The Terrain Theory of Social Disease/Contagion;

or, The Whale

Jon

I take it for granted that most readers who have come across this stack are somewhat familiar with “terrain theory” in the health context.

But for exposition sake, and to get my own cognitive wheels turning, allow me to refresh your memory with a condescending, simplified version of the germ vs. terrain theory debate.

Here goes:

Sometimes people get sick. Usually it is because they ate something rotten or drank too much booze or were poisoned by a jilted lover. But sometimes it isn’t.

So, if no gas-station sushi, box wine, or conniving ex is involved, why do people get sick?

Well, sometimes we notice that people get sick despite no obvious (such as the aforementioned) reasons, and then subsequently other people around them get sick too, with the same symptoms.

Yet we don’t see any reason for the first person getting sick, and we certainly don’t see any behavioral factors (beyond proximity) for the subsequent people getting sick too.

Now, commonsense logic says either one of two things may be happening, either some mutual source of illness is making everyone sick. Or the first person is somehow communicating their illness to the others.

In either case, whatever is doing the work must be invisible, since otherwise we would see what is doing it.

Now, there are five possible reasons things can be invisible:

1. They are just the type of thing that doesn’t have a body and thus isn’t visible, like numbers or souls.

2. They have a body, but fail to interact with light in a manner which allows us to see them, like radio waves or shadow people/other entities with subtle bodies.

3. They are too large—like the giant cat whose collar contains the gem which contains our visible universe

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4. They are too far away or are obscured from our line of sight—like India or Disney land.

5. They are too small—like the little blobs and bugs we found after we figured out how to make microscopes.

Now, the fifth possibility captured the imagination of many men of science a few hundred years ago. They hypothesized that what is responsible for the communication of illness is little bugs or blobs, too small to see, jumping from person to person and taking up residence—germinating— in their sequence of hosts.

Thus, germs. Germs make you sick (that is, when it isn’t bad sushi, too much booze, jealous lovers, etc. doing the job). This is basic germ theory.

Now there’s a slight problem with this theory, namely, these little fucking bugs and blobs are all over the place. They’re everywhere! If they are what makes you sick, you would be sick all the time. But yet, for most people (excluding the properly named sickly) sickness is an exceptional state. The norm is health.

This is hard to square with the idea that it’s the lil bugs and blobs making us sick.

Thus, one has “terrain theory” which says the bugs and blobs aren’t what’s important, it’s the overall state of the body and its health. Caste your seed into fallow ground and it will not grow. Thus, it’s not the germs that drive the germination of disease, but the terrain, the field, our bodies.

Now both theories have incompatible strawman/bailey versions, and mutually pretty compatible steelman/motte versions. Respectively,

The steelman/motte version of terrain theory reiterates the obvious truth that vigorous healthy people rarely get sick, and when they do it is usually minor. That germs are everywhere all the time, and most people are healthy most of the time. Thus maintaining that healthy state is the key to preventing disease, even if germs may serve as the catalyst for disease when a state of health is not maintained, or in rare cases, even despite such maintenance for particularly nasty bugs (like ebola).

The strawman/bailey version of terrain theory says all that matters is ones own bodily (or spiritural) state, that there are no germs or they are completely inconsequential, and any apparent communication of disease is due to some kind of mutual exposure to toxins (or radio waves, or other mischievous subtle bodied entities). If one could keep one’s body free of toxins or one’s karma perfect, disease would be impossible.

The steelman/motte version of the germ theory is concedes that the overall state of health is very important, but insists never the less that there is just too much evidence of direct transmission excluding any possible mutual contamination for germs not to be a significant factor in communicable diseases. “We performed a series of tests…”

The strawman/bailey version of germ theory states that germs are the cause of illness, no germs-no illness. If we could sufficiently disinfect ourselves, perhaps just constantly be dipped in hand sanitizer and flushed with antibiotics, disease would be impossible, regardless of how fat, sickly, or evil we allow ourselves to become.

Most sane people today adopt some compatible mixture of of the steelman/motte versions of these two arguments.

The fringe prefers to emphasize terrain theory. While the mainstream tends to (over-)emphasize the germ theory. But this is probably because it’s much easier to sell drugs using the germ theory— but to be fair it’s also kind of pointless most of the time to “focus on the terrain” and just tell fatties to stop eating so damn much or tell San Francisco bath house goers to ease up a bit on the poppers and anonymous all-night piss orgies.

Now, medicine overall is not very effective or interesting, so the reader may ask, “Jon, what’s your point in all this exposition?”

Well, one thing I think any observant person of recent years has noticed is the apparent “social contagion” going on. That we appear to be ill as a society, in an analogous way to how the body can be ill. And that illness seems to be spreading.

Yet we seem stuck in the idea that what is making us ill is something analogous to the germ theory of disease—some perverse ideology: socialism, feminism, communism, cynical race-hucksterism, gender goblinism, etc. is infecting the social body politic like a virus or bacterium, and that this virus/bacterium needs to be fought directly and purged and social health would return. Or if we could build a homestead and isolate ourselves and our families from the social infection agent, we’d at least be able to save ourselves.

But I think that by analogy this “germ theory” of social-political illness is mostly incorrect, and what we really have is a problem better described under the analogy of “terrain theory”.

Basically, perverse, decadent, degenerate and destructive ideologies and social behaviors are always bubbling up—but to a healthy society they either cause no issue or whatever they do cause is the socio-political equivalent of a runny nose.

Be we aren’t a healthy society, the terrain is completely fucked, we are basically the moral-social equivalent of this:

The Whale, (see what I did there?)

And thus, no matter how mild or fierce the proximate, socio-politico-ideological germs are, we aren’t going to save ourselves by their mere removal or avoidance. A deeper reorganization and salvation of the social “terrain”, a recovery of actual health, has to take place, or some other diseases will just replace them, even if we manage to kill these versions.

Or it won’t, and we’ve passed the social point of no-return much as I presume the character above has passed to point-of-no-return with regard to his physical health

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And I tend to think that that is the case.

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Saw it in a movie!

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I haven’t seen the movie and probably won’t.

Source: Notebooks of an Inflamed Cynic