Fear

I've been thinking a lot about fear lately. I said in my last post that our entire culture it based on fear, and that might have startled some people, assuming anyone is reading (I know two people at least read that post, because they commented on it in other places, but anyone else? Who knows.)

Why do we overeat? Think about it for a bit.

Because it just tastes so good we have to eat? Most people, if they sit down and think about it, will tell you that the last bite they eat doesn't really taste as good as the first one they eat when they're really truly hungry.

Because we're bored/tired/angry/whatever? Here we're talking about habitual eating. Where would we get the idea that eating more would solve those problems? Could it be that we were taught these habits early on, by people whose first thought when they heard us cry was that we must be hungry? Why would they jump to that conclusion first, out of all the things that could be wrong?

"Let's see, Darla, we fed little Timmy not ten minutes ago and he's howling, must be he's hungry again." It couldn't be he's wet, or has a pin stuck in him, or his big brother is pinching him to see him howl, or anything else. It has to be that he's hungry.

Does this make any kind of sense?

It sort of reminds me of the "clean your plate" scenario that gets blamed for overeating, the last holdover from the last famine, where children who didn't finish their food ended up dying of malnutrition, a common symptom being refusal to eat in its latter stages.

Ah, fear. Not our lived fear, but fear passed down through generations so urgently that it persists almost 100 years later. No one is starving to death in America, yet people still make their kids "clean" their plates.

The thing is, no one is starving to death in the last surviving Leaver tribes either, and they don't have any fat people.

Well, you might say, it's because food is sooooo hard to get. Of course they aren't fat.

From what I've read, though, Leavers don't understand why we go to so much trouble to get food in the first place. "It's all around us," they say. Why bother planting or keeping animals when the food is right there for the taking?

I think the answer is fear. Fear of hunger, fear of danger, fear of things as silly as getting dirty or being thought weird for not participating in the Taker lifestyle.

I'm not sure how to get past that. It may take a cataclysm to make people give up the Taker mindset, but even that's uncertain. Remember, all it took was one person to get it started, and all it takes is one person to get it all going again.