IS IT POSSIBLE TO…
Reach your genetic potential in 6 months?
Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours?
Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing?
Indeed, and much more. This is not just another diet and fitness book.

-from the homepage for THE 4-HOUR BODY: AN UNCOMMON GUIDE TO RAPID FAT- LOSS, INCREDIBLE SEX AND BECOMING SUPERHUMAN⁴³⁶

(The following is excerpted from the epilogue to The Mass Psychology of Fittism [Undocumented Worker Press, 2015])

What are the secrets to gaining abundance, happiness, 2.3 kids and a European sports car… earning millions of dollars while working only a few hours per week, reaching your genetic potential and getting more “Likes” on Facebook?

When, in short, will my life be like a MasterCard® commercial?

Since these questions have been answered time and again by advertising slogans, recycled aphorisms (that coupled with stunning stock photographs are perpetually posted onto Facebook walls), and the fastest-growing section in the bookstore, it would appear that we have all the information necessary to accomplish anything we want. Yet this being the case, why is it taking so long to reduce air pollution, stem global warming, climb out of debt, end world hunger and get an upgrade to my iPhone 2G 3G 3GS 2G 4 4S 5C 5S 6 6s? Furthermore, how come I still don’t look like the fitness model on the magazine cover (or for that matter my own professional grade headshot?)?

It seems that in the last half-century technology has not only quickened the pace of every day life, but in the new millennium, continues to do so with each passing day, making yesterday’s relative dearth of information, along with last year’s newest models (now “old”) seem embarrassingly out-of-date and even backward. If we consider that prescription drugs, iPads, air conditioning and memory foam are recent inventions that didn’t exist for the great majority of human existence, but to which we as a culture have become highly dependent, we may wonder how we could ever have survived through our first hundred thousand years on the planet. (And, if paved sidewalks, Nike® Air Soles, orthotics and Herman Miller Aeron® chairs are among the most recent inventions in the civilized world, how could anyone have run a mile, much less walked a step or sat down to rest without enormous discomfort and possible risk for injury before 1960?)

FASTER

Human memory is short and collective memory, while arguably longer, has been diluted by the ever accelerating pace of an already high-paced culture. As such, the 21st Century has become an age where the average attention span has been whittled down to the pause between the ringing, dinging, singing, chiming, honking, flashing, vibrating or other form of audible, visual and/or tactile alert by which an electronic gadget draws our Pavlovian head-jerk response. As such, the 21st century has become an era in which children express waning interest—if there is any interest at all—to look up from their individual LCD screen in order to listen to their grandparents’ stories (assuming the latter haven’t been locked away in their own personal holding cell to perseverate in front of their own personal LCD screens). And it is an era where the shrinking attention span—both child and adult—prevents most from reading past the first paragraph of the online article, much less go past Chapter 1 of any given book.⁴³⁷ As it is, few seem to recall what life was like before the age of Twitter®, Facebook®, Instagram®, the Google® search engine and smart phones.⁴³⁸ And it is the rare individual who still has an inkling that life was once captured by our eyes, ears, nose, lips, tongue, fingers and myriad other sensing organs, all tuned into our once acute, but increasingly atrophied sense-abilities. As it stands today, life is being increasingly captured (i.e. digitally compressed, photoshopped or otherwise simulated) by the ubiquitous phone camera (with iSight, software algorithms “to assess the color temperature of the scene to determine just the right percentage and intensity of white light versus amber light you need—using over 1000 unique combinations”!) by which we can instantly update our Facebook status or share with Facebook friends, Twitter followers and the general public via the latest smart phone app.⁴³⁹

We are, in short, constantly looking ahead into the future and in the process, not only forgetting the past, but missing everything that lies just beyond the borders of the liquid crystal display monitor. With the latest smart phone, smart phone app, Xbox®, X-Men sequel, patented synthetic fabric, patented shoe technology, end-of-the-world film and reality show lurking on the horizon, we have become primed to forget the previous edition, the original, that “obsolete piece of junk” around which we built altars just a decade a few years one year ago. With last hour’s Youtube® clip approaching a million hits, this minute’s scrolldown triggering my desire to share in either real or virtual time-space, last minute’s selfie trending in my Twitter feed, and the most recent stranger to “Like,” “Friend,” or otherwise (virtually) connect with me via social media, life appears to be increasingly colonized by a richer, brighter and rosier imitation of it (pale imitations having become rare in this era of Photoshop®, stock photos and automatic settings on the digital camera). That is to say, as virtual life expands, real life (the one occurring in real time-space) necessarily contracts, making us increasingly oblivious to the other reality that exists in three dimensions (and surprisingly, remains three dimensional without the aid of 3D glasses), outside of the cinema or confines of a liquid crystal display monitor and in the real world (not to be confused with the copyrighted one on MTV®).

So faster it is—and without much regard to the past, but decidedly with growing disregard for the present (even as I recycle pithy quotes about it from the Tao Te Jing, Eckhart Tolle and Dalai Lama onto my Facebook wall). And this means while waiting both expectantly and impatiently for the next quick fix, we likely exhibit little regard to how we got to where we are or even where exactly we happen to be at this moment. A growing portion of the world may be out of shape, sick and depressed, yet in the dominant worldview, pathology remains within the strict confines of Cartesian reductionist, and therefore, biochemical and/or motivational, cause and effect. There is an answer out there, in other words, and it will come in the form of a pill, scalpel, “revolutionary” and patented machine, TV show host, Batman sequel, 20-minute 10-minute TED talk, make-up artist, fitness expert or New Age guru who holds the secrets.

THE WORLD IS FLAT (LIKE MY LCD MONITOR)… ISN’T IT?

If we go by the sheer volume of book sales in the self-improvement section of the bookstore over the last twenty years, each of us should be well versed in the 8 quick and easy steps to 6-pack abs, 10 habits of successful Wall Street bankers, 7 secrets to enlightenment, 30 days to discovering the most beautiful me, 4 weeks to looking younger, 6.5 hours to living my unavowed dreams and 12 minutes to attracting my soul mate. If we go by gross receipts in diet pills, diet books, diet drinks, liposuction surgeries, implant surgeries, Botox® injections, facelifts, antidepressants and drug rehab centers, however, the general public doesn’t seem to be attaining the expected spectacular results. If astonishing achievement is only steps away, one would predict that the percentage of fit, healthy, attractive, wealthy, loving, loved, self-loved, happy, peaceful, sober, enlightened and otherwise successful and fulfilled people to increase every year.

Perhaps quick fixes are not so quick after all…. Could it be that our cultural fixation on fixing or otherwise “improving” humans is itself the problem?

Humans, in our fundamentally experimental and creative process, invented the machine. And machines need to be periodically fixed if they are to continue to function properly. Nature, in her fundamentally experimental and evolutionary process, selected the neurologically endowed organism. And neurologically endowed organisms need to learn if they are to survive and possibly thrive. Where nature (or God), through the complex process of evolution, not only selected the neuron, but over the course of 500 million years, continued to select for species with greater neurological complexity, order and sophistication, a human through the process of exploration selects for greater understanding—abstract and emotional, as well as sensorimotor—and thereby increases her own neurological complexity, order and sophistication. As nature experiments with trial and error, creates greater complexity and thereby reverses entropy in a phylogenetic manner—all while consuming vast amounts of life—we humans have for eons expressed our evolutionary fitness by exploring and learning and thereby reversing entropy in an ontogenetic fashion—all the while consuming vast amounts of food (in contradistinction to foodlike substances). Natural selection could be, therefore, another way of describing the highly complex process of learning and thereby generating fitness on both a phylogenetic-species as well as ontogenetic-individual level.⁴⁴⁰

Where a human senses, explores, selects, learns and thereby processes information into knowledge via a neurologically endowed body, a machine computes, follows set algorithms, repeats executive tasks and stores information via a transistor-embedded circuit board.⁴⁴¹ Where a human is an organic, living being made up of many highly complex sub-systems that are part and parcel of a larger, unifying system called a bodymind, a machine is an inorganic, non-living object made up of discrete and replaceable parts. Where neither machines nor humans appear to violate the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, only machines operate with high voltage electric currents, or mechanical energy derived directly from an internal combustion engine. Where only humans are very good at exploring and learning and thereby reversing the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, machines are comparatively bad at it (artificial neural networks and a handful of other machine learning models aside, the vast majority of machines cannot learn at all) and generally do not reverse entropy. Where as mentioned above, machines are designed to be fixed—or more likely in this day and age, to be thrown away and replaced—humans have evolved to explore, learn, grow and expand. Where, in other words, machines are designed to be used and some might even say abused, humans evolved to be nurtured and respected—even if terms like human resources, human capital and correctional facility reveal the fact that our dominant culture increasingly sees humans as objects to be used, corrected, thrown away and/or replaced (i.e. coerced, manipulated, and/or discarded).⁴⁴²

SERVING THE PUBLIC GOOD

In Hollywood, celebrity architect Frank Gehry, renowned for his “humanism,” apotheosizes the siege look in a library designed to resemble a foreign-legion fort. In the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley the Los Angeles Police barricade streets and seal off poor neighborhoods as part of their “war on drugs.”

-MIKE DAVIS, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles⁴⁴³

Where the biochemicals in our foodlike substances, along with the machinery designed and humans exploited to extract and combine them, remain largely invisible to the public eye, fitness technology is in the center of what people see and use on a daily basis. Where the process of transforming living animals into uniform, attractive and neatly packaged food items in the supermarket or fast-food chain involves turning labor into little more than invisible human robots repeating motions to the time of conveyor belts and the tick, tick, ticking of the supervisor’s watch, the postmodern process of getting fit often involves turning human consumers into little more than highly visible human robots mindlessly repeating the same motions to the tick, tick, ticking of their electronic heart rate monitor, step-counter, calorie counter, odometer, pacer or smart phone app while they stare at one of any number of liquid crystal display monitors dangling in front of their faces.⁴⁴⁴

Where many leading universities house entire departments devoted wholly to agriculture, many have also added entire departments devoted to biotechnology and the science of exercise (better known as kinesiology or exercise physiology). Using the latest research findings from leading universities, we can rest assured that people in agribusiness as well as those the fitness industry are doing all they can to improve general health and well-being.⁴⁴⁵ Backed by the ivory tower in other words, both agribusiness and the fitness industry are loaded with the latest high-tech electronics, machinery and gadgets to help our cause. Considering the newly engineered methods for splicing the genes of a cow with those of a pig, washing hamburger with ammonium hydroxide, blasting bovine brains into slurry or using nuclear waste to irradiate meat, we could be on track to end hunger and disease (as well as boost slumping sales in ammonium hydroxide and irradiation plants) in the next decade.⁴⁴⁶ Considering newly designed machines that simulate everything from stair climbing to riding a bicycle on hilly terrain to doing Zumba in a Brazilian dance club to running on an imaginary tropical island, along with the latest electronic devices and apps that perform every task from measuring our heart rate to counting the number of steps we’ve taken to calculating the number of calories we’ve burned or consumed—all the while giving us encouragement (or berating us, depending on the app), allowing us to show off our results on social networking sites and/or alerting us to exactly when we should speed up or slow down—it appears that we are on course to become the fittest humans to have ever walked the planet.⁴⁴⁷

RATIONALITY IN THE ABSENCE OF SENSE-ABILITY

Mrs. Buttle:
My husband’s dead, isn’t he?

Sam:
Er … I assure you Mrs. Buttle, the Ministry is always very scrupulous about following up and eradicating error. If you have any complaints which you’d like to make, I’d be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.

-TERRY GILLIAM, Brazil⁴⁴⁸

Not so long ago, and without the benefits of either nutrition or exercise science, fitness clubs, heart rate monitors, the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, or the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, people everywhere ate healthy food and moved with graceful ease, power, agility, balance and fluidity. And they did so without the weight, postural and orthopedic problems that so commonly plague us today. In contrast, the mass level of fitness appears to be stagnating in the postmodern era—despite continual improvements in nutrition and exercise technology. One could make the case, in fact, that as the (health, beauty and) fitness industry goes forward, the masses continue to go backward. Whether or not we are making intelligent use of research and technology, or even taking research and technology in a direction that benefits humans, human sense-abilities and the environment at large, one thing is clear: With our dominant culture’s heavy fixation on speed over attention, information over knowledge, achievement over learning, quick fixes over understanding, reified numbers over tangible life, disposing and replacing over renewing and reinvigorating, and imitating and performing over wondering and exploring, we are experiencing not only a type of sensory deprivation previously unseen in human history, but the concomitant increase in entropy, chaos and sensorimotor disorder that goes along with it.⁴⁴⁹

If modern/postmodern culture is bound to a 19th Century way of thinking about nature and the human body, and this way of thinking is itself shackled to a 17th Century nonsense-able, or in other words, senseless understanding of life on earth, it’s no wonder why we are increasingly quantifying, making quantifiable or otherwise rationalizing (in the Cartesian sense) more aspects of life and thereby leaving what cannot be represented by a numeric value—i.e. the bulk of life—to be either disparaged or simply ignored. Yet if by sanctifying numeric values, and thereby allowing them to dictate more aspects of life on the planet, we are simultaneously extinguishing our own sense-ability (along with other non-quantifiable attributes), it could be an indication that rationalism taken to a Cartesian extreme, comes the expense of sensing, feeling, (sensible) thinking and therefore, living—that is if human life is still considered to be a biological process that is only capable of being experienced by a sensing, feeling, breathing and (sensibly) thinking bodymind rather than a senseless, mindless machine.

Unfortunately, rationality in the absence of sense-ability is in the end, neither sensible nor particularly rational.⁴⁵⁰ It follows that as cutting-edge technological advances make nutrition and exercise science ever more precise and fitness equipment ever more sophisticated, food itself is becoming scarce (as it is being increasingly replaced by foodlike substances), and being fit, where once universal a mere century ago, has become a rarity. Meanwhile, as the people appearing on magazine covers have gotten “fitter” in the last four decades (their superior level of fitness symbolized by a higher degree of muscle mass and lower percentage of body fat), and famous actors have become ever more svelte with the help of fitness equipment, celebrity trainers and Photoshop, Marilyn Monroe continues to put on weight (her lack of muscle tone becoming less appealing with each passing year), Rocky I looks flabbier than ever, and Conan the Barbarian has turned into a (240-pound) pipsqueak.⁴⁵¹

CULTURE AND ITS LIMITATIONS

Obviously, technology is not intrinsically bad. Less obvious is the fact that is it also not intrinsically good. It is a tool which we can either use, or by which we can get used. Exactly how we use technology and whether or not we get used by it is largely a matter of the paradigm we have consciously, or more likely, unconsciously chosen to follow. Today as we become more reliant on government officials with direct financial ties to agribusiness and experts in nutrition science and food science labs (often with indirect ties to agribusiness) to tell us what to eat and how much, along with what food we are allowed to grow, how we should grow it and from what companies we can buy our seeds, we are simultaneously witnessing a growing public health crisis that is mirrored by a growing agricultural and environmental crisis.⁴⁵²

If we consider that the food and agriculture industries view humans, plants, livestock and nature at large as machine-like objects made up of discrete and separable parts, while the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations (including the multinational kind) should be treated as people, should the crises be of any surprise? Given that humans and nature at large are now represented by reified numbers and consequently seen as sense-less machine-like objects, while the non-living machine-like entity known as the corporation is now considered a sensible, reasonable, living being—so much so that it has been granted the civil liberties of a real one—we appear to have reached an era whereby life no longer involves sensing, feeling, thinking or even living—that is, if the act of living is still considered a sentient activity only capable of being carried out by biological organisms. With the rise in Cartesian logic and the proportional drop in human sense-ability, the distinctions between the quick and the dead are becoming increasingly blurred.

So much has reductionism invaded our lives that we willingly and regularly consume foodlike substances (which are often simply disguised forms of toxic chemicals), rather than tasting, savoring and eating food. Instead of choosing what to eat, when to eat it, and how much, we often look to experts to make the choices for us. Rather than maintaining or improving response-ability over increased degrees of freedom, we absolve them to machines and in turn move like automatons while we stare ahead to the ubiquitous liquid crystal display monitor as if unable to resist its gravitational pull. With the narrowing distinctions between the quick and the dead, the real world and the digitized versions of it, or reality and simulated reality (both the kind experienced within the borders of the liquid crystal display monitor, and the sort we read about in science fiction and dystopian literature), it appears that the nonsense-able 17th Century worldview called Cartesian reductionism, is not only alive in the 21st Century, but like Victor Frankenstein, the United States Supreme Court and undergrads in the biology lab, increasingly granting life to the non-sensing, inanimate and otherwise, non-living.

FRANKENFIED MOVEMENT

[I]t seems to me, moreover, objectionable to treat the individual like a dead tool.

-ALBERT EINSTEIN⁴⁵³

In the short century since exercise has become a science, and fitness has subsequently come under reductionist scrutiny, human movement has become more machine-like and increasingly under the authority of somebody or even something else. Rather than exploring movement, paying attention to our sense-abilities, and thereby choosing in which way to move, how much and when, we rely on experts and machines designed by experts to choose for us. With electronic gadgets alerting us as to whether we should speed up, slow down, increase the resistance, decrease it or otherwise make some adjustment in order to reach our (electronically computed) “target” level of exertion, we know just how hard to work. With heart rate monitors, step counters, odometers, calorie counters and other electronic devices measuring everything from distance to elapsed time to number of repetitions to estimated caloric output, we know how much further to go and exactly when to stop.

As fitness is increasingly reduced to a morphological aesthetic—i.e. the image of a fitness model or photoshopped Hollywood actor on the magazine cover—and our bodies increasingly divorced from our sensing and feeling selves, we have willingly placed our individual compass into the hands of those who know better. Orthodoxy, which in this day and age sees each human as the Frankenfied conjoining of a mind-less body with a body-less mind, increasingly asks us to seek guidance, instruction and even punishment from authorities (including the authoritative smart phone app berating or deriding us into working harder). As members of a culture that preaches personal responsibility and civic duty, we nonetheless willingly give over freedom—untold degrees of them—and thereby absolve response-ability over much of the control over our own bodies and minds. Where pop culture pushes for greater freedom, individuality and creativity (that is, freedom, individuality and creativity within the confines of the dominant culture’s hivemind), popular behavior sees it normal to not only enlist, but pay for enlistment in classes with names like Extreme Boot Camp®, Bodycombat® and Insanity®.

Even on our own, and without the prodding of a quasi-military or “insane” instructor, we have internalized the Cartesian way of seeing the human being and consequently prefer to count calories and repetitions of industry-sanctioned movements—both of which have been designed by industry-sanctioned experts to get us in shape—rather than playing with, experimenting with, exploring and even enjoying the process of moving. Among other things we restrict our movement by strapping ourselves into industry-sanctioned machines, most of which enforce machine-like two-dimensional movement rather than encouraging human-like three-dimensional spirals.

MACHINE-LIKE, MECHANISTIC, UNALIVE AND RIGID

To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.

-GEORGE ORWELL⁴⁵⁴

The fitness industry, its experts, shareholders and legions of followers are obviously not bad people seeking to do evil. (In fact, the industry does a lot of good, though mainly for its shareholders, experts and those few who are able to climb the fitness pyramid without sliding back down.) The industry, its experts, shareholders and legions of followers are also not intrinsically good (though many do, in fact, have good intentions). The issue is neither one of good versus bad, nor benevolent versus evil, but rather one of whether humans and other living organisms should be viewed as and treated like machines.

Given its generally reductionist outlook, the industry itself should be more accurately seen as a symptom of our dominant culture rather than a cure for obesity and other aesthetic and health issues. And as a symptom, it naturally follows that instead of contributing to a rise in mass fitness levels, growth in the industry normally signals a drop. From this perspective, endemic obesity and unfitness could be considered part and parcel of a Cartesian reductionist worldview which happens to underpin a fitness industrial complex. Thus, as profits for the industry have grown by large proportions, so have the numbers of unfit people.

The direct correlation between fitness industry profits and the number of people who are unfit will likely continue as long as we continue to view each human (along with every other living organism on the planet) as a machine, each mind as discrete and separate from its body, what we put into each mouth as merely ingestible chemicals to be represented by numeric values, and any movement only worthy of being taken if it can be turned into a series of numbers. Our increasing lack of fitness will likely continue in other words, as long as what we put in our mouths, how we move our minds and bodies, indeed, life itself, continue to be valued only for the numbers to which we can convert them rather than as sense-able phenomena to be sensed, felt, explored and fully experienced.

Of course, even if we continue to stay the Cartesian course, the small percentage of individuals who succeed will likely continue to succeed—a few having traded in the rhythm of their beating heart for the tick, tick, ticking of the digital alarm clock, electronic heart rate monitor or step counter app. The vast majority, however, will continue to lament their relative lack of fitness, many even chastising themselves (or hiring a trainer to do the chastising for them) for being “untalented” or simply “lazy.” Most will consequently continue searching for the magic bullet, the secret, the 10 quick and easy steps to fix what was once a flesh and blood, sensing and feeling human organism, but is fast becoming a machine-like, nonsense-able object. Most will in other words continue pouring money into quick fixes that inadvertently make them more machine-like, mechanistic, unalive and rigid.

INSTITUTIONALIZED HOMOGENEITY

Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich? Legal.

Sacco Vanzetti? Quite legal.

The Haymarket defendants? Legal.

The hundreds of rape trials throughout the South where black men were condemned to death? All legal. Jesus? Legal.

Socrates? Legal.

And that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places. Because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretense.

-WILLIAM KUNSTLER⁴⁵⁵

Despite what I’ve stated above, we should not rule out a possible third scenario whereby the majority of people actually do become fit by following the industry’s legion of experts who encourage them to utilize, wear, imbibe, topically apply and otherwise consume the industry’s multifarious machines, digital counters, apps, sports drinks, nutritional supplements, protein bars, creams, footwear and other high-tech paraphernalia. As laudable as it sounds, however, getting everyone into shape via the industry’s reductionistic model does not necessarily bode well—either for individual humans or civilization at large. While encouraging or enforcing relatively nonsense-able (senseless) and mindless obedience in performing machine-like movement for the purpose of achieving (reified) numeric success may be one way of generating six-pack abs, history shows that it is also effective in generating a legion of automatons.

That is to say, while instilling senseless discipline and mindless obedience may be an effective way to immunize the masses from sensing, feeling and thinking (and thereby increase public interest in Super Bowl commercials, TV sitcoms and the latest superhero sequel or good-versus-evil Hollywood blockbuster), it is also the means by which autocrats and their corporate clientele (or perhaps more accurately stated, corporate leaders and their political clientele) take greater control over the media, as well as the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.⁴⁵⁶

In short, while humans have the ability to achieve numeric and therefore “rational” success via dehumanizing policies, senseless discipline and mindless obedience, such success doesn’t come without a cost. As clearly demonstrated by famous monuments to and markers of human progress, such as the Great Wall of America, the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay and the USA PATRIOT Act (not to mention, the Separation Wall, Auschwitz and the Spanish Inquisition), any policy which succeeds by instilling and/or maintaining senseless discipline and mindless obedience among its creators, executors, supporters, enforcers and even “innocent” bystanders, does so at the cost of human sense-ability, response-ability and life.

SENSE-ABILITY, RESPONSE-ABILITY AND INDEPENDENCE

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the same purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. Yet such as these even are common esteemed good citizens.

-HENRY DAVID THOREAU⁴⁵⁷

Applying the 1st Law of Thermodynamics to the steam engine and other machines has led to many technological breakthroughs. Assuming that everything which applies to machines applies equally well to humans, however, could be called a Cartesian error.⁴⁵⁸ It’s not that humans are exempt from the 1st Law, or any of the other laws of classical physics for that matter, but that our extraordinary complexity—biomechanical and neuromuscular as well as biochemical—makes it as shortsighted to view what we put into our mouths exclusively for its discrete caloric and chemical value (especially since scientists have only discovered a small fraction of the chemicals available in either plant or animal matter) as it is limiting to consider how we move our bodies primarily—and in many cases, exclusively—in terms of its numeric representation.

If evolution shows us anything, it is that living organisms must learn if they are to survive. When we learn, our mind enters into its own extraordinary process of natural selection by discarding millions of unusable bits every second while organizing the remaining usable ones into greater sense and therefore meaning. It is by sensing more that we make sense of ourselves and of the world around us and thereby give meaning to life. And from a thermodynamics standpoint, it is by sensing more that we not only preserve, but improve our own neuromuscular organization, thereby turning chaos into order. Obeying the dicta of an industry dedicated to quantity over quality, on the other hand, we begin to sense less, increase entropy, disorder and chaos and thereby contribute to our own extinction on two levels: the individual level where we begin to extinguish our own neuromuscular complexity and order, and the species level, where we as a culture continue to degrade our collective sensibilities, and consequently not only enact nonsense-able policies, but senselessly police them—often with great brutality. The senselessness and brutality, however, are not merely directed toward others. When I attempt to fit myself into an industry propagated image—incidentally, one generated for the main purpose of increasing profit margins—and do so in the industry sponsored machine-like manner that has become today’s norm, I am to some degree trading in the living, breathing entity once known as ________ for a nonsense-able (or in other words, senseless) automaton following the rhythm of an electronic counter.

SURVIVAL OF THE…

Yet the knowledge of what is possible lives on inside each of us, inextinguishable. Let us trust this knowing, hold each other in it, and organize our lives around it.

-CHARLES EISENSTEIN, Sacred Economics⁴⁵⁹

In the beginning of industrial (and some would say, pre-industrial) civilization, humans created machines to serve them. Over millennia, machines have served them well, leading ultimately to a world of skyscrapers, automobiles, jumbo jets, Xbox® 360 and other technological marvels.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image.⁴⁶⁰ In other words—and from a Darwinian perspective—after some 500 million years of experimenting with sense-ability, motility, neurological complexity and order, nature selected the human genome. Yet, God and nature have experienced an extreme makeover in the sesquicentennial since Darwin first published his seminal work—a makeover perhaps more radical than any talking bush could have fathomed in the age of antiquity. And if we reflect on this radical change, one thing remains clear: As we chop down the last vestiges of primeval rainforest for timber and pasture, lop off ever more mountaintops for coal, pave over diminishing plots of porous earth to increase the flow of vehicular transport, poison and wash away the last inches topsoil for agribusiness profit, dam the few remaining rivers and tributaries to maintain lavish expenditures of electricity, desertify ever more acres of arable land for cash crops, suck rivers dry to fill swimming pools and sustain outdoor carpets of manicured grass, engineer more species of plants and animals in the laboratory to theoretically feed the starving masses (whose land has been sold for corporate profit, and whose nation’s crops have been exported to feed those who aren’t starving), construct modern Towers of Babel that reach higher than anything our Egyptian and Mesopotamian forebears could ever have imagined, and reconstruct an increasing number of faces and bodies to suit the fashionable standard, God and nature have taken on a markedly sanitized, denuded, inhuman, machine-like complexion.

Whether God has modified humans to reflect her transformation into an industrial machine, or we humans, reversing roles, have recreated God to reflect our transformation into nonsense-able objects to be liposucked, injected, implanted, starved, drugged, tortured, discarded, replaced or otherwise fixed, molded and shaped, one thing remains clear: Our God is a reductionistic one whereby all reified numeric values representing what were once thought to be living organisms (but are now seen as machine-like objects), are created equal (equal, that is, to their measured, estimated or computed value).

Meanwhile, as drinkable water, breathable air and tillable soil are rapidly disappearing, life itself is not only becoming more tenuous, but the meaning of it increasingly sanitized of sensing and feeling.

Aside from the fact that in the long run, by trying to get fit we generally do not get fit, our attempts lead to some fundamental sacrifices.⁴⁶¹ The fitter we try to be in the conventional sense of the word, the more we tend to extinguish the very sense-ability that makes humans human and therefore, categorically different from machines. If we want to become more human rather than less, and thereby increase our chances for surviving as a species, it may be time to stop trying to get fit. If we want to go beyond merely existing as human robots, and instead thrive as living, breathing, sensing, feeling and expanding beings, then we might consider a new—or perhaps more accurately stated old idea of fitness. If sensing, feeling, exploring and learning are the vehicles by which all members of all species survive to reproduce—for those who do not sense, feel, explore and learn are swiftly extinguished—perhaps it is time to return to our evolutionary roots. If we as individuals are to become fitter, and perhaps even thrive, and we as a species are to make it to the second half of this century without exterminating most forms of complex life on the planet (including our own), it will probably help to become more sense-able, response-able, human and alive, rather than following the centuries-old trend of becoming increasingly senseless, mindless, machinelike and dead. For as psychopaths and genocidal despots have amply demonstrated, a figurative death involving severance from one’s own sense-abilities often leads to literal death involving mass murder.

Fitness, from this perspective, has more to do with sensing than counting, curiously exploring than distractedly tolerating, mindfully learning than senselessly memorizing, creating variation than enforcing homogeneity, and improving sense-ability than mindlessly repeating. Fitness, in other words, has more to do with living life than quantifying, tabulating, (re)posting, (re)tweeting or otherwise simulating it.

When redefined as the process of increasing neuromuscular complexity and thereby reducing entropy—or simply put, exploring, learning and growing—the term “improving fitness” lacks the sexiness with which it is normally associated via the industry’s high-tech gadgets, apps, advertisements, magazines, infomercials and newfangled gyms. Thus, in contrast to our glamorized image of what it means to be fit, the process of getting fit, when viewed from an evolutionary perspective, can seem commonplace and even mundane.

Yet for all that it lacks in industrial shine, fitness as a form of exploring, learning and growing harkens back to a truly enlivening process by which humans have survived and even thrived for eons—a process which is quintessentially holistic, diverse and imaginative rather than reductionistic, robotic and anesthetizing. This is because in the evolutionary and thus, revitalized sense of the word, fitness alludes to our innate desire to explore; it alludes, in other words, to our inextinguishable, if culturally repressed, yearning to live more fully, and the invigorating process by which this yearning can be fulfilled.

436. “The 4-Hour Body.” The 4 Hour Body. N.p., n.d. Web. July 2, 2014. <http:// fourhourbody.com>.

437. For a fascinating and disturbing look into how the internet is changing the way we read and think please see, Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? (What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains),” The Atlantic, July 1, 2008. Here is an excerpt: “‘We are not only what we read,’ says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. ‘We are how we read.’ Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become ‘mere decoders of information.’ Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

438. Of course, any old cell phone will no longer do. Simply sticking with an older generation iPhone, Android or Galaxy when the latest model comes out seems retrograde even though its capacities will always far outstrip what any billionaire could have purchased just a few years prior.

439. iPhone5s description from Apple.com: N.p., n.d. Web. July 2, 2014. <https://www.apple. com/iphone-5s/camera/>.

440. As I mentioned earlier, natural selection could also be looked at in terms of computation and probability, but on a scale that is unfathomable to humans and uncomputable by machines.

441. Artificial Neural Networks possess a primitive capacity to learn, but nothing close to what humans are capable of. In contrast, simpler machines like steam engines, do not contain transistors or vacuum tubes and do not learn. Their operations are far simpler and purely mechanical.

442. By including correctional facilities in the mix, I don’t mean to imply that law enforcement and incarceration are inherently evil. The word correctional, however, carries an entirely different meaning and connotes a wholly different approach than the words preventive and rehabilitative. In comparing the way the US deals with drug addiction and drug offenses to the Portuguese approach, we can get a sense of how dehumanizing correctional facilities can be when juxtaposed with preventive and rehabilitative ones.

443. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso, 1990, p. 223.

444. Why agribusiness machines remain hidden from public view while fitness industry machines are highly visible has to do with the fact that agribusiness uses its machines exclusively for production whereas the fitness industry sells its machines directly to the general public and to fitness gyms that serve the general public. Sophisticated machinery, electronic gadgets and even clothing manufactured to help us get in shape (and look good while doing it) are consequently not only open to public viewing, but designed to be used directly by the average person. When it comes to heavy exploitation of human labor, however, many parts of the production process in both industries mirror each other. Where agribusiness operates its own domestic meat processing sweatshops that are hidden from public view, the fitness industry outsources to overseas sweatshops to manufacture its shoes, apparel and gadgetry.

445. “The commoditization of university science results from the financial needs of universities. They consider scientists to be an investment in four ways: for obtaining research grants from government agencies and corporations; for converting scientific reports into public relations and the prestige into endowments; for raising the ‘standing’ of the university as the basis for raising tuition and attracting students; and, finally, for sharing in the patents and inventions made by university faculty. As a result, the allocation of resources within a university is influenced by the prestige and earning capacity of the various programs, and scientists in a number of universities report pressure from their administrators to turn their research in more affluent directions, such as genetic engineering.” –Levins, Richard & Richard C. Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 205.

446. Though modern agricultural, animal husbandry, bioengineering and food processing methods may increase crop yield, meat production and the microunits of essential vitamins injected into Kellogg’s Froot Loops few research or publicity dollars have gone into how they affect soil, air, water or human health. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin state the quandary of scientific research succinctly: “Many people will now admit that the problematic of science—what questions are thought to be worth asking and what priority will be awarded them—is also strongly influenced by social and economic factors. And everyone agrees that the findings of science, the facts, may have a profound effect on society, as best shown by the atomic bomb.” (Levins, Richard & Richard C. Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 4.) Levins and Lewontin could just as easily be pointing to the social, political and economic forces that lead to pig brains being shipped to Asia so that they can be used as thickeners for cooking: “On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds- per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs’ brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry.” –Ted Genoways, “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret,” Mother Jones, July/August 2011.

447. Lorie Parch reviews two such apps that are intended to motivate through heckling, berating and otherwise abusing its user. “Simply put, if you put on pounds or fail to lose, the [CARROT Fit] app will heckle, shame, and berate you. It doesn’t sugarcoat its purpose: Its site calls the app ‘a sadistic AI construct with one simple goal: to transform your flabby carcass into a Grade A specimen of the human race. She will do whatever it takes — including threatening, inspiring, ridiculing, and bribing you — to make this happen.’” –Laurie Parch, “Are You Motivated by Someone Yelling at You?” Ih8exercise. N.p., Feb. 6, 2014. Web. July 3, 2014. <http://www.ih8exercise.com/barriers/are-you-motivated-by- someone-yelling-at-you>.

448. Gilliam, Terry, dir. Brazil. Dir. Screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown. Prod. Arnon Milchan. Perf. Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond. Universal Pictures, 1985. Film.

449. The quick fix approach, which tends to leave no time for considering, much less observing shades of grey between the black and white, may give partial explanation as to why Washington has a penchant for carpet-bombing (sometimes officially referred to as “precision bombing”) Third World countries and employing drones to root out so-called “evil.” While designed only for smaller “fixes,” drones on the other hand, have the advantage of being both quick and surgical—unless, of course, innocent wedding-goers or other forms of civilian life happen to get into the crosshairs and are subsequently annihilated (in which case, they are quick, but not so surgical): “The headline—‘Bride and Boom!’—was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a US drone via one of those ‘surgical’ strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, ‘Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.’” -Tom Engelhardt, “The US Has Bombed at Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001,” The Nation, December 20, 2013.

450. For just as manufacturing 7400 nuclear warheads helps make the world safe for democracy (depending, that is, on your definition of safe and democracy), summarily detaining, interrogating, imprisoning and/or torturing Muslims helps win the war on terror (not including the terror committed by those who are doing the detaining, interrogating, imprisoning and/or torturing), summarily imprisoning half a million to a million poor and working class black and brown-skinned men on minor drug offenses helps win the war on drugs (or at least the war against poor and working class black and Hispanic communities), increasing GDP necessarily improves the lives of a nation’s citizens (specifically, the lives of the top 1% who happen to own 40% or more of the nation’s wealth), and getting more children to pass standardized tests improves their aptitude and intelligence (as long as imagination, critical reasoning skills, social skills and creativity are not included in our definition of intelligence)… counting, calculating or otherwise quantifying (or more likely, using a machine to count, calculate and quantify) steps, heartbeats, seconds, repetitions, oxygen consumption, body fat percentage, electrolyte content, LDL cholesterol levels, grams of protein, calories consumed and calories burned, makes humans fitter—at least in theory. (“The United States has an estimated 4,650 nuclear warheads available for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft. Approximately 2,700 retired but still intact warheads await dismantlement, for a total inventory of roughly 7,400 warheads.” -Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “US Nuclear Forces, 2014,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2014 70: 85 DOI: 10.1177/0096340213516744. [http://bos.sagepub.com/content/70/1/85.full.pdf ])

451. If we compare Marilyn Monroe’s images in any of her films or Sylvester Stallone’s physique in Rocky I to current cover girl/boy, fashion model and/or fitness model standards, neither would qualify to be on a the cover of a fitness magazine—at least not without heavy Photoshop editing. (Then again, few celebrities make it to magazine covers these days without alterations made possible by Photoshop.) Arnold Schwarzenegger, while not exactly puny during his reign of the Mr. Olympia and Mr. Universe contests, would nonetheless be considered too small to win any of today’s contests: “All the bodybuilding champions after Arnold [Schwarzenegger] have been virtually monstrous, outweighing him, ‘out muscling’ him, presenting unimaginably gigantic bodies. In terms of bodybuilding, Arnold was no longer the biggest body, even by the time of his last championship win.” –Krasniewicz, Louise & Michael Blitz. Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006, p. 29.

452. It’s important to note that the “what,” “how much” and “from whom” are questions that are largely influenced, and to some degree circumscribed by the USDA, FDA and Supreme Court—the former two of which have maintained a decades-long revolving door policy with multinational agribusiness corporations. It’s also important to note that agribusiness has played a growing role in academic research, outspending even the federal government on grants to major universities, and consequently narrowing the type of research being performed:

“…while corporate cash has come to dominate university ag[riculture] research, the USDA still funds a substantial amount of it: more than $300 million (vs. about $600 million from industry) in 2010. In addition to its research grants for land-grant professors, the agency also employs its own scientists and maintains its own labs; its total research budget stands at about $2 billion per year. Yet rather than act as a counterweight to the corporations, the USDA essentially mimics them. It ‘prioritizes commodity crops, industrialized livestock production, technologies geared toward large-scale operations, and capital-intensive practices,’ FWW [Food & Water Watch] shows.” –Tom Philpott, “How Your College Is Selling Out to Big Ag,” Mother Jones, May 8, 2012.

453. Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions. New York: Dell Publishing, 1954, p. 71.

454. Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. New York: Mariner Books, 1970, p. 223.

455. Kunstler, Emily & Sarah Kunstler, dir. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. Disturbing the Universe LLC and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), Arthouse Films, 2009. Film

456. To put it another way, instilling senseless discipline and mindless obedience is an effective strategy for gaining executive, legislative, judicial and media support for assailing democratic principles (including the ones outlined in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights) and violating the UN Charter on Human Rights.

457. Henry David Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience.” In Walden and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 1965, pp. 637-638. Quoted in Reed, p. 70.

458. To borrow a term from the cover of Antonio Damasio’s book, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin, 2005).

459. Eisenstein, Charles. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition. Berkeley, Calif.: Evolver Editions, 2011, p. 446.

460. Genesis (1:1), “King James Bible Online.” Official King James Bible Online: Authorized King James Version (KJV). N.p., n.d. Web. April 12, 2015. <http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/>.

461. Once again, while it is possible for mass numbers of people to get fit within the authoritarian atmosphere of say, a concentration camp or military boot camp, authoritarianism in modern civilian life is, with some exceptions, generally reserved for assembling smart phones, sewing on zippers, butchering animals, packing meat, and manufacturing widgets, rather than producing legions of people six-pack abs. While small pockets of authoritarianism do appear in other areas of civilian life, such as in the worlds of professional sports, dance, acrobatics and martial arts as well as particular fitness programs (where yelling, berating and belittling are sometimes more the rule than the exception), they have not yet reached enough of the population to turn the growing tide of obesity and infirmity. As I mentioned earlier, within a culture of senseless behavior and mindless obedience, majority fitness will only occur by prodding and/or forcing the masses into even more senseless behavior and mindless obedience.