Curse words

I come from a cultural background in which notions of witchcraft and black magic are common representations of power. Though it can give me the creeps I was rather dismissive, never quite able to grasp what it was for emotionally.

My relationship with it especially when I was growing up could be summed up as incomprehension. I know they're a form of religion, but I didn't get that much, either.

Theoretically, I sensed it was a form of psychological power playing, to manipulate people mostly through fear to do your bidding. What I found so hard to grasp was the how, or even why? What was the point of it? These are in a sense a stupid questions. It's a little bit like an atheist person asking why religion?  

That seems dense now but I really remember that lack of purchase, it took me a long time to slowly realise it was about the interplay of mental energies between people. The power it was trying to contain, manage and use was the same the world over just called different things, approached in different ways.

The management systems are named differently, they rely on different central sources.

The obesity crisis has often been aimed at "worried well". Mostly seen as the middle classes who look upon their doctor like some used to look to a parish priest for guidance. They seem very into the OC, regardless of their political or intellectual affiliations to an extent suggesting it is using themes already deeply inculcated in them.

Usually the major religions start from good- god- and speaks of fighting evil. The crisis is drawn from fighting its designated evil-fatness and is concerned mainly with fighting with that. Rather than being uplifted by goodness though it does establish it's version of that-slimness; it seeks to fight fatness.

Hence its rage. It is very angry with our fatness. The fact that within each of us is there is that potential corruption waiting to appear and get a hold of us. Religion tries to save souls, the crisis, tries to destroy and punish them, in order that they be restored in goodness.

It draws people with punishment and its avoidance rather than utopia. This makes it feel like having the bad finger put on you. When the spectre of fat is raised when the word "FAT" is spat at you in rage,  when you are told you are going to become fat if you do x or y, it can make you wonder whether it is a wish a prediction or a warning.

The sense of being caught and trapped can been overwhelming, such is the extent of feeling invested in the term. To bear it can be like sinking into a depression, being under a black cloud. There is something of the occult about the use of this to control people.

When religions behave like the crisis, the irreligious are appalled yet many are happy to board this bandwagon. Getting the same out of it as others get out of various cults. I've been somewhat averse and sceptical of what Terry Eagleton calls the "Dicthkins" effect and why its really emerging.

The crisis and its little habits and quirks have actually help me to gain a more emotional sense of how these systems of mind power spread, how they work and manage to affect people so deeply. You do it to yourself in the main, it is you that feels impelled to act out your role under the influence of those whom you defer to, it's as much about that, as what is actually being put across.

Through seeing how the investment of meaning creates the weight of terms, I can grasp more of the way fear and neurosis can control people's actions. When someone feels they're living under a curse, it can be hard to meaningfully relate. But what's to be said about someone being told what they are and finding themselves just acting it out as if their lives depended on it?