Civilization Disease

Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning.

Big Pharma loves to invent new ‘diseases’ so that they can then invent dubious new drugs to ‘cure’ them, give them an official-sounding acronym (“ED” for hawking Viagra to men with low self-esteem), and then frighten you into hounding your doctor to ask if their new drug “is right for you”.

Ever since the term Information Sickness was coined, and ever since I started saying that in our modern overcrowded world we’re all suffering from a form of mental illness, I’ve been looking for a label to put on this ‘illness’. So I thought I’d invent a new disease. I’ve decided to call it Civilization Disease. I thought of calling it a ‘sickness’ but the term ‘disease’ is truly ancient, and before the invention of medicine meant literally ‘lack of room or opportunity’. Ancient peoples understood that crowding and confinement really are the causes of ‘dis-ease’.

So having named this new disease, it’s only appropriate that I provide an appropriate medical summary of it : Symptoms & Diagnosis, Causes, Treatment & Prognosis, and Prevention.

Symptoms & Diagnosis:

• Patient frequently appears anxious, distracted or depressed
• Patient seems to be ‘disconnected’ from and distrustful of his/her instincts, feelings, sensory surroundings, and the natural world, all-life-on-Earth, with a tendency to retreat inside his/her head
• Patient fears and hates nature and natural things, and sees nature as something that must be conquered, defeated, overcome
• Patient is constantly competing with and trying to outperform and diminish others
• Patient has delusions that the planet actually ‘belongs’ exclusively to his/her species
• Patient is addicted to consumption unrelated to actual needs or even wants; this addiction is aggravated by encouragement from the corporatist establishment to get hopelessly into debt to feed this insatiable craving for ‘more stuff’
• Patient may in particular be addicted to things made from or requiring oil, things containing artificial sugars, starches, alcohol and salt, and to desensitizing depictions of extreme violence and other activities that stimulate dopamine, adrenaline and testosterone release/reaction

Causes and Sources of Infection:

• Disease is a form of deep-seated and chronic psychosis brought on by sustained trauma, beginning with parental humiliation whenever the infant/child patient’s behaviour is non-conforming, continuing with psychological abuse and  ritualized, relentless ‘normalizing’ propaganda from infected peers and adults in the competition-based education system, augmented by an imposed, unnatural hierarchy and scarcity in the ‘work world’ where approval is withheld, criticism and competition are constant, and the constant fear of never having enough, and by media which portray the patient as inadequate, a ‘loser’ and inevitably unhappy until/unless he/she acquires bigger, more and newer stuff
• This continues life-long as the symptoms are reinforced by peers, friends and colleagues suffering from the same disease until the patient begins to believe this behaviour and this situation are normal, the only way to live
• The disease is aggravated by chronic physical and mental malnutrition caused by:
  • eating processed, chemical-laden foods lacking in nutritional variety or micro-nutrients,
  • a disorienting separation from natural and peaceful places,
  • prolonged times spent in cities and other horrifically overcrowded, stressful and unnatural places,
  • exposure to unnatural toxins in the air and water, and
  • exposure to propaganda agencies that oversimplify complex issues and starve the mind of intellectual stimulation, replacing it with artificial adrenaline and dopamine stimulation.
• The resultant stress responses disorient and confuse the patient until he/she chronically suffers from the symptoms above, and also acquires related physical and mental stress-provoked diseases, notably auto-immune diseases, asthma and allergies, cancers, attention-deficit diseases, and anxiety, depression and bipolar diseases

Treatment & Prognosis:

• Proper treatment is unavailable and unaffordable for the vast majority, who are fated to suffer with the disease from onset in young childhood until death from diseases with related causes
• Patients need to be removed, ideally at a young age, to a natural, healthy, sustainable environment, away from other sufferers, and for a protracted period; there, with therapy from others who have recovered and with practice, they can begin to reconnect with their instincts, senses, feelings and all-life-on-Earth, and come to understand how industrial civilization really works and why it must be dismantled to provide hope to other sufferers, and begin to discover a better way to live and make a living — the prognosis for such patients is good, though the threat of relapse if re-exposed to the above causes is constant
• Until the causes noted above are systemically reduced or eliminated, the prognosis is for the current global epidemic of Civilization Disease to infect every human on the planet, as there is no natural immunity for the disease

Prevention:

• For children not yet infected:
  • move the child to a natural, peaceful place, away from the sources of infection above
  • unschool the child, to enable him/her to learn naturally
  • bring the child up collectively in natural community with others who are not infected
• There is no vaccine for this disease