Healthy (as) Reason

I still vividly remember how my grandmother, while I was an uninterested little girl running after butterflies in the village yard, talked to me about the future.

One day, people will take one, single pill (I suspect it will be outrageously expensive!) that will replace all those wonderful tastes and smells of live food. Which used to be called just food. Today, organic. Even new! She also told me how people would walk down the street talking to themselves (OK, maybe she meant collective mental craziness. She wouldn’t be far off). The point is that she was right. She saw how alienated we would become from each other and from ourselves just 30 years later. And from little Nora. Setting aside all that wonderful humanitarian engagement around her experimental treatment. The thing is that we live in a society where it is becoming normal that if you don’t have money – you die! We accept this as a normal mantra.

In America, dehumanization is a long-finished process. Medicine there is already dead. There is only science. The one that generates money.
The case of the unfortunate stevia and the even more unfortunate sweet potato (I won’t go into how journalists turned out to be hasty imbeciles who can’t read) shows how absurd we have become as a global society. It is no longer a matter of whether this or that stevia is banned, this or that form of sweet potato. The issue is the amount of bureaucratic idiocy we are willing to swallow. And that which serves only one thing. You know which one. For our health, for which, supposedly, all those numerous analyses are done, they couldn’t care less. Stevia has long been stuck in the throat of the pharmaceutical and ‘food’ industries that are based on artificial sweeteners. The ones that give us a nice gift – illness. And please, what exactly does ‘new’ food mean? The kind that EU bureaucratic cockroaches have heard of for the first time?

And that’s not all! Several American states have banned individuals from collecting rainwater. In the Netherlands, you are not allowed to plant, say, tomatoes on your balcony. Australia and New Zealand, based on the number of bans that connect individuals and ‘food production’ in the same sentence, have long gone off the deep end. When did this become normal? When did it become normal to panic and distance ourselves from nature with which we share the same DNA? When did it become normal that I buy unadulterated, unprocessed, fragrant milk secretly under the counter as if my neighbor and I are concocting a plan to personally and directly eliminate Barroso himself? The internet is full of claims that the dairy industry starts with one liter of milk and makes two. I knew that. But I didn’t know that the one that has expired is supposedly returned for pasteurized processing, then back on the shelf. And so it is, again supposedly, rotated 5-6 times. Only then does the so-called milk turn into yogurt. And into all sorts of things. Supposedly, you can somehow read at the bottom of the bottle how many times it has been rotated. How much does the industry pay farmers for a liter?
I don’t care if someone wants to eat, drink, smell…exclusively industry.

And believes that it is the epitome of rosy health. It is a matter of choice. That is exactly what I want. The possibility of choice. Without any institution or corporation insulting my common sense. For those who are convinced that we have no choice – GDP, you see, depends on competitiveness, industry, consumption, resource expenditure – here are a few sentences. Years before the crisis, powerless to convince my own children that frantic consumption is not the meaning of life, I sought someone to confirm that I had not gone mad. Because I seek meaning. Balance. A human at the center of the economy. Humanity. I stumbled upon Manfred Max-Neef, a Chilean economist who, in a single second of encountering human misery, realized that his economic doctorate had nothing smart to say to that misery. It was the beginning of his ‘principles of barefoot economics’. The Unmasking Economics, a book he wrote together with the late physicist Philip Smith, shows that neoliberalism can be dismantled and transformed into an economy with a human face. Eckhart Tolle notes this: ‘Unrestrained craving for an ever-increasing number of things, for infinite growth, is a disorder and a disease. It is the same disorder that manifests in cancerous cells whose only goal is their own multiplication, completely unaware that by destroying the organism of which they are a part, they lead to their own destruction. Some economists are so obsessed with the idea of growth that they cannot free themselves from that word, even calling recession a period of negative growth. The collective selfish mind is the most dangerous being that has ever inhabited this planet. What do you think could happen to this planet if human consciousness remained the same as it has been?’
Defenders of the status quo, who seek an exit within a powerless and extremely ruthless model, I would only ask one thing: where and when did we sow common sense and turn it into a cold economic ‘science’?