and ignorant -- for the vested interests (experts).

That's the model that fails modern society -- when the trade associations serve their own self-interests above the interest of the general well-being -- which is to have an independent thinking, egalitarian society -- instead of the rule by the self-chosen experts (technocracy). That is the fulfillment of the democratic ideal -- and not that a few tell everybody else what they need to do.

Everybody can own their own lives -- as their ultimate expression of who they are, and what they know. Thinking for themselves should be the highest attainment and fulfillment of citizenship.