We the People: The American Owners' Manual

By Doug Dix

Dictionaries define health as the absence of disease, but that's wishful thinking, for diseases typically begin asymptomatically. You don't know you have them. You might feel fine, but you can't say there's no cancer, occlusion, infection etc. lurking beneath the surface. If something pops up, you might describe it, name it, even fix it, but until you see it, you can't know if it's there. So, feeling fine isn't adequate.
It's actually much worse than that. If you're feeling fine while others are suffering, you're either ignorant, or apathetic. And most people are suffering, so either option qualifies as a disease. The same can be said if you're feeling fine while our ecosystem unravels or our government provides less than liberty and justice for all, the same when elected officials, lawyers, educators, therapists, clergy, commanding officers, police officers, and others betray the very principles of their professions. But except for the chronically depressed, we all have our good days. How does that happen? How do we have good days when so many are suffering, when our kids' futures look so bleak? We simply ignore the suffering. But that's sick by any definition. We might call it Empathy Deficiency Syndrome. Health, therefore, as the absence of disease, is a myth.
We're all sick, either because our bodies are broken or are minds are. We live as independent islands, entire in ourselves. If I'm not hurting, I feel good. Your problems are not mine, and vice versa. But that's not true. We're all connected (Donne). COVID proved that. Infection anywhere threatens everywhere. The same can be said of environmental, economic, and political threats. And all threats are inter-related, and translate to health threats: "Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale" (Virchow).
"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . ." (Declaration of Independence). That's never necessary, never even possible, for the bands, political and otherwise, that connect one people to all, and all people to each other, and each person to all organisms, are insoluble. To have a shot at anything resembling health, we must ratify a new Declaration of Dependence: Significant others make others insignificant. The family that matters is the One we all belong to. To have a shot at health, we must build this family. This book's the blueprint.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667869407

Book preview

BK90071891.jpg

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We the People: The American Owners’ Manual

Doug Dix, Ph.D.

Secretary/Treasurer, MOMS: The Fund for Mothers with Young Children

10 Oxbow Lane

Bloomfield, CT 06002

[e-mail]

Published by: Douglas Edward Dix

For

Alma Mater: The Press at MOMS: The Fund for Mothers with Young Children

10 Oxbow Lane

Bloomfield, CT 06002

[e-mail]

www.thinktankatmoms.org

www.journalofholistichealth.com

Copyright: Doug Dix 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022917705

ISBN paperback: 978-1-66786-939-1

ISBN ebook: 978-1-66786-940-7

For Rosie

All profits to MOMS: The Fund for Mothers with Young Children

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Rationale

Lesson One: What Can I Do for You?

Lesson Two: How Do You Live and What Do You Live For?

Lesson Three: What Did You Learn and Why Did You Learn It?

Lesson Four: What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person?

Lesson Five: There’s No Substitute for Critical Thinking

Lesson Six: What Is Science, and Why Should We Care?

Lesson Seven: Food Preference - Hidden Implications

Lesson Eight: Fix Our Environment

Lesson Nine: Fix Health Care I

Lesson Ten: Fix Economics

Lesson Eleven: Fix Politics

Lesson Twelve: Fix Health Care II

Lesson Thirteen: Fix College I

Lesson Fourteen: Mid-Term Assessment and Correction

Lesson Fifteen: Fix Welfare

Lesson Sixteen: Fix Philanthropy

Lesson Seventeen: Fix Justice

Lesson Eighteen: Fix Our Military

Lesson Nineteen: Fix Your Occupation

Lesson Twenty: Fix Your Religion

Lesson Twenty-One: Fix Your Family

Lesson Twenty-Two: Fix College II

Lesson Twenty-Three: Fix Death

Lesson Twenty-Four: Conclusion

Lesson Twenty-Five: Self-Help Projects

Afterword or Final Exam: What’s Wrong with the Admiral’s Speech?

Preface

Dictionaries define health as the absence of disease, but that’s wishful thinking, for diseases typically begin asymptomatically. You don’t know you have them. You might feel fine, but you can’t say there’s no cancer, occlusion, infection etc. lurking beneath the surface. If something pops up, you might describe it, name it, even fix it, but until you see it, you can’t know if it’s there. So, feeling fine isn’t adequate.

It’s actually much worse than that. If you’re feeling fine while others are suffering, you’re either ignorant, or apathetic. And most people are suffering, so either option qualifies as a disease. The same can be said if you’re feeling fine while our ecosystem unravels or our government provides less than liberty and justice for all, the same when elected officials, lawyers, educators, therapists, clergy, commanding officers, police officers, and others betray the very principles of their professions. But except for the chronically depressed, we all have our good days. How does that happen? How do we have good days when so many are suffering, when our kids’ futures look so bleak? We simply ignore the suffering. But that’s sick by any definition. We might call it Empathy Deficiency Syndrome. Health, therefore, as the absence of disease, is a myth.

We’re all sick, either because our bodies are broken or are minds are. We live as independent islands, entire in ourselves. If I’m not hurting, I feel good. Your problems are not mine, and vice versa. But that’s not true. We’re all connected. COVID proved that. Infection anywhere threatens everywhere. The same can be said of environmental, economic, and political threats. And all threats are inter-related, and translate to health threats: Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale (Virchow).

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . That’s never necessary, never even possible, for the bands, political and otherwise, that connect one people to all, and all people to each other, and each person to all organisms, are insoluble. To have a shot at anything resembling health, we must ratify a new Declaration of Dependence: Significant others make others insignificant. The family that matters is the One we all belong to. To have a shot at health, we must build this family. What follows is the blueprint (www.journalofholistichealth.com).

America exists to form a more perfect union. Our money beseeches: "E pluribus unum and In God We Trust. We pledge allegiance to one Nation under God, indivisible," but are offered no instruction on how to make any of this happen. It doesn’t just happen. And God is out of vogue.

When I was in public school (from K through 9), each day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and a prayer. I was in sixth grade when under God was inserted in that Pledge. Eisenhower thought it made a neat distinction between us and the God-less commies. Schools let out early on Wednesdays so kids could attend religious instruction at their various places of worship, and almost every kid had such a place.

From grades 10 through 12, I attended Catholic school, and each class began with a prayer. At college (Fairfield University), each year included a course in theology. The message was clear: God was in charge, and our job was to find our place in His Divine Plan. That was the reason to study and work and live, to find our place. You couldn’t know God’s Plan, so you could never be sure you found your place, but there was no doubt it involved being good. So, in the end, you studied, worked, and lived to be good.

But being good wasn’t easy. It seemed almost that being bad was the natural inclination, and some incentive was needed to be good. Eternal reward and punishment were offered as such, and these seemed to work for some people. They worked for me when I was young, but faded gradually as I grew older. Now I care nothing for ulterior motives. I want only to be authentic, true. But that’s not easy as distinguishing true from false is a struggle. But it’s one I can, and do more regularly, win, because truth can be measured objectively. It is what doesn’t change. The good, on the other hand, is just a matter of opinion (Hamlet in Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2), and what seemed good yesterday, e.g., antibiotics, fossil fuel, football, hotdogs, whole-fat dairy, wealth, may seem bad tomorrow. And what seems good for one person, e.g., winning points in a contest, can seem bad for another. There’s none of that subjectivity with regard to the truth. What’s true for me is true for everyone forever, like the laws of gravity, buoyancy, electricity, thermodynamics, etc. They never change. They’ve made of nothing, And they rule the universe.

Distinguishing the true from the false is a uniquely human struggle. No other species does it. Proficiency in this struggle is what we call wisdom. It comes from practice by learning from mistakes, and that learning, typically correlates with age. And that’s why I’m writing this blueprint. I’m older than I’ve ever been. If I wait to get wiser, I may be in no condition to write, so what follows is the truth as best I see it.

No one mentions God in public school anymore, and, when clergy mention God, it’s often with tongue in cheek. If you can’t see it, or hear, taste, feel, or smell it, it doesn’t exist. After the Holocaust, how could it be otherwise? What kind of God allows a Holocaust? And who would need such a God? Never were there more prayers, more fervently uttered. No God could ignore such prayers, but those most worthy prayers were ignored. Draw your own conclusion. And if those prayers could be ignored, don’t imagine that your petty prayers will be answered. There is no God, no plan, and you’ve got no purpose. You may as well live it up until you die. Study to make more money so you can wallow in more luxury. If that works for you, there’s no point in reading further.

It doesn’t work for me. After a life of tears and laughter, I need more than ashes and fading memories. Something has to last. But nothing lasts. Heraclitus (500 BCE) made that insight famous, but seems never to have realized its importance. Nothing lasts lasts, i.e., never changes. That’s why we say it’s true. Nothing lasts but truth. Thales (585 BCE), Pythagoras (510 BCE), and Archimedes (220 BCE) found truths in nature and math. Objects float, for instance, if they displace a weight of water greater than their own weight, and sink if they don’t. This law never changes. It has neither weight nor volume nor caloric value, i.e., it isn’t made of anything. Yet it exists always and everywhere, and rules all matter and energy. Laws of nature prove spirit is real. You’d think more would be make of this in school, but it’s never even mentioned. The focus of science is on utility. But what is useful today, e.g., the internal combustion engine, can be useless tomorrow.

The ancients who founded Judeo-Christianity (1500 BCE) didn’t practice science, and didn’t know any laws of nature. They were just guessing when they posited a spiritual and eternal God: God is Spirit (John 4:24). The eternal God is your refuge (Deut. 33:27). And they were lucky. Without evidence, they concluded that truth exists and that it is spiritual, universal, eternal, and one (Deut. 6:4). And those are precisely the characteristics of scientific truth. If the ancients had stopped there, their guess would qualify now as evidence-based theology. But they didn’t stop there. Without evidence, they personified this God as father (Deut. 32:6; Mark 14:16). From that sheer speculation, they concluded that God loves us (Isaiah 54:10; John 3:16). It made for a cozy religion. But it’s faith-based, i.e., there’s no evidence for it. All evidence hints at the converse. Creation, as we can see it from its remnants, was violent. To call it the Big Bang is the supreme understatement. The Sun is an ongoing hydrogen bomb, and the sky is full of suns. And when ours runs low on gas, in a billion years or so, it will expand to engulf the near planets including earth. There’ll be nothing gentle or kind about that.

The sheer speculation that God loves us like a father loves his kids led to the assumption that suffering is bad. Suffering is difficult. At times it can seem impossible. At times it can be worse than that. How could God permit it, e.g., the Holocaust, hunger, poverty, cancer? Perhaps there is no God. But there is now irrefutable evidence for eternal, universal, spiritual truth that rules all matter and energy, i.e., the laws of nature. We could call that collection of laws, God. It’s just not personal. It doesn’t love us, and it doesn’t care about suffering. If we want to know the truth, we have to open our minds to a different perspective. God exists, but not as a man in the sky.

Here’s a stretch: Perhaps suffering isn’t bad. Childbirth ranks among the worst forms of suffering, but no one would call it bad. Endurance is our most basic sport. Clearly, we can suffer willingly, even enthusiastically. And look at the results. Without suffering, there’d be no compassion, no empathy, no children, and no sense of victory. Let’s stop assuming it’s bad. It’s difficult, but that’s why knowing truth is a challenge.

When we are wise, we embrace austerity as our way of life. That’s why religious orders require vows of poverty. Austerity may not require overt suffering, but it definitely demands sacrifice. And unless we embrace that sacrifice, we will perish as a nation and a species. And let’s be careful about what we attribute to fathers.

They’re ruled by testosterone, and there’s nothing loving about that. Any lioness that leaves her cubs alone with the lion finds fewer cubs when she returns. If a father is kind, as mine was, he’s motherly. But even mothers are cruel if they’re not herbivores. The omnivores and carnivores are eating each other alive. Is there worse suffering than being eaten alive? That ought to put an end to any speculation that God is kind. I would have designed hawks to eat beans instead of bunnies. But that’s not holy. Humans perpetrate God-like cruelty by exploiting animals and other humans for fun, fame, and profit. Look at what the Nazis did for their Fatherland. Look at boxing, football, hockey, hunting, fishing, trapping, rodeo, and bull-fighting. These are the fatherly sports. Aren’t they fun? It’s as if men have never heard of Elvis (Don’t Be Cruel).

Truth exists, and it fits the Judeo-Christian definition of God, i.e., spiritual, universal, eternal, and one. One? What’s