Steppin' Out

Joe Jackson devotes a section of his website to a serious, well researched pamphlet he has written: Smoke, Lies and the Nanny State. (PDF)

A valetudinarian is someone neurotically obsessed with the state of their health (a close cousin of a hypochondriac, which is someone who always thinks they’re sick). Such a condition leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation, as does the parallel obsession with ‘safety’. The idea of ‘zero-risk’ is also fashionable, but I believe that the more we are encouraged by authorities to demand it, the more we are infantilised. A mature person should accept that ‘zero-risk’ is an illusion.

The smoking issue is part of a much broader one, in which ‘public health’ is less and less
about healing the sick and more and more about social engineering of the well. And we play right along. We’re allowing our pleasures, habits, quirks and imperfections to be redefined as syndromes needing (profitable) therapeutic intervention. We are constantly in search of scapegoats and panaceas, and seem (particularly in the USA) to see life as a rather desperate game, to be played very hard, with whoever lives the longest being the winner. The trouble is that we’re forgetting how to enjoy playing.

Have we created a fertile ground for a Jihad against tobacco? Or is our culture actually being created by antismokers and similar crusaders themselves? I think it’s probably a bit of both.
Either way, it gives me the creeps.

Hat-tip: Samizdata

Philosophy Posted by jk at January 7, 2008 5:28 PM