Welcome to the new religion
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 What's with the word "wellness"? I don't remember, five or ten years ago, ever hearing it. "Health", yes, or "well being", but not "wellness". Even now, it's not a word that most people use in normal conversation. And yet it's hard to escape. Google it and the long list of sites includes "Wellness.com", "Seek Wellness", "National Wellness Institute", "Wellness Online" and many more.
This afternoon I received an invitation to purchase How to Work Wonders: Your Guide to Workplace Wellness. Workplace wellness?
"This new book aims to provide a practical, interesting and fun guide to help people to be physically, mentally and environmentally healthier and happier at work. It is packed with handy tips and useful information to help you to motivate you to take responsiblity for your own wellness. Pre-order some copies to give to your staff to support their wellness at work! Perfect for keeping your staff (and yourself) focused and motivated in these challenging times."
Wellness? Where did it come from, and what does it mean? Perhaps - as I suspect - it's a new religion for the 21st century. Forget Buddhism, forget Islam, forget Christianity - welcome to Wellness.
Reader Comments (11)
It all started with Well-Wimmins clinics in the alternative 80s. So when I hear the mantra "wellness" in the present climate, I think of compulsory smear-tests conducted by crystal-healers.
Speaking of new "religions", has anyone seen Bee Movie. Yes, yes, I know what ya gonna say "that's a kids film!", well it is but has some well placed anti smoking propoganda in it.
Perhaps - as I suspect - it's a new religion for the 21st century. Forget Buddhism, forget Islam, forget Christianity - welcome to Wellness.
There's nothing new about it at all, Simon. It's been around for 100 years or more. It's the kind of thinking that underpinned the eugenics movement, and the Nazi regime in Germany. Read Heil Health or Nazi Health Tips or Lifestyle, Health, and health promotion in Nazi Germany. People had a duty to be healthy. Healthy people were more productive workers.
These sort of ideas never went away. They did not die with the Third Reich. They have been gathering strength again slowly over the past 50 years, and now they're back with, and so are the Nazis - and it's about time you took off your rose-tinted spectacles and realised it. There is the same intolerance. The same lies. The same pseudoscience. The same propensity to marginalise and demonise 'unfit' social groups - smokers, drinkers, and fat people these days -. The same fanatical belief in their own rightness. The same refusal to compromise. The same bulldozing of everyone else into conformity with the correct doctrines.
There's nothing new about it at all. And for that matter, there's nothing new about your sunny complacency either. We are going to have to fight World War II all over again. But this time we'll be fighting it in our livingrooms and our pubs and our streets. Because this time, the Nazis are among us, and around us, and within us.
Yes, I remember eighteen years ago getting a fourtieth birthday present, or, as my late mother would have said, in my forty first year. What was it? an invitation to a 'wellman' test.
Well said Idlex. It is very frightening, but it isn't long off now.
My rose-tinted glasses cracked a long time ago.
To be honest, I'm still waiting for the announcement of their 'latest study' - the blue-eyed ones - that will be the tipping point.
Mine used to do that as well, Tim. Add a year whilst pointing out the literal truth in the statement. Most upsetting.
Tim, one only ever has one birthday, the rest are merely anniversaries.
Well said, idlex.
The latest wheeze appears to be non-payment of benefits if claimants refuse to answer questions about their drinking behaviour - on the grounds that consumption affects employability. If - when - the time comes that, as a rule, employers actively discriminate against smokers, they'll surely do the same. Dick P writes:
http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.com/2009/02/next-they-came-for.html
I think that what's needed is lobbying of the EU to add smoking to the list covered by anti-discrimination legislation. Who, however, would be willing and able to do it?
Idlex has just said what I was trying to put down on paper and he has hit the nail on the head, I think thats exactly the way things are heading.
Brainwash the young breeding workforce about 'wellness' and you have the next generation automatically wellnessed to fit whatever mould they want to suit their purpose, i.e. worker, soldier or enforcer.
And to think it all started with the smoking ban. Easy to see now why they're honing in on drink next and then obesity.
The hard drugs are proving a little more difficult because the international gangs, like legitimised corporations and banks, have that one all sewn up.
Maybe its just a matter of time before they start dropping the 'truth serum' into the evian water, that is after they've euthanased us older people!!
On the other hand, isn't it the younger ones that tend to rebel against all this controlling behavious, be it by parents, teachers or government?
I mean, how come so many under age people drink, smoke and have sex?
Rule of thumb, if you want your offspring to do something, tell them not to!
We can all hope that this ends up massively backfiring in the faces of the zealots!
In the present economic climate, we really should be asking is this type of advertising or more correctly propaganda really giving value for money to the public purse. If it is connected to New Labour, you can guarantee that it almost certainly is not value for money and yet another campaign to demonise smokers. It also uses children in a way which can only be construde as child abuse by the state - nothing more, nothing less.