Permission to wax philosophic and a change for the better

I don’t often have bouts of philosophical meandering. I’m not a florid person. Nor am I extravagant in the way I speak. I’m an introvert, through and through. Get me going on a topic and I’ll talk like the wind but try and get me to talk about myself and I’ll go quiet, get awkward and simply give up the ghost and end the conversation – hopefully politely. I think that now, however, is the time for some philosophical self-indulgence.

Ideas matter. Without them we are like helpless infants, groping for an understanding that never comes, seeing only a frightening, disconnected morass of concrete perceptions that never unify into any sort of understanding. Thankfully no one really operates on this level. But ideas are only helpful if they are true. I don’t want to get into a difficult debate about the nature of truth, suffice it to say I believe that there can be objective truth – that is to say there are facts that can be discovered that pertain to reality that exist independent of our wishes and beliefs. To put into standard philosophical terms; A = A.

I don’t think it’s presumptuous to say that few us every check the premises by which we live. Even those of us that do, do so on such narrow terms that we see reality clearly in only one field (we call these people academics, or scientists) and more often than not hold false beliefs in other areas of our lives (seemingly without contradiction). I by no means exclude myself from this group. My speciality is human behaviour, and I have a lot to learn, but I am least part-way rational about it; but let me ask you, how much of your understanding of human behaviour is based on superstition? Folklore? Old wives tales?

If you shirk off this accusation, consider this; you see a teenager dressed in a full tracksuit, cap down low, swaggering along the street. You immediately tense; will he attack me? Abuse me? Do something uncomfortable and then accuse me of something? What is this based on? Past experience? Partly, but most of us only rarely see these things, instead it’s an image, carefully crafted and reinforced by social mores, media, news, discussions with likeminded individuals and so on. What if he helps an old woman carry her bags? Or inquires about your day in a friendly manner? Will you change your opinion of people who broadly fall into this category? Unlikely. Instead you’ll write it off. The carefully constructed image is too psychologically comfortable to just cast away.

Another good example is with politicians. Have you ever noticed how quickly you are able to explain away a mistake made by someone “on your side”, whereas you can quick and harsh when you notice a mistake by someone on the other side of the fence?

The truth is most people don’t understand human behaviour. Those of us that do profess to understand it will be the first to acknowledge what we do know is only preliminary. The science is young. What we do know, however, is powerful; very powerful.

The world is awash in problems, big ones, small ones, ones that affect the whole of humanity and some that affect just you. The time isn’t right yet to make changes on a global scale. I’ll discuss global change another time. What we can change, however, is the little problems. The ones that affect you.

And now to the crux of my point. You see now why I soliloquised on waxing philosophic at the start of this blog post, I guess I am in a reflective mood, and I’m a stickler for developing (hopefully) coherent arguments. So here goes; I am overweight.

It’s not exactly a secret, and those who know me, know that I am quite open and honest. I’m not avoiding the issue, I’m not ashamed really. It’s just how I am. How I’ve always been. Unfortunately this makes the root of my behaviour incredibly difficult to pinpoint. Why did I start over-eating when I was so young? I have my theories but they are private. The problem is that I over-eat. Or, more precisely, over-eat the bad things.

All the standard explanations fail me. I am not from a lower socio-economic status, I do not live in a food “desert”, I don’t lack adequate cooking skills, and whilst I am hardly well-off I can easily afford healthy food – and when I can’t, I can usually create something passably healthy from very cheap fare. So what am I to do? Should I just admit I have terrible will power? Consign myself to the status of terminal (and I mean that in the full implication of the word) obesity? Pass off the responsibility to my genes?

No. I know too much about human behaviour to give in to those sorts of explanatory fictions. Essentially they pass the buck.

So I’ve decided to apply the skills I know best to solve this problem once and for all. You may or may not have heard of the 5:2 diet, I won’t go into an explanation in this blog but you can get the ebook cheaply, and find out loads of info on the web. Basically it involves healthy eating interspersed with light fasting. I’ve heard good things from colleagues and I intend to trial it for at least two months to see if it has any effect. I’ll be weighing myself (and providing waist measurements) daily and graphing them to try and ascertain any affect. Part of the behaviour intervention will be posting it online. Public commitment is a powerful motivator. Not to mention it’s a wonderful learning opportunity for me.

There is, however, a truth beneath the truth (a world below the world) that I want to highlight. You can’t save the world with grandiose actions and sweeping changes. Not the American Revolution, not the Communist Revolution, not the internet, not globalisation, or the EU, or Mini-skirts of Mary Quant (god bless her!) can have the long term effects they are meant to. They can lay the foundation, create the architecture, provide the environment, but ultimately individuals must decide to make the changes. It gives new meaning to that tired old phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world”. But far from the boring platitudes of aging hippies and new-age wannabes, this simple phrase hides a simple truth; behaviour is something the individual does. Society doesn’t “behave”, governments don’t “behave”, and even businesses don’t “behave”. We do. And we make a choice in every situation how we are going to behave. Good or bad, rational or irrational (and is there a difference between good and rational?), the outcome is for us to decide. So I want to be an example, a small, simple, example of what we can do to make the world a better place.

I won’t post the graph until more info has been collected, it looks a little sad now and wholly unhelpful.