The Fascism of Well Being

 
At the dawning of the information age, we are told that greater knowledge will bring greater freedoms like modern medicine wanted to fix all our ills with vaccination. What becomes of man when obsessed with his own sense of well being, he starts to believe in the science of his mind rather than the poetry of his heart.

Some film directors need to first create a space into which the audience enters to follow the story. Michelangelo Antonioni sets many of his stories (usually about human relationships) in the fraught open spaces of our times, tense with the discomfort of an uneasy rapport between nature and artifice, in which his characters are struggling to attain a sense of freedom. Earlier Frizt Lang cast the city as a claustrophic juggernaut of willful control in his film 'Metropolis' At the end we learn that the scheming mind and the labouring hand will only be joined by the mediation of the heart.

Modern politics focuses principally on inhabitants of big urban centres. It intends to ensure for everone, above all else, the attainment of the artificially created sense of well being. The policies are for all to abide so we must start quitting bad habits and conform to height/weight ratios, alcoholic percentages, unrealistic speed limits etc. but in practice, healthy lifestyles cost money and still prevail mainly among the well dressed elite. This insistence on what's good for us through policy reminds of the pleasure based authoritaniasm foreseen in Huxley's Brave New World. "Enforced happiness is the greatest of tyrannies.", said the wise Australian poet, Peter Porter.