Chronic Disease

 

“The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”  ― Joseph Conrad

“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” ― C.S. Lewis

"All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while [d]evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed." — T. Jefferson

Time never heals

"Procrastination" comes from the suffixed Latin "pro+cras" = "for+tomorrow" ... and it remains the leading cause of death [both individual and societal] in the history of human civilizations. Why? Think of it as custom or moral inertia in which evil grows ... at first enjoyed ... then unadmitted ... then undiagnosed ... then too advanced to treat ... then fatal.

Appetite appeals as it repeals

Chronic disease begin with pleasure-seeking [or appetite] which appeals to us as an end in itself and, in so doing, appears to repeal the limits and consequences we, unconsciously at least, suspect nature [as our ever-presnt companion] might impose on our unilateral actions. This is the "liberty or labor" phase of life ... and can be quite intoxicating as it powerfully stamps our mind with an open invitation to return to its boundary-less domain where everything seems to be within and waiting for our grasp.

Custom conceals

As time progresses, we begin to "use and consume the fruit of our labor" ... known as usufruct. This is the "pursuit-of-happiness or property" phase of life in which we first encounter satisfaction of appetite and are faced with the choice of "craving more" or "sharing with the one in need" ... and we must decide which is "proper" [which word has the same etymological root as "property" and "robbery"].

This is the critical moment in any civilization, as Jefferson explained to Madison, in which "custom" is established as the basis for political authority ... and in which, as the Apostle Paul warned, "the [d]evil seeks a foothold". And it is the moment in which conscience usually fails to be heard ... not because it fails to speak ... but because it is sequestered in the right hemisphere of the brain as the left hemisphere wrests control. The critical question that must be answered at this point is

• whether "what is true of every member of the society individually is true of them all collectively" or, in other words,
  
• whether "the right of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals."

Everything that follows hinges on the answer to this question.

Pain reveals

One therapeutic purpose of pain is to raise the alarm that something is not "right" [to use Jefferson's word]. Unfortunately, treating the pain per se usually becomes the obsession that obscures and delays any diagnosis and allows the disease to progress until it is too advanced and multi-symptomed to cure without killing the hosting organism ... TOO BIG [NOT] TO FAIL.

Delay seals

It is in retrospect [ie. "backwards+looking"] that irreversible chronic disease becomes clear with lyrics which inevitably recount some story of an intelligent man being needlessly reduced to a dehumanized animal for slaughter ...

• a tragedy [tragos+ōidē = "goat, buck + song" ] as opposed to
• a comedy [kōmos+ōidē = "revel, carousal, merry-making, festival + song"].

The net-WORK of demons

In a letter to his son, storied economist Irving Fisher retrospectively identified his demons as "war, disease, degeneracy, and instability of money". We each have our own list of demons. And, if we are persistent and honest, we always find them linked in a net-work [ie. snare] of chronic diseases that can be traced back to the formulations of LIFE we chose to embrace by giving them our attention in custom which becomes more entrenched and entangled the longer we wait to examine and untangle it.