by Ethan Johnson
January 12, 2007
There is a passage on the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site that I like to harp on every so often, regarding the first movie in the Matrix trilogy:
To cover itself, the movie throws in a quick mention that the human energy source powering the machines is combined with a source of fusion. This is like getting on a 747 and having the captain explain in great detail that the plane is rubber band powered, then add that it also has four jet engines. Guess which power source gets it off the ground, duh.
I have been wanting a name for this phenomenon, where someone describes a process one way but is revealed to work another way. For example, it's like a fast-food restaurant claiming to use "secret sauce" in their food, but internally the employees are shown that it's "just" mayo or salad dressing. Deficit spending is another guise, where the illusion of prosperity is given (to quote the late Senator Lloyd Bentsen) but in reality massive debt is accrued.
Due to some happy accidents when link surfing, I seem to have found the term I am looking for: Breatharian.
One inediate who has been attracting followers to breatharianism is Australian Ellen Greve, a.k.a. Jasmuheen. According to Greve, a former financial advisor, we can get all the nutrition we need from prana, the universal life force. She is the author of Living on Light: A Source of Nutrition for the New Millennium, a 21-day program that will allow the body to stop aging and attain immortality by living solely on light.
Greve claims she hasn’t eaten since 1993; yet, she admits “she drinks herbal teas and confesses to the occasional ‘taste orgasm’ involving chocolate or ice cream” (Sunday Times Online UK, Sept. 26, 1999). She also admits “if I feel a bit bored and I want some flavour, then I will have a mouthful of whatever it is I’m wanting the flavour of. So it might be a piece of chocolate or it might be a mouthful of a cheesecake or something like that.” Several interviewers have found her house full of food, but she claims the food is for her husband, who once went to prison for misappropriating a pension fund. Apparently he hasn’t seen the light and is unable to live on prana yet (Walker and O’Reilly 1999).
Suggested use: "George W Bush's breatharian tax cuts have contributed significantly to the national debt." (Where the cure contributes to the disease, or as Dear Old Dad phrases it, one puts the shadow in another place.)
Another example: "The breatharian economic principles that drove the dot-com boom, and then bust in the mid to late 1990s insisted that companies could thrive indefinitely without ever turning a profit." (Some companies did survive the dot-com bust, most notably Amazon, by - you guessed it - turning a profit.)
See?
Another opportunity for breatharian thought comes by way of various business models and philosophies, such as Six Sigma. I won't go so far as to say that Six Sigma is a complete and total sham, however I will note that I am aware of a few businesses that claimed to be "all about" Six Sigma, failed at it, covered their tracks, and then insisted that they adhered to "Six Sigma". Same with ISO-9001 (etc).
Breatharian thought (as I am defining it here) is rooted deeply in "keeping up appearances", and is identifiable either through covert activities to create a specific impression, or overt actions that oppose the stated ideal. But this differs from mere hypocrisy in that the hypocrite is loathed because he or she doesn't even bother to act in the manner that he or she claims to be the ideal, such as the finger-wagging moralist who snorts cocaine and enjoys horse porn. Hypocrisy in the business sense would be declaring "keeping jobs safe at home" to be the ideal while outsourcing 99% of the company's operations overseas. Breatharianism in the business sense would be to claim that sole entrepreneurship is the key to success, only to reveal that a virtual army of outsourced labor/resources was pressed into service to keep the business afloat.
Another inspiration for breatharianism is Wiley Brooks, who heads The Breatharian Institute of America. For the past thirty years or so, Brooks has been claiming that we don’t need food, water, or sleep. He asks “if food is so good for you, how come the body keeps trying to get rid of it?...Man was not designed to be a garbage can.”
I trust I don't need to explain what our digestive system does with the food that we consume.
Nor should I have to explain how governments accrue budget surpluses, although I wish someone would have taken the time to give it a once-over with George W Bush, who said:
But they’ve got it backwards. The surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money. Now is the time to reform the tax code and share some of the surplus with the people who pay the bills.
Then again, depending on who is talking, the reasons for national economic prosperity or decline are fraught with breatharianism.
Politics and economics aren't the only magnets for breatharian thought. Linux comes to mind, where people who trash the Windows operating system (or more to the point, Microsoft itself) run WINE to keep at least a toe dipped in the Windows arena. Running non-free (proprietary) codecs and the like is another sore point. When "open source" computing is hailed as the ideal, but the OS is propped up by non-free codecs, that would be breatharian computing. I must note here that Linux is rooted heavily in choice, which means one has proprietary/non-free code on one's computer because one chooses to, not because one must. It's possible to "just say no" to .wma files, for example. I do not consider official Linux versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader or Macromedia Flash to be "non-free" in the sense that it's being pirated somehow to bulk up the OS artificially.
Green Mountain Energy is another example of breatharian marketing, where they claim on the front end to use 90-100% "green" energy, yet on the back end, they have been cited as being over-reliant on natural gas (which is not renewable, a key "green" tenet). Those of you who think you're being "green" because you chose that utility company may want to dig a little deeper into their claims. I do advise to evaluate counter-claims against that company with the same amount of tenacity and skepticism.
Go forth, and make "breatharian" 2007's word of the year. It can't happen without you. <EM>
