‘I hope I taste good’

www.americanthinker.com

Some years ago, a German man with cannibalistic tendencies was said to have advertised for a victim willing to surrender his life and serve as food for the cannibal. He received a response and met with the willing victim, who before he died and was cooked and eaten reportedly said, “I hope I taste good.” This case is so shocking because it violates everything we have been taught about the dignity of and respect for human life.

Instead of an affirmative culture of positive values, we live much of the time in an ironic and perverse culture not unlike that of the German cannibal — a culture of antagonism that celebrates weakness and failure and rejects what is good and beautiful. In essence, that perversity describes the culture of the left that has existed since well before Karl Marx codified it in Capital and the Communist Manifesto. It was once obvious that law and order, health, respect for authority, aspiration, goodness, excellence, and merit were better than the opposite, but today the media, the arts, the universities (and even the lower grades back to elementary school), and many corporations have become “woke,” which is just another way of saying they identify with what is opposed to life as most people have known it. The only antidote to wokeness is the practice of affirmations: training oneself to focus on gratitude, happiness, acceptance, and virtue.

The German case of cannibalism is the very antithesis of the affirmation of life that tens of millions practice on a daily basis. Metaphorically speaking, cannibalism is not very different from saying, “You’re toast” or similar expressions like “I’ll blow you out of the water” or “You’re done for.” These expressions are part of our everyday speech, which shows how negative that speech can be. The problem is that negativity, not just toward others but toward oneself, can become reflexive, and that kind of negativity affects our relationships with others, our ability to accept goodness, and our overall well-being. In a prospective study conducted over a period of decades at Johns Hopkins Medical School, researchers found that a child’s lack of closeness with parents and the negative self-image that accompanies it were a key factor in whether enrollees would develop a serious illness later in life. Those who reported coming from a close and loving family acquired a sort of magic shield that they carried throughout life (Siegel, The Art of Healing 61).

Spiritual leaders such as Louise L. Hay, Deepak Chopra, Esther Hicks, Marianne Williamson, and Gabor Maté, among others, spent their lives teaching their millions of readers and listeners how to practice affirmation through phrase repetition (“I am worthy of love,” “I am worthy of life,” “I am worthy of health”) and through breathing techniques and visualization. They also taught the importance of letting go of the past by forgiving those who have harmed us and forgiving ourselves for wrongs we have committed.

Equally important is the emphasis on learning to love oneself. A great deal of suffering is the result of persons who have learned, often from childhood or early life, that they are not worthy and do not deserve love. This mentality contributes to a large number of conditions — psychological, emotional, and physical. Certainly, the victim in the German case above must have suffered from a severe form of self-hatred.

Thoreau at Walden Pond, who began each day with a glass of pure water instead of coffee and a heavy breakfast, was practicing a similar form of affirmation. “It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to see the beauty around us.” “Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present.” “Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.” “To make a deep mental path, we need to think over and over the thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” These and many other quotations from Thoreau’s writing are remarkably prescient of the movement that is now called “positive thinking” or “presentness” and that is being practiced at many medical centers including the Mayo Clinic, which houses large departments of functional medicine at its three centers, and by thousands of functional medicine practitioners, notably Bernie S. Siegel, Valter Longo, and Gabor Maté.

RFK Jr. and MAHA are encouraging a holistic medicine that includes affirmation as part of our 250th anniversary. President Trump often speaks of a “golden age” for America, but that golden age cannot come without improvement in our nation’s health. Americans cannot register some of the highest rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases and still lay claim to being golden. I truly believe that we are on the verge of a golden age, but our display of military might, our huge increase in national GDP, and lower crime rates (in those cities that will allow the removal of criminal illegal aliens and the incarceration of native criminals) should be matched by improvement in our nation’s health. Our health care system is the best in the world, but it has not been able to deal with rising rates of disease. Perhaps the addition of affirmations and of functional medicine in general can bring these rates down and make our country truly healthy again.

Our entire society, but especially those on the left, needs to reflect on what is meant by the purpose of life. We were not meant to practice perversity, self-hatred, and antagonism; we were meant to live purposeful, joyful lives devoted to bringing happiness to ourselves and others. America is a strong and powerful country, but it would be a greater country if it turned away from the culture of antagonism that dominates the public space and embraced a gentle, caring, and healthy form of affirmation. We live in a sea of negativity, but with conscious effort, we can escape it and return to what we all know instinctively to be true: that good is better than evil, that life is better than death, and that virtue is better than perversity. In some ways we have become a society that consumes the lives of people, but we can resist this degradation and restore the beauty and purpose we were meant to practice.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

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