with the medicine god Aesculapius

Looking after our selves is a hardcore business. More often than not, we don’t really care about our health. Here I am talking about men. Most women I know have a couple of pharmacies inside two cupboards at home. All the pills, liquids and powders that were ever invented since the god Aesculapius and his disciples are there, awaiting their expiry date, or be taken as prescriptive potions with a religious devotion, morning, noon and evening.

The pill industry is highly profitable and as you can see on TV, it’s the battle of which chains will sell you the cheapest snake-oil, fish-oil, vitamins A B C D E F G H and more, most products encased in digestible little capsules — in their cheapest on earth retail outlet.

Once in there, with the glimmer of product-packed shelves to the rafters especially for you, you are sold that getting a better health is not a sin, by people looking far better than you. The aim is to entice you to enjoy these venuses’ health-space by the pool of a pristine tropical island (that has already been cleared of rubbish and mosquitoes). Your wallet thins out, or your bank account vanishes in smoke since you don’t have enough cash. You pay by card that’s already maxed out. By buying the products you already feel 100 per cent better. You don’t need to take the pills. It’s psychology 101.

We, males, are not impartial to a bit of healthy stuff. We do thus inflict ourselves with massive hangovers by using our only valued medicine: booze. Our pharmacy is run by Bacchus — at the pub or in the home liquor cabinet. So we suffer the massive throb, possibly mediated with the help of one aspirin found in the inner sanctum of the lady’s pharmacy. Usually it’s hard to find, because aspirin is “old-hat” and all the other newer options are stacked in front. Should we change the order of the display, there will be hell to pay.

Guys, the simple alternative is to buy your own aspirin, hide it in your cigar box and use as needed in between benders.

For women, headaches soon become migraines and are “hormonal”. Men don’t have thus luxury. Ours, male, is self-inflicted and our neurones are often begging for mercy, but the sight of a glass of beer or red ned is irresistible.

The older one gets, the longer it takes to recover, until our liver, heart and kidneys are so badly damaged, we have to abandon the quest of trying to find what is our booze limit. We’re not scientific about it. There is a lot of guesstimate. We don’t measure our glasses of red wine. Some women do and sometimes blame the bubbles in champers for the troubled head.

We, male boofheads, of course compensate by eating the three food groups: Macdonald’s, Dominos and more beer.  It’s good to maintain that lovely beer gut, the skin of which is stretched like that on a drum.

Our cells have got used to these hardcore diet since we were students and sharing a “house” (which may have been a bit brothelical) in Glebe. 

The police booze buses are a bit of a killjoy, but they help us stay moderate, especially when we are the designated driver. We don’t want to stagger along a fictitious straight line that is crooked by the time we stand up.

Beer in hand, from the tired couch for potato bags, we can only admire the young people pushing the soccer balls at the Russian FIFA world cup. They are super-healthy but they seem to protect themselves by being conservative in their play and only manage a free-kick from time to time.

In our days, we would have scored three goals already, before the kick-off. And in our days, we did not have a dedicated staff of repairpeople who could spray some anti-pain lotion on our broken limbs. We carried on, in pain till we could not get up, though we had to since there were no paramedics with stretchers. A dislocated shoulder is painful and before going onto the field to do battle, the young player, now sporting beards like Ned Kelly to show some rebellious spirit in a far too heavy armour to win a game, have a team of masseurs to warm their tense juvenile body while the coach, a fully psychologised-phd former ball-kicker himself, read them the riot act to boost their confidence which will result in a “gallant” defeat. Nothing new, except the temperature.

When we went onto the field, the ground was minus 14 Celsius, we did know we had feet attached to our frozen legs and the ball weighed a ton of ice. After the 8-nil defeat, you could always blame the guy on the other side of the backline, for playing statue with stalagmites for legs, instead of “defender”… Mind you, the guys of the other team were professionals and about twice the size we were. Tackling for the ball was a take-your-life-in-your-hand butchery and the ref was blind — or paid off. It was fun.

But in this world cup, played in magnificent Russian stadiums, that our glorious right-wing New South Wales government would deem insalubrious just to keep our developers’ bulldozers happy, is a pleasure to watch. There is a lot of theatre in the box. Attackers who are barely touched by the defenders, go into magnificent dives that deserve us lifting cards with numbers one to ten to show how we rate their Hollywoodian fall. You know these modern action movies where people get hit into the crumpling glass door, by fictitious punches, as their head do no connect with the incoming fist.

So far so good… After a few days without booze, the treatment works. Then the old arthritic pains come back with a vengeance. The old battle scars and the clarity of mind becomes untenably real…  It’s time for a Pill… a Pilsener or a red ned. Don’t be too religious about it though…

Religion is a bastard solution to an angsted brain. The Christian religions tell you that you are damaged goods. You used to enjoy an eternal life of plenty with no need for booze nor anything else. Glorious infinite boredom with angels blowing in trumpets you wish would stop. Perfection has its limits in so far to give you nothing else to do but to adore the Almighty who loves you in return forever after. All this is quite meaningless when you really and I mean really really look at this. Eternal bliss would require some shitty bits in order to recognise the magnificence of this pure concrete-set absolutism.

But we are humans with a brain that can be filled with rubbish in order to hope for better, rather than enjoy or even improve what we have. But over the years since the monkey touched the floor of the grass plains, we have designed earthly improvements that are amazing. The question of “what the f..k are we doing here” soon arose. This slow awakening led to the invention of “spirituality” which filled the brain with illusions. The social structure of the chimps in the tree tops was not enough to maintain cohesion and a more efficient breeding programme. This is where the adventure began, when there were not enough grasses for all and the land stretched beyond the horizon. Pathway had to be found out of Africa into Europe via the lands of the middle east which then would have been quite lush and more European in their vegetation. The Sahara desert was a forest and the ice was quite far south into the heart of Europe. Pathways had to be made towards the east. The monkeys now walking on two legs were protohumans, that is to say the Neanderthals and the Denisovans — and possible other species of protohumans that we have not discovered yet. By then, the new wave of Homo sapiens themselves running out grasses, possibly evolved from the Neanderthals themselves by now with a different diet of meat and carbohydrates, had also formed better associative relationships, which nature’s evolution of DNA, indicated that one could not or should not breed with one’s siblings. This complicated the relationship between tribal groups. Families had to be constructed from a mix of gene pools.

In order to control this natural construct of genetics, some rough rules had to be formulated by the “humans”. As well, the physical attributes of the “silverback” and the females, had to be managed on a more systematic level. The proportions of males and females would have been approximately what it is now and unless every one had their go at reproduction, the gene pool would weaken back to the monkey, in small groups. Thus the need to share by trial and error the various means of survival and reproduction led to more structured social interactions. The division of tasks became like a natural structure, like that that would have been observed in some other species, from deers to elephants — and ants.

Meanwhile, all these readjustments of the “thinking brain” let for more agility of the hands, better uprightness and a growing communicative skill which in turn demanded more brain space for “understanding” such development in a feed-back mechanism.

That a god created a man out of dust and then a woman out of the man makes as much sense as winning the lottery without having a ticket. It’s stupid nonsense that unfortunately still inhabits in the brains of some people today. Silly.

From then on, more streamlining happened by ageing.  The old codgers had more “experiences” at survival than the newborns or those who failed to make it by being too weak. The species of humans in comparison with other species is a weak species, with hardly any protection, nor natural attacking devices. It’s a bugger when you have to fight lions and hippos. And the further north one went, the more the need of fur became urgent. With no hair to speak of, except on the head and in the pubic areas, the humans had not much choice but to steal the hide of other animals.  The hunt was on, for food as grasses were a bit too seasonal with their offering, and for protective clothing. Invention by robbery was a massive step of discovery. Similarly, deceit to catch prey — and to fend off challenging tribes — was part of the panoply of tools, such as stones, sticks and traps…

So in modern humans, these characteristics still are at the core of our systems, with improvements:

Stones and sticks

Deceit

Control of reproduction

The rate of new inventions grafted on these concepts increased at the rate of knots, including fighting and copulating with the previous escapees of the homo species, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.

In this Leonisky philosophy we concentrate on the art of deceit that eventually led to various beliefs designed to control the ever-growing population of Homo sapiens. The evolved brains of this species needed to be streamlined to manage the social “order”.

One event that led to a massive change in these beliefs was the end of the Ice Age that changed the geographical spaces, the status of the grasses and the temperatures of the atmosphere. Nature had flipped. Humans HAD TO ADAPT — and adapt they did. Uncertainty of the next made them believe more and more that some supernatural forces were manipulating the environment.

By 10,000 BC, we, humans, started to manipulate the environment beyond its natural settings. We selected grasses and grew them especially. By then, events such as seasons and natural disasters had to be associated with behaviour of the group and supervised by a deity.

This misunderstanding was powerful. And it is the driver of much of humanity till today.  Good and Evil still appear in the words of many world leaders. Some are trying to speak a different language of evolution. It’s difficult. The deceit is ingrained deep in the fabric of this human brain. We dream. We have illusions and delusions that try to maintain our nature away from our monkey.

With the recognised anthropogenic global warming, which will change the surface of this planet very much like the end of the last Ice Age did, it’s time to revise our deceptive practices. Why? Because deception and religious practices won’t settle our relationship with the incoming changes.

Sciences are “the new thinking”, in which a truer picture of the evolution of humans in relation to the evolution of the protein soup, from which we come from. Still battling religious fallacies, sciences has no choice but to push on, explaining bit by bit, the non-god given universe.

Is this the end of deceit? Not quite. We have a long way to go and much red ned to drink. In moderation, whatever that is, of course. Cheers.

Gus Leonisky

Your local moderate philosophicaloranter