Steve_Bamlett_blog

What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being?

The idea that health is JUST an individual one is a relatively new one culturally and socially, although it’s roots lie in the Robinsonades, as Marx called the genre including Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’, of eighteenth century ‘enlightment’ and free market thinking. The idea has inevitably fed into and fed off (like children whose best sustenance is the body that loved them as they disregard compassion and eat into the sources of love) the notion of private healthcare at the expense of public resources. It is lumped into those promises that collectivity needs not to be externally resourced for all its resources are merely the aggregate of individuals. Hence Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’ was really a cruder version of David Cameron’s ‘ Big Society’.

So even to start addressing this question brings up problematic issues like an assumption of control over our own health as if it were merely a possession rather than a thing we hold in trust and in concert with others who either bolster or harm it. Issues like weight control, exercise, thinking in the here and now are really things that belong to an already established privilege and set of assumed resources. In the UK we usually forget that some of these resources are public, for they conveniently pretend to be in the control of ‘experts’ with an interest in the status quo, and sometimes of regression to competition of private interests.

Many people in poverty or lack of adequate income fostered by exclusion are asked to stop worrying about the future and the past and live in the here and now if they want good mental health, yet the resources to do this get denied. At root the message is to blame the victim for the consequences of oppressive circumstances. Likewise diet is tied to income not just choice, the matter being impossible without the other.

Exercise depends somewhat on access to resources, including space and fresh air. These are not ever free as being in London tells me every time I visit. ULEV (ultra low emission zones) is unpopular because the poorest pay for its costs we are told, but we are given no alternative view even by the Labour Party. Control and responsibility are ideas I treasure but to pretend that the capacity to these is optimally distributed is live on cloud cuckoo land. They depend on what we are accustomed to call distribution of social capital as well as capital in it’s older meanings.

And in the end responsibility really means taking a positive response to the things in your own control, being honest about the limits of these things and avoiding guilt, which is anyway only the reflex image of narcissism. It stops all action other than the egoistic. Responsibility is not altruism. It is recognizing that there is no other, than that I have created by my exclusion of itself from me, no self that isn’t still hungry to be other than it is in co-operative loving growth.

So, like a politician, I don’t answer the question put to me. But that is because the assumptions of the question here are more important than any ‘individual’s’ answer – like a routine trip to the gym, classes, mindfulness exercises – for all these leave is the residue of voluntary non-compliance answered only by guilt not support seeking – or involuntary non-compliance fired by the unavailability of resources to you for which you will as always be blamed. Social psychology labels these mechanisms of blaming the victim self-serving bias. But this is not a truth of depth cognition, it is a product of a society geared to self-interest alone.

Love

Steve