Brief Introduction to Big Body Thinking
“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” - Sophocles
"We live in the age of corporate organisms. Though no formal announcements have been issued it's becoming harder to ignore that they have wrested control of the earth from Homo sapiens and supplanted us as the planet's dominant species. It is they - the multinationals, government bureaucracies, religious hierarchies, military bodies, et al. - not individual humans, that generate our era's character - its patterns of wealth & poverty, its technological progress & ecological peril, its entertainment & political agenda. They have, in short, taken over, and nowhere more so than in Japan. " From "E Pluribus Yamato - The Culture of Corporate Being", Whole Earth Review, Winter 1990
Big Body thinking is a form of metamedicine that applies germ theory insights to the direst diseases of our Earth and body politic. But instead of just focusing on microscopic pathogens, it also looks for disease agents that are very, very large.
Malignant is as Malignant Does
The Big (corporate) Bodies it discovers are far larger than any individual, act like tumors in the biosphere, and draw their life force from attentional energy that they parasitize from our minds. They are the mega-organizations that have emerged amongst us with primitive growth-obsessed agendas and no heart or soul at all.
Big Body thinkers maintain that these huge hierarchical entities are true living systems and the primary agents devastating the planet, paralyzing our evolution, and killing democracy. Until we identify and deal with them as a dangerous new class of being, we will exhaust ourselves fighting their myriad symptoms and never cure their plagues.
As befits a metamedical view, Big Body diagnoses also offer prescriptions and remedies. Like most tumors, these social neoplasms can be melted back to harmless scale with the right kinds of therapy. The therapies of choice:
a) immediately strengthen the body politics' activist immune system,b) expose Big Bodies as a dangerously pathological new life form,
c) shrink them back to human scale with all legal & political means available, and
d) dejuvenalize and liberate their terminally incorporated inhabitants.
Neoplasm is an abnormal mass of tissue resulting from neoplasia (new growth in Greek), the abnormal proliferation of cells. The growth of this clone of cells exceeds, and is uncoordinated with, that of the normal tissues around it. The growth persists in the same excessive manner even after cessation of the originating stimuli… Neoplasms may be benign, pre-malignant or malignant. - Wikipedia
Big Bodies too may be benign, pre-malignant or malignant, but they all are abnormal and should be shrunk to human scale or gradually dissolved.
The most malignant Big Bodies of late have been the commercial corporations that have parasitized our natural world and attacked our social sphere with toxins, violence, lethal consumer hungers and paralyzing debt.
Moving Upstream from Single Issue Activism
In this metamedical vision, the world's activist population is the planet's true immune system and it could defend us all a lot better if it could learn to think Big.
Up until the 19th century medical practice was divided by symptoms and there were separate doctors for fevers, for diarrhea, for liverishness, gout and cramps. They didn't have a clue there were common denominators behind these various afflictions and just tried to make the symptoms that they specialized in go away.
After Pasteur and Lister, and poor Ignaz Semmelweis, physicians gradually accepted the existence of disease agents that were too small to see but could cause all manner of symptomatic harm. This enlarged vision set the stage for broad spectrum antibiotics that could treat scores of diseases and for vaccines to end smallpox, polio, and a host of other contagious ills.
Big Body thinking therefore invites another level of activism beyond single issue efforts that targets the Big cause of so many different symptoms and works to devise some broad spectrum remedies for them all.
The Vision Thing
Just as dangerous microorganisms long evaded detection by being too small to see, Big Bodies have generally escaped notice by being too damn large.
Even though they are the most powerful economic, political and legal entities in our world, when people face corporate behemoths they can't really see them very well. Some try to dismissively describe them as "legal fictions" or resort to logos or brand images or organizational charts. We can't see them yet as emerging new beings because they are not made of cells and protoplasm but of human beings and organized attentional networks.
"Does not the only way out of our dead-end lie in introducing boldly into our intellectual framework yet another category to serve for the super individual? Biology will not be able to generalize itself upon the whole of life without introducing new concepts, that it now needs to deal with certain stages of being which common experience has hitherto been able to ignore - in particular that of the "collective". Yes, from now on we envisage, beside and above individual realities, the collective realities that are not reducible to their component elements yet are in their own way just as 'objective'..." from The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1959
If the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a 'Great Being'. -- J.B.S. Haldane, Essay on Science & Ethics, 1932
In more down-to-earth terms, populist visionary Jim Hightower tried to alert us to the problem nearly a decade ago.
“Practically every progressive struggle--campaign finance reform, sweatshops, family farms, fair trade, health care for all, unionization, military spending, tax reform, alternative energy, healthy food, media access, hazardous waste dumps, redlining, alternative medicine, you name it--is being fought against one cluster of corporations or another. But it is not that corporation over there or this one over here that is the enemy. It is not one industry's contamination of our drinking water or another's perversion of the lawmaking process that is the problem--rather it is the corporation itself that must be addressed if we are to be a free people... The piecemeal approach to fighting corporate abuses keeps us spread thin, separated, on the defensive, riveted on the minutiae, and fighting on their terms. Piecemeal battles must certainly continue, for there are real and immediate corporate harms to be addressed. But it's time for our strategic emphasis to shift to the offensive, raising what I believe to be the central political issue for the new century: Who the hell is in charge here?" -- Jim Hightower, 2000
Big Body thinking seeks to answer that question in a new and effective way, and reclaim our societies and the planet from these tumorous entities and their primitive growth-obsessed hungers.
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