Some are fond of stating fatness is the last acceptable prejudice, clueless and erroneous, but really, it misses something. Fatness for many feels like the last holdout of human free will. And if it goes [breathe deeply] it feels to them like we might forget what it means to be properly human. Perhaps we'll descend into anarchy.
Fat anarchy.
In everyone's mind to varying degrees, despite having trained ourselves to think otherwise, we've had to accept a lot of things we were told previously were our choice pure and simple. We've been told you cannot control; your thoughts, mood, who you love, find attractive, sexuality, drug and drink intake, pleasure intake, sexual appetite, shopping, dieting habits etc., etc.,
In a cultural mindset dependent on pure unadulterated free will-that speciously singular channel for human agency -that feels like an attack from all sides, on that very notion. Irony is, its very inadequacy in explaining the whole of human will is why we have rivalled Usain Bolt in running away from it.
That very singularity and the lack of clearly understood additions to it means getting away from it is like escaping a cherished monolith. Which makes us feel dishonest cowards who cannot face harsh reality. It is seen as the essence of what makes us human. That we can think and decide to act. Then act, purely of our own volition.
Rather than adding useful constructs that enlarge and fill out the picture of why and how we act. And therefore, how we regulate our actions and behaviour, for good or ill. Our defensive flight has left these incompatibly opposite feelings in uneasy stasis.
Something's waiting to hit the fan.
It's that oddness where a tyrannical overlord is much hated and feared, yet somehow has become central to our thinking. We hate living with "We are free to do or not do anything"- When we are on the wrong side of it.
The only way that can alter it is if we claim to be forced by something or someone greater than ourselves. But we still hold to it as the standard. Feeling guilty, shabby, slightly less human even, for evading its destructive glare.
Yet evade it we do and if we're lucky, a group of people will be left, who've been thrown out of their own humanness leaving a hollow shell that can be turned into a construct. This draws like a vacuum all our need to express our fidelity to pure-free-will.
To human agency absolute.
The one thing everyone bar none could guarantee, could count on, is that fat people choose to be fat. They use their elective free will to become fat, apropos of nothing. No "excuses" i.e. explanations of what's going on. It's just, through decisions to eat.
Doesn't matter that of all the things we've accepted as beyond our direct control, this makes the least sense by far. We simply do not design ourselves to be hungry. But we do have direct control over the thoughts in our head. Even in the case of some neuroses.
The point is, the ability to get away with this has been given from on high.
And if we somehow now have to accept that weight is not a conscious direct choice, in the main, then where can we express our disconnected yet oh so important tribute, to this so important you have to get away from it truth?
How can we keep alive and vital our sense that we are in total control and in it our hope of change, of progress? Our, we can any time we want, do anything we want, as long as we put our minds to it?
Howwwww?
* edited.
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