Healthy people

Remaining healthy is difficult only insofar as an environment is unhealthy. Otherwise, remaining healthy is the most natural state. If one’s environment is unhealthy then remaining healthy is a great challenge. If you were suddenly transported to Mars you would die, as the Martian environment is not conducive to human health. As it stands, our environment, both physical and mental, is unhealthy. The fundamental problem is that too many people are basing right & wrong upon human opinion, and not enough people are basing right & wrong upon health. And so we are left with yet another decision. Our ability to reason is being summoned once again. We must decide to either base our notions of right & wrong upon the rigid human opinion of good & evil, or upon the natural dictation of health. Remember: anybody can be “of the opinion,” because volition is the human trump card. It trumps even reason. But, and here’s the rub, only a person whose opinion is in accord with their environment (that is, with nature and the cosmos) will be correct and thereby justified in their opinion. Like Carl Jung wrote, “The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” It is our responsibility to make the right decision. And the “right decision” is dictated by nature at some level. We just have to pinpoint this “level” and then use the faculty of reason to make sense out of it.

The problem we face as a species (and as a world) is simple: not enough healthy, reasonable people, and too many unhealthy, unreasonable people. It really is that simple, albeit deceivingly so. Like Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And here we are. But just because we are surrounded by unhealthy idiots doesn’t get us off the hook. We are still responsible for our reason and our health. We are still responsible for our power. And just because we are outnumbered by people who are choosing to be unhealthy rather than healthy, choosing to be unreasonable rather than reasonable, it does not get us off the hook for doing what is right: which is being reasonable and healthy.

I paraphrase Camus here, “The only way to deal with an unhealthy world is to become so absolutely healthy that your very existence is an act of rebellion (I replaced the word ‘unfree’ with ‘unhealthy’ and ‘free’ with ‘healthy,’ but you get the gist).” Now enter the Virtue of Dissent. When one’s environment is unhealthy, as ours has become, dissent becomes a virtue. Both our physical environment (cosmos) and our mental environment (psyche) have become extremely unhealthy. Indeed, they have become battlefields of armored egoism. We are literally tripping over our weaponry. We are running on dead blueprints. The propped-up gods of Money and Greed are fat and bloated with affluence. The earth lies ruined and toxic all around us because of shortsightedness and narrow-mindedness. We have alienated ourselves from the vitality of nature. The primordial umbilical cord has been severed, and globalization has produced a cancerous homogenizing effect. Diversity, once a praised aspect of the interconnectedness of nature, has become blasphemy according to those of unhealthy and ill-reason. The muck and mire in which we are immersed is akin to slow-boiled water, and we’re the frogs. What’s the solution? How do we get out without drowning, or worse, being slowly cooked to death? Arundhati Roy said it best, “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

It’s not that we need be rebellious just for the principle of the thing; it’s that we need to be rebellious in order to evolve as a species. It really is that critical. As I’ve mentioned before, we'll reap no evolution if we can't sow a little revolution. There has never been a greater need for whistle-blowers than right now. There has never been a greater need for people whose faculty of reason has not failed them to step up. Indeed, in an unreasonable world the reasonable person becomes a dissenter by default. And when the person of reason is courageous enough to call-out people of ill-reason, that person becomes a whistle-blower by default. Like John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

If a governing institution becomes corrupt, as powerful institutions are prone, then the highest calling for a person of reason, thereby governed, is to act as dissenter and whistle-blower. No amount of power can defeat truth. If an entity of power claims that collateral damage (otherwise known as innocent civilians) is a necessary evil of war, then that unreasonable entity must be called out by people of reason, by people who will be considered whistle-blowers. Sure, it’s risky. But acts of courage always are. The virtue of dissent is not for the meek and mild. The capacity needed to burden the vicissitudes and handle the heat, is great. But never has there been a greater need for people of this particular capacity. “In order to disobey one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin” wrote Erich Fromm. “But courage is not enough. The capacity for courage depends on a person's state of development. Only if a person has emerged from mother's lap and father's commands, only if he has emerged as a fully developed individual and thus has acquired the ability to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say “no” to power, to disobey.”