Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.
Health: the state of being free from illness or injury.
Illness as seen by the cult of health is mediocrity. It is the blasé attitude toward ones life that offends them. Know your enemy. The cult of health will sell you books on how to sleep, eat and exercise. How to properly transform your life because you’ve been doing it wrong the whole time! For you are in a hole. You lack. You lack. You lack again.
You Need Self-Help
Not the help of a licensed professional but a coach, a mentor, a teammate and someone you can imbue your own loneliness into. You need an other. Not the type for your anger or love, because you already have those but a “bigger than life” other. Yeah! Now that’s the type of other you could unquestionably hitch your wagon too. A Deepak Chopra, Jim Jones, James Arthur Ray, Jaime Gomez or some other guru. Someone who can tell you how to unlock all the hidden secrets both inside you and among life around you. But get ready dig yourself out of that hole spending some serious mula, which is not a Sanskrit word for awakening.
Buying Your Way to Wellness
As American’s we love big, pomp and circumstance celebrations, sports, fireworks and spectacle. Why should our health be any different? In order to be above average, you have to spend money on retreats, ceremonies, warrior training’s, summits and exotic experiences. Living a quite life where one reads books, takes idle walks about the neighborhood, watches birds or has interests beyond constant self-improvement is ill. The cult of health seeks to heal the sick, get them organized, get them producing, dreaming, ignoring the sensible, contemplating nothing, consuming and conforming.
Buy a book? Interest you in a potion? Perhaps a silver bullet or two for the road? Can I deliver you a magic wand next week? Well, get ready to hand over the greenbacks in return for a Chuck Norris – Total Gym. You are worth the total package, double diamond, precious metal, full meal deal! To be stingy with your wallet means being stingy on future fit, enlightened, all perfect you.
Being the Polite Asshole
You know someone is a phony when they preach the virtue of assertiveness but then shut you down whenever you practice it! Learn to be the polite asshole. Continue to assertively bring up skeptical questions. Be constantly curious. Take things apart and put them back together. Reason backwards from the conclusion to the premise. Replace common words or phrases with the opposite word. Don’t take any refuge in the false security of the consensus because you see one of the things so insidious about cults of kindness is that anyone who questions them begins to look like an asshole. Who wants to question someone who says; God is love. Sickness can be cured. Health is all you have. Not many of us want to confront those ideas. But lest we be slumbered into a “system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object”, we sure as hell better start.