Self-Centeredness Kills
A rogue left hemisphere drives self-centeredness, which leads to chronic stress, which exacerbates our health problems
RFK, Jr. can lead the crusade against our country’s toxic food, but he’s swatting at symptomatic gnats. If he wants to solve the problem, he needs to spray the neuro nest.
For that to happen, he needs to be radical, to get to the root. He needs to go prehistoric and walk in an era both mythical and profound. He needs to reach the Garden of Eden.
That’s not the name of your local marijuana dispensary. It’s Adam. Specifically, Adam’s pre-apple brain.
Before the apple, Adam’s brain worked well. He was Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil in his Old Forest domain, his robust right hemisphere directing the left hemisphere’s everyday actions and the left hemisphere contentedly serving its right-hemispheric master. Post-apple, the left hemisphere got unruly. It’s been a tug-of-war since.
Modernity is the era of left-hemispheric hegemony. The right hemisphere has been beaten like a new inmate during hazing week at Attica, and if it tries to reassert its proper role, it gets Shawshanked.
The left hemisphere rules the brain, and the left hemisphere jealously guards its power and serves its only master: the body, what that piercing and mystical Paul called “the flesh”: the old self, the ego, carnal appetite . . . the “niggardly part of the soul,” in the words of that other piercing mystic, Flannery O’Connor.
The left hemisphere is inherently self-centered: it protects the self. It doesn’t want pain. It doesn’t want suffering. It doesn’t want discomfort. Heck, it doesn’t even want to be inconvenienced, which is why it whiffs disgust when that old guy ahead of him is walking so frickin’ slow through the airport. Those things adversely affect its ability to get things done and to get through the itinerary, no matter what it is.
The result: It goes into damage control as soon as something threatens it. Neuroscientists have found the source in the amygdala. When the amygdala senses a potential threat, the left hemisphere tries to avoid it, thereby reaffirming the threat, including anything connected to it. After a while, a person’s world becomes the devil’s playground of threats: things that could hurt, slow down, or inconvenience are feared.1
This devil’s playground is what we call “chronic stress.”
It leads to the health problems that plague the developed areas of the world, especially the United States.
It leads to inflammation, which in turn leads to all sorts of problems, like appendicitis. It leads to anxiety, depression, metabolic disease, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, immunity dysfunction, erectile dysfunction, and you being a dick all the time because you’re so freakin’ miserable, and you can’t identify why because of mitochondrial inflammation, and you can’t even get laid.2
The rogue left hemisphere also affects our food supply. Our food comes from a system that values speed and efficiency, including cost efficiency. Those are the hallmarks of the left hemisphere, which would rather destroy a field with glyphosate than lose profits.
RFK, Jr. correctly diagnoses that we need to clean up our food so we don’t exacerbate our health problems with our crappy diets, but he’s still starting at the end of the problem.
If we want to start at the beginning, we need to start with the hemispheres of our brains and then play it forward. The implications are enormous—from valuing locally-grown food despite the cost and inconvenience to ostracizing the junk food DC lobbies that spend more money on hookers than Charlie Sheen after a Viagra overdose—but we can sort those out as we go.
For now, we need to start by putting the right hemisphere into its rightful role as master. It will moderate the left hemisphere, tell it to mellow the f____ out, and put the LH’s efforts into the context of the greater whole. Those efforts then reshape themselves to proper proportions. The devil’s playground can then become the mere playground it’s intended to be: a place of exertion, but not a place of stress.
The loss of money is especially feared. Money is, said that (third) piercing mystic Simone Weil, “power’s master key.”
And BTW: Without that appendix, you can’t filter out the food impurities that cause the inflammation, so when your doctor tells you that you don’t need your appendix, tell him to chew glass. You might not need it, but you sure as heck want it.