People ask why they should care about health and fitness. What bearing does the food we eat, the toxic chemicals we’re exposed to or the exercise we do – or don’t do – have on politics today? Isn’t the emphasis on health and fitness, at best, a distraction?
As a first answer, then, I might say that our unparalleled sickness has made ours the only society where issues of health and fitness have taken on an existential character – where the costs of obesity and chronic disease are so enormous, the effects so debilitating, that they could genuinely destroy our society without determined political intervention. And it’s true: the costs really are enormous, and the effects really are utterly debilitating. The estimated cost of obesity alone in the United States was $173 billion dollars in 2019, according to the US CDC. You could build 11 border walls between the US and Mexico with that money.
In actual fact, though, it isn’t true that we’re unique in this way. Health and fitness has been recognised throughout written history as a core concern for the state, pertaining directly to its very survival. It was certainly such for the ancient Greeks, for whom there existed no separation between mind and body of the sort we’re 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 done by fools,” said the great historian Thucydides. Indeed, if a hierarchy did exist, it was more likely to be matter over mind than mind over matter. As Bronze Age Pervert reminds us, the tombstone of the playwright Aeschylus recalled nothing about his plays, instead noting 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 practise gymnastics, weightlifting or wrestling. These were activities that developed what the Greeks called thymos, best translated as “spiritedness” or “vivacity” or “warm blood”, personal qualities that pushed men on to excel and seek distinction. The slaves’ disbarment 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 preventing them from exercising and developing their thymos meant they would never have the opportunity to demonstrate otherwise.
Thymos could be eliminated in other ways. Plato seems to have believed diet, specifically vegetarianism, could do it too. 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 it functioned harmoniously. If you gave the ordinary people a simple diet of bread, peas, beans, fruit, nuts, olive oil and cheese, a blessed fearfulness would prevail. The people would live a “peaceful and healthy life”, perfectly content with their lot, and “keep the number of their families within their means.” Give them meat, however, and now you have a society “in a fever”, where thymos comes to the fore and suddenly you need more territory, greater social differentiation and new rules and customs to keep things from falling apart.
(It’s worth noting that a vegetarian diet of the sort Plato’s Socrates recommends really would quash men’s thymos, if by “thymos” we mean “testosterone”, the hormone that is responsible for so much of the behaviour that makes men men and not women. Studies show that eating a vegetarian diet is about the worst thing you can do as a man if you want to maintain your hormones at optimal levels. A low-fat vegetarian diet, in particular, can reduce testosterone by over a quarter. Men with low testosterone suffer from depression and anxiety, reduced libido, decreased muscle mass and hair loss and may even, in some cases, grow breast tissue.)
What would the ancient Greeks think if they could see us today? Would they see a society of high-thymos men? Or would they see a society of men who, despite calling themselves free, are indistinguishable from slaves – incapable of self-discipline, reason and, most of all, effective resistance to tyrannical rule?
Something else we may very soon be incapable of is reproducing. If current trends in sperm counts continue, by 2045 mankind will, as a species, be unable to reproduce by natural means. The median man will have a sperm count of zero: half of all men will produce no sperm at all, and the other half will produce so few that they might as well produce none. This isn’t speculation: eminent scholars of reproductive health have just extrapolated from the data we already have. What’s more, new data suggest these trends have actually started to speed up since the turn of the millennium…
Among the principal justifications for the massive replacement migration now being forced on us, which will only intensify in the coming years and decades, is that Westerners just can’t produce enough babies. Of course, we know that prosperity brings with it decreased fertility – this happened to the Romans in their glory just as surely as it has happened to us – but our current predicament is also the result of our dreadful health, especially obesity, and our chronic exposure to a wide array of hormone-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates and PFAS. A shocking recent study revealed, for instance, that overweight boys grow up to have testicles that are 1.5x smaller than those of men who were a normal weight in their youth, permanently damaging their reproductive health. Exposure to PFAS has been shown to increase a woman’s risk of miscarrying by up to 40%.
Here, then, we can surely see how sovereignty and health are inseparable today. Measures like Viktor Orban’s to increase the birth rate of native Hungarians are of course to be welcomed, and should be emulated by every right-wing party that comes to power in the West. But social and legal incentives are doomed to fail if we don’t also solve the health crisis that is making us not simply unwilling, but also unfit, to produce a new generation to carry forth the timeless ideals of our ancestors and win.
As a first answer, then, I might say that our unparalleled sickness has made ours the only society where issues of health and fitness have taken on an existential character – where the costs of obesity and chronic disease are so enormous, the effects so debilitating, that they could genuinely destroy our society without determined political intervention. And it’s true: the costs really are enormous, and the effects really are utterly debilitating. The estimated cost of obesity alone in the United States was $173 billion dollars in 2019, according to the US CDC. You could build 11 border walls between the US and Mexico with that money.
In actual fact, though, it isn’t true that we’re unique in this way. Health and fitness has been recognised throughout written history as a core concern for the state, pertaining directly to its very survival. It was certainly such for the ancient Greeks, for whom there existed no separation between mind and body of the sort we’re 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 done by fools,” said the great historian Thucydides. Indeed, if a hierarchy did exist, it was more likely to be matter over mind than mind over matter. As Bronze Age Pervert reminds us, the tombstone of the playwright Aeschylus recalled nothing about his plays, instead noting 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 practise gymnastics, weightlifting or wrestling. These were activities that developed what the Greeks called thymos, best translated as “spiritedness” or “vivacity” or “warm blood”, personal qualities that pushed men on to excel and seek distinction. The slaves’ disbarment 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 preventing them from exercising and developing their thymos meant they would never have the opportunity to demonstrate otherwise.
Thymos could be eliminated in other ways. Plato seems to have believed diet, specifically vegetarianism, could do it too. 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 it functioned harmoniously. If you gave the ordinary people a simple diet of bread, peas, beans, fruit, nuts, olive oil and cheese, a blessed fearfulness would prevail. The people would live a “peaceful and healthy life”, perfectly content with their lot, and “keep the number of their families within their means.” Give them meat, however, and now you have a society “in a fever”, where thymos comes to the fore and suddenly you need more territory, greater social differentiation and new rules and customs to keep things from falling apart.
(It’s worth noting that a vegetarian diet of the sort Plato’s Socrates recommends really would quash men’s thymos, if by “thymos” we mean “testosterone”, the hormone that is responsible for so much of the behaviour that makes men men and not women. Studies show that eating a vegetarian diet is about the worst thing you can do as a man if you want to maintain your hormones at optimal levels. A low-fat vegetarian diet, in particular, can reduce testosterone by over a quarter. Men with low testosterone suffer from depression and anxiety, reduced libido, decreased muscle mass and hair loss and may even, in some cases, grow breast tissue.)
What would the ancient Greeks think if they could see us today? Would they see a society of high-thymos men? Or would they see a society of men who, despite calling themselves free, are indistinguishable from slaves – incapable of self-discipline, reason and, most of all, effective resistance to tyrannical rule?
Something else we may very soon be incapable of is reproducing. If current trends in sperm counts continue, by 2045 mankind will, as a species, be unable to reproduce by natural means. The median man will have a sperm count of zero: half of all men will produce no sperm at all, and the other half will produce so few that they might as well produce none. This isn’t speculation: eminent scholars of reproductive health have just extrapolated from the data we already have. What’s more, new data suggest these trends have actually started to speed up since the turn of the millennium…
Among the principal justifications for the massive replacement migration now being forced on us, which will only intensify in the coming years and decades, is that Westerners just can’t produce enough babies. Of course, we know that prosperity brings with it decreased fertility – this happened to the Romans in their glory just as surely as it has happened to us – but our current predicament is also the result of our dreadful health, especially obesity, and our chronic exposure to a wide array of hormone-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates and PFAS. A shocking recent study revealed, for instance, that overweight boys grow up to have testicles that are 1.5x smaller than those of men who were a normal weight in their youth, permanently damaging their reproductive health. Exposure to PFAS has been shown to increase a woman’s risk of miscarrying by up to 40%.
Here, then, we can surely see how sovereignty and health are inseparable today. Measures like Viktor Orban’s to increase the birth rate of native Hungarians are of course to be welcomed, and should be emulated by every right-wing party that comes to power in the West. But social and legal incentives are doomed to fail if we don’t also solve the health crisis that is making us not simply unwilling, but also unfit, to produce a new generation to carry forth the timeless ideals of our ancestors and win.
