Essay: Why health and fitness?

Here’s a short essay I wrote earlier this year for Arktos.com, about why health and fitness are of vital political relevance today. More and more, I think that when people ask me “Why?” As for health and fitness, I’d just have to answer, “Why shouldn’t people’s health matter politically?” It seems perfectly obvious to me, and I’m sure it probably strikes you as well, but it’s unfortunately not clear to many people, especially among conservatives and right-wingers, who you’d think would intuitively understand. , the points I am about to make.

People ask me why they should care about health and fitness. What does the food we eat, the toxic chemicals we are exposed to, or the exercise we do – or don’t do – have to do with today’s politics? Isn’t the emphasis on health and fitness, at best, a distraction? Some even claim that I am a fed, a piper sent to turn the youth away from the real paths to victory, such as supporting Kanye West in his 2024 presidential run…

There are several ways to answer. For one thing, it often seems to be a certain type of person who asks these questions. But enough attractive and interesting people ask me that I can’t dismiss this skepticism just because of looks or IQ.

As a first response, then, I might say that our unparalleled disease has made ours the only society where health and fitness issues have become existential, where the costs of obesity and chronic disease are so enormous , the effects so debilitating, that they could genuinely destroy our society without decisive political intervention. And it’s true: the costs really are enormous and the effects really are absolutely debilitating. The estimated cost of obesity in the United States alone was $173 billion in 2019, according to the US CDC. With that money you could build 11 border walls between the US and Mexico.

In fact, however, it is not true that we are unique in this way. Health and fitness have been recognized throughout recorded history as a basic concern for the state, directly related to its survival. It was certainly so for the ancient Greeks, for whom there was no separation between mind and body of the kind we are so happy to accept, unthinkingly, today. “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools,” said the great historian Thucydides. Indeed, if a hierarchy existed, it was more likely to be matter over mind than mind over matter. As Pervert of the Bronze Age reminds us, the tombstone of the playwright Aeschylus remembered nothing of his works, but only the fact that he had fought at Marathon against the Persians.

A key distinction between citizens and slaves in ancient Greece was that slaves were forbidden to practice gymnastics, weightlifting, or wrestling. These were activities that developed what the Greeks called we steal, better translated as “spirit” or “vivaciousness” or “warm blood,” personal qualities that pushed men to excel and seek distinction. The exclusion of slaves from physical activity became a self-fulfilling prophecy. According to Aristotle, slaves were by nature incapable of self-discipline and reasoning, just like children, but it prevented them from exercising and developing their we steal it meant they would never have a chance to prove otherwise.

Timos it could be removed in other ways. Plato seems to have believed that diet, specifically vegetarianism, could do this as well. In the second book of the republic, Plato’s Socrates describes an ideal society of vegetarians that would not need elaborate laws, eugenic codes, or social classes of warriors and rulers to ensure that it functioned harmoniously. If you gave the common people a simple diet of bread, peas, beans, fruit, nuts, olive oil and cheese, a blessed fear would prevail. People would live a “peaceful and healthy life”, perfectly satisfied with their lot, and “keep the number of their families within their means”. Give them meat, though, and now you have a society “in a fever,” where we steal comes to the fore and suddenly more territory, greater social differentiation and new norms and customs are needed to keep things from falling apart.

(It’s worth noting that a vegetarian diet of the sort recommended by Plato’s Socrates would actually do we stealif for “I’m afraid” we mean “testosterone,” the hormone responsible for much of the behavior that makes men men and not women. Studies show that going on a vegetarian diet is the worst thing you can do as a man if you want to keep your hormones at optimal levels. A low-fat vegetarian diet, in particular, can reduce testosterone by more than a quarter. Men with low testosterone experience depression and anxiety, reduced libido, decreased muscle mass and hair loss, and in some cases may even grow breast tissue.)

What would the ancient Greeks think if they could see us today? They would see a high societywe steal men? Or would they see a society of men who, despite calling themselves free, are indistinguishable from slaves, incapable of self-discipline, of reason and, above all, of effective resistance to tyrannical rule?

Another thing he may soon be unable to reproduce. If current trends in sperm counts continue, by 2045 humanity as a species will be unable to reproduce by natural means. The average man will have a sperm count of zero: half of the men will produce no sperm at all, and the other half will produce so little that they may not produce any. This is not speculation: eminent reproductive health scholars have just extrapolated from the data we already have. Moreover, new data suggests that these trends have begun to accelerate since the turn of the millennium…

Among the main justifications for the massive replacement migration being forced upon us now, which will only intensify in the coming years and decades, is that Westerners simply cannot have enough babies. Of course, we know that prosperity leads to a decline in fertility – this happened to the Romans in their glory as surely as it has happened to us – but our current situation is also the result of our terrible health, especially obesity, and of our chronic. exposure to a wide range of hormone-disrupting chemicals such as BPA, phthalates and PFAS. A shocking recent study revealed, for example, that overweight boys grow up to have testicles 1.5 times smaller than those of men who were of normal weight in their youth, permanently damaging their reproductive health. Exposure to PFAS has been shown to increase a woman’s risk of miscarriage by up to 40%.

Here, then, we can surely see how sovereignty and health are today inseparable. Measures like Viktor Orban’s to increase the birth rate of native Hungarians are of course welcome, and should be emulated by all right-wing parties that come to power in the West. But social and legal incentives are doomed to failure if we don’t also solve the health crisis that makes us not only unwilling, but unable, to produce a new generation to carry forward the timeless ideals of our ancestors and win.