OK guys, I have this thought or two about plastic and the way I can feel its creeping tendrils making connections to other parts of my brain makes me think this could get awful conspiracy real quick, so…you’ve been warned.
If I had a time machine, I would take it to a time before plastic existed. I’ve thought this for a long time. So that’s not very far, right? Early 1900s I’m guessing? Because I know the early 1900s are when petroleum-based molecules were first being patented, because I know that that was when the anti-trust stuff was “breaking up” the Standard Oil monopoly, quotations because I think they just moved on to creating new monopolies - because that’s when the Carnegies sent Abraham Flexner to every single medical school in the US and Canada in order to write a report about them that was used to discredit and shutter every kind of school of medicine that wasn’t oriented around patentable-petroleum-based pharmaceuticals, and was backed by $100 million dollars of 1900s money to “help.” Because every kind of medicine until then wasn’t good.
OK, so - I think this all ties into germ theory, and the need for us to be afraid of everything, which then birthed absolutely MONSTER industries, like - plastic.
When I’m working in the deli at the grocery store I probably put on and take off and throw away minimum 10 pairs of plastic gloves a shift. I put things into plastic containers after taking them out of plastic containers. In fact, I can’t at the moment think of a single thing I do that isn’t taking something out of plastic and putting it into plastic, all of which will be thrown away very very soon.
And if I didn’t, it would be called dirty.
What the fuck did people do before plastic??
Don’t say, “They died when they were 30.” That number is based on incorporating early childbirth and child deaths into the averages. As those rates went down the averages have gone up. Damn I should talk to
about those figures.And don’t say, “They died.”
It’s not that simple. And honestly after the past three years I have never trusted history-as-reported less than I do now.
Feeling soiled is a conflict identified by German New Medicine. I’ve read the article on it a few times on learninggnm and haven’t learned a whole lot except that it’s part of a whole list of things that can affect you through your psyche and create a cascade of symptoms that we are taught to then panic about.
And that’s honestly it - affecting people through their psyche and then blaming it on invisible enemies that can’t possibly be as much of a problem as people think, divorcing them from any faith that what their bodies do in reaction to a thing could be completely and entirely sensical, even pitting them against their bodies entirely, is a brilliant bloody way to get people to BUY A LOT OF STUFF, BUILD ENTIRE WORLDS (not just industries)…worlds where every single thing is wrapped in, shipped in, or made of plastic. A petroleum-based product. Almost like a monopoly on the world stage.
Would we have ever bought into single-use glass in the same way? Would we have believed that everything had to be wrapped in paper or it we couldn’t be sure it was clean? Is that what we did before plastic? What was life like, dammit?
How did people live? They did live. They engaged in food trade and bought and sold things. The population still expanded. A lot.
Plastics have other uses, of course. They’ve made packaging and shipping things so much lighter.
I don't think that’s necessarily a good thing. If you observe just what’s true - packaging and shipping things all around the world! It does sound pretty neat. And it also brought us farther and farther from our food, from our communities, from our desire to even engage in creating trades locally. Most things in our lives have very little to do with the people we meet and the place we live and I don’t know that that’s a good thing even though I willingly participate in it right now.
Plastics and germ theory go hand in hand in my eyes. Convince everyone that everything is dirty and they’ll reach for any placebo effect you’re selling, ignoring their own senses and outsourcing the responsibility for ever deciding.
A woman at the deli sheepishly asked me when her deli meat should be used by, and I told her I just trust my nose and also made something up to appease her.
We have to be aware of anything that divorces us from a trust of our senses and ourselves and our ability to decide things. If you start paying attention, you’ll realize that is almost our entire world today.
It’s taken me years to be ok with my body hair, and somehow that seems relevant to me right now.
Just to raise more questions for you about everything, check out the fabulous human behind the Raw Meat Experiment.
Brilliant connections that you drew here. The connections you made make sense to me. And the "improvements" to birthing processes in the early 1900s - courtesy of a combination of the Flexner Report and Dr. Joseph DeLee - certainly did not improve birth outcomes, but worsened infant mortality over the course of the next several decades.