There’s a lot of interest in ‘care’ at the moment. And justifiably so. I suspect young people faced with a world which threatens to dissolve into chaos are feeling stressed at a deep level. So there’s discussion about care and systems of care. Cassie Thornton, for example, has her hologram project (http://feministeconomicsdepartment.com/hologram/) and there’s a ‘museum of care’ looking at alternatives globally (https://museum.care/).

Of course, there can be a psychosomatic element to illness, the pharmaceutical industry is invasive and profit driven, the gene-determined analyses are over determining, the health system is often something of a production line, the data collection is frightening, and the current government control of movement and interaction through regulation, is, at least, tedious. Compliance is the order of the day and people react.

I am of the belief that I can do something about my own health through daily exercise, awareness of the natural world and its rhythms, being careful not to get clogged up with unexpressed emotion, monitoring the effects of the depressive/neurotic/bureaucratic encounter, protecting the child within and holding on to improvisation, play and the ideal of the common sense of the organic group. I’m not faced with twelve hour shifts or immersed in dense bureaucratic systems so this could be critiqued as privilege, but it costs no money and only takes half an hour each morning and then again at the end of the day. While I will talk about this to friends and family I find it mainly my own business and don’t preach.

But currently, some wellness, mindfulness, holistic, natural health advocates, who might be saying something like the above, have formed an alliance with conspiracy theorists. And then, marketing and profit comes into the equation, branding takes place, and the guru stares from the screen with intent eyes. The whole notion of self-determination and freedom become absurd. The web creates an intensity, so that a hesitant impulse can be magnified and marketed into something resembling a cult, like a virus invading and amplifying itself.

The debate becomes then, a three way one between the neo-feudal state capitalist system in all its variations, the communalists cum anarchists, and the new age/conspiracy theorists morphing into neo fascists, played out on the net and sometimes in the streets. It adds up to a struggle that makes the playful investigations of Freud and Jung feel from another world.