How Fitness Went Neocon
Weekend Mixtape for Feb 1-2
I’m one of those annoyingly healthy, rarely-gets-sick, doesn’t-really-take-medicine kind of people. Even worse, I enjoy exercise. And yes, I love salads. 🤷♂️
Of the many things that inform my politics, I never considered fitness or nutrition. So I perked up when I arrived at chapter nine of Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelgänger, about fitness and fascism:
Fitness and alternative health subcultures have long mixed with fascist and supremacist movements. In the United States, early fitness and bodybuilding enthusiasts were also enthusiastic about eugenics, and the prospect of breeding for what they saw as a superior human form.
Hmmm, okay. But maybe you like working out and liberalism?
Klein seems skeptical. She quotes at length from Barbara Ehrenreich’s last book, “Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness.” For Ehrenreich, the modern fitness and diet movement emerged “when the high hopes of the 1960s and ’70s slammed into the brick wall of ’80s neoliberalism.”
This was all “part of a larger withdrawal into individual concerns after the briefly thrilling communal uplift some had experienced in the 1960s … If you could not change the world or even chart your own career, you could still control your own body.”
Sure, I can see how working out could prioritize individual optimization over collective uplifting, but I know plenty of people who work out in groups and then volunteer together. (It’s probably less individualistic than, ahem, writing a book.) But Klein seems skeptical about the psychological well-being of anyone who works out. She suggests that perhaps we work out because we hate the unfit versions of ourselves or others:
When body mania sets in, the fit self may well not be satisfied with crushing its own unfit self; it may look for other targets, its self-hatred seeping out and projecting itself onto other people’s less fit, less conventionally able bodies.
I’m not sold on Klein’s diagnosis. Most people want to work out and eat healthy — while resisting the temptations of TikTok and junk food. We are better, kinder versions of ourselves when we exercise. Few people work out from a place of self-hatred. It’s just kinda nice to go for a morning run in the crisp air, you know?
But I do recognize some of the tendencies, I admit, as the wellness community turns conservative under the banner of “Make America Healthy Again.”1 More on that below, but first, new music!
🎵 Songs I liked this week
📚 12 Weekend Reads
MAHA is where the crunchy granola left meets the libertarian right. It includes wellness influencers, new age environmentalists, and right-wing podcasters. And they come together in skepticism and antipathy toward the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific establishment.
I dare you to listen to this 70-minute podcast/video with three of the MAHA movement’s biggest influencers and not find yourself agreeing with at least a few points while vehemently disagreeing with others.2 But if they start to sound too sensible, skip ahead to the lightning round at 1:04:45 to hear their real wackiness come out.
Attia argues that individual choices matter not because they are all-powerful but because they are the power that we have. He acknowledged that health, like wealth, is unequally distributed; indeed, one of the most powerful longevity “medicines” is money, which can buy people less stress, better education, safer neighborhoods, and higher-quality medical care.
True. But also:
Silicon Valley's new live-forever flex: Hiring a 'longevity concierge'
New York Times profile of RFK Jr.: How fitness, fasting, and sobriety changed his life and inspired a battle against the pharmaceutical industry.
And to be perfectly honest, conservatives’ fears about the scientific establishment are not entirely unjustified. Here is a flowchart that a UCSF medical professor tweeted about inflammation:
Ms. Gleaton is part of a growing crowd who question not only educational institutions for what they see as liberal orthodoxy, but also “Big Ag” and “Big Pharma” — leanings coded as progressive not long ago.
Insurers are refusing to cover Americans whose DNA reveals health risks. It’s perfectly legal.
Researchers from the UK’s National Survey of Health and Development have tracked 5,000+ Britons since they were born in 1946. Participants who exercised throughout life were less likely to experience cognitive decline even if they had key markers of Alzheimer’s. As if anyone needed another reason to exercise.3
Buddhism recommends contemplating your cravings over a period of years in order to gradually loosen your grip on them in a deliberate way. Ozempic and its peers, by contrast, “do it in a chemical way, without the psychology coming along with it.”
😝 True:
Have a great weekend!
David
For instance, Joe Rogan is absolutely correct about the strong relationship between metabolic health and the lower risk of death from Covid. (It’s ridiculous he was labeled a crank for pointing it out.) But of course, healthy, fit people weren’t asked to get the vaccine and wear masks for our own sake but to prevent transmission to more vulnerable folks. So yeah, it does seem a little judgmental for Joe Rogan to insist that everyone should be as fit as he is to avoid the inconvenience of wearing a mask and getting vaccinated.
Similarly, every week at the gym I see how a healthy workout routine can slip into anxiety-inducing “body mania.”
The last time I heard this kind of religious revival energy was during the peak of the DEI movement in 2020.
Even if they call you a fitness fascist! 😂
Mixtape so so good - pulled a few for my Feb playlist.