(2011-02-01) Greer Lalanne Fitness Physical Culture

John Michael Greer on Jack Lalanne's Physical Culture. We don’t like to think about the fact that by and large, Americans these days are weaker, less healthy, and less capable than their great-grandparents... from its beginning, the physical culture movement took a critical stance toward the products of industry and the Life Style-s made possible by the extravagant use of Fossil Fuel-s... His accomplishments, like those of the great physical culturists before him, depended on something utterly unmentionable in contemporary industrial culture. It’s more strictly tabooed than sex or death or the total dependence of today’s Middle Class American lifestyles on Third World slave labor. Yes, we’re talking about Self Discipline (Self Control)... JamesFrancis’ useful 1994 study Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World chronicles how Rome’s rulers found the reasoned self-discipline taught by Stoic (Stoicism) and Platonic philosophies an unendurable challenge to their authority. You can find similar conflicts in the history of imperial China, the Muslim world, or, really, wherever the decline of imperial (Empire) states is well enough documented. The reason behind these conflicts is simple enough: people who are ruled by their passions and appetites can be ruled just as efficiently by any political system willing to pander to those things, while those who control themselves can’t reliably be controlled by anyone else. Thus the Roman government regularly sent Rome’s philosophers into exile, failing Chinese dynasties praised Confucius to the skies while doing away with anybody who took his teachings too seriously, and modern America uses every trick in the media’s book to marginalize those who remind us that the life of a channel-surfing couch potato might not express the highest potentials of our humanity.