Tangled Metal wrote:I used to pay to go to a gym (regularly as it happens for two hours each time, including sauna / steam room / short swim time). It was a good gym that worked with members doctors to improve health and fitness.
There were at least 3 ladies who were obese (morbidly by definition I suspect). They had their membership paid for by the nhs on medical / health grounds. It was a waste of money. They spent their time on the rehabilitation tables reading magazines while the tables vibrated different parts of their body. You may picture this, obese women sat on the edge of a bench on two pads that vibrated in different directions such that you could see vibrations going up and down her obese back.
They all did that for the same time on the same days off the week. Needless to say they had the inclination to get healthy but too lazy to do any actual work. So they lost no weight over the 3 or 4 years I noticed they did this.
Then suddenly they changed their approach. They started to lose weight and indeed in 3 months had noticeably changed their body shape through exercise. What do they do? They got real and put effort in. First walking on the treadmill. Then walking on an incline. Then riding a static recumbent, then running. I was very impressed. However they had to go through 3 or 4 years of wasting nhs money by sitting on a vibrating pad.
I only mentioned this because nhs has funded active lifestyle initiatives on a case by case basis in the past. The issue is actually doing it so there's a positive result. Without it being set up well you might end up with wasting money as in the three cases I mentioned.
Here lies the problem - modern folk have been tutored by our culture to believe in the easy fix; and also the "right to do what I like and not do what I don't like". They feel no duty to make the effort to better themselves because they don't accept either the notion of "duty" or the definition of "better". They feel they have a right to be lazy and self-indulgent.
As we've seen with drunk driving and smoking in public, it takes the inducement of feelings of shame to stimulate these recalcitrants into adopting the procedures & effort to adhere to the norms that a society asks for or even demands. The previous sentence will rankle or even shock many modern folk. "Shame!? Induce!? Social norms and demands!!? We feel oppressed"!
But appealing to reason doesn't work. It takes social pressure of an often rigorous kind to motivate people into changing their damaging ways.
The problem is, as others have said, that too much shaming (especially if no practical solution if offered to rein-in bad behaviours) may make the self-indulgent one worse, as they go to their pleasure-behaviours to compensate for the hurt. A chocolate binge can be soothing!
*****
All this is not to say that rights and freedoms are somehow bad. It's simply the recognition that one person's right is generally made available by other peoples' duties. If I have the right not to be mown down by a drunk driver or given lung cancer by my seven fag-addicted co-workers in the office, they have a duty to not drive when drunk and not smoke in the office.
In the case of the NHS, we can argue that taxpayers and those suffering delayed treatment for unavoidable ills have a right to a better NHS that's in part based on the duty of all not to self-abuse to the point that they take up scarce NHS resources and time. You could also make a strong case for those who become ill and disabled at their own hand (via continuous self-indulgence in various damaging pleasures) to have a duty not to degrade the lives and freedoms of their families.
On the other hand, we also have a duty to provide them with the means to avoid or cease their damaging and often addictive behaviours. This might include the inducement of shaming them but should include practical procedures and facilities for changing their behaviour. One big step would be to criminalise the fundamental causes - selling damaging foodstuffs; advertising things like cars via the portrayal of yob-driving; banning gambling; a whole host of other (usually profitable) dangers to well-being.
There's always a great danger, when creating more rigorous social norms and duties within a nation of community, that too much of our variable behaviour becomes subject to limitations, strictures, penalties, mockery and discrimination. It's a fine balance between rights and duties. But that's what a civilisation is for. Always there's a need to avoid confusing a legitimate demand for dutiful conformity with the demands of intolerant and stupid prejudice against not-me behaviours that are harmless to the rights of others.
If current political events and styles demonstrate one big lesson, it's that failure by the ruling class and other authorities to tend to this right-duty balance will have dire consequences for a society. If the ruling class is itself uncivil, self-indulgent and seemingly without any feelings of duty to others, this will amplify the social damage - especially when the politicians concerned prescribe lots of duties for the hoi-polloi whilst ignoring such duties in their own behaviour.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
