Saturday, May 03, 2008

my very special friend and confidante the professor sent me an interesting e mail, i'd like to share with you.

'im rereading some incredible stuff in that genome book;

get this, of all the stuff about heart disease deaths, most is debunked in one way or another and shown to be genetic - all that cholesterol stuff etc.
now, amazingly the only real indicator they have of who is actually likely to die early from heart disease is...get this....your position at work.
countless massive studies in places like the entire british civil service, the US postal service etc - across tens of thousands of people over decades - shows it has almost nothing to do with what you eat, exercise etc, but how far p or down the pecking order you are at work.
the lower your position the more likely you are to die an early death from heart disease. the higher up, despite smoking, eating shit etc your chances decrease.
they reckon its the genomes reaction to the behavioural ques of being told what to do and having your own freedom limited to the choice of others.
studies on chimps (we differ by 2% of our genome) show that when high ranking ones are deposed to lower in the heap their lives are shortened considerably.

think about this....

think that heart disease is the single largest killer in western societies.

decentralized, self-designed, self-selectedness is not some whim - humans (and chimps) are designed to work better that way.

'think for yourself and question authority' is not some yippie slogan - its actual genetic transmission bleeping out across the millennia that our chances for lives long enough and with enough quality to evolve for fun is programmed in and will be realized when we stop adhering to industrial-era heirachies.'

i guess my response is the lower down the pecking order you are the more likely stress will effect your system, and also the coping mechanisms will be less effective than say a high paid executive who has access to holidays and spas, good food and quality lifestyle. everything is related but non the less here we have a good reason to start changing the whole way health and illness is perceived.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Belief in hierarchy is a killer on many levels. I guess compulsory unionism could be a good argument for reducing the health costs of capitalist nations then. Hierarchy is an illusion that requires us to take a static view of the universe and this universe is anything but static. Everything here it seems is moving towards a higher state. All gold was once hydrogen all gods were once children.

If the imposition and belief in a hierarchy terminates the program prematurely what does that say about the program? Somewhere in the gospels jc draws an analogy for his term ‘the kingdom’ that sums up with ‘the kingdom is like this, the first shall be last and the last shall be first and all shall get equal”. I love it; it turns everything in our linear directional hierarchal evolutionary heads upside down without even breaking a mild sweat. If ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first and all shall get equal’ then it would seem that time and hierarchy are both illusions we have to unburden ourselves of before the program can proceed. It would also seem to defy all our everyday notions of acquirement and ownership as well.

So maybe it’s not a case of everything here is moving towards a higher state, but that everything here moves towards the state it is already, and always has been in. That would defiantly help explain the persistence of evolution to find us where we are now and it would also hold true for matter; the gravitational centres towards which all matter appears to flow is just the gravitational centre within all matter. Without any notion of hierarchy our perception of "centre" becomes non-directional, the centre is everywhere and everywhere is the centre. blah blah blah yadda yadda yah . . .