Observations About the World, Part Twenty-Six

Photograph of the Atlas globe

Observations about Obesity |
Thursday – March 26, 2026

Obesity is perhaps the most indicative tragedy of the modern world, a true monstrosity. But why is this the case, why obesity? Well try to read some of my earlier texts about this subject before you go on with this post, as they provide crucial information. Here is a link to all my posts containing the word "fat".

    Of course, it would be all too easy perhaps, to assume that there is some kind of addiction, really some kind of demon, behind the ever growing rate of obesity, particularly in the so-called "developed" world, and yes this would surely be a part of the problem, but you see it would be just as well to suggest that ideological indoctrination plays an even greater part, because after all the issue is not one of mere individualism; obesity is at this point a global and systemic, as certain particularly and conspicuously hip persons would refer to it, problem and really obesity must be understood on a population level, and this is why it would make sense that persons in, again, "developed" nations should be expected to be fatter and more likely obese. Of course, the mechanical and material definition of obesity is entirely quantitative; here I am of course referring to the ratio between weight (mass as measured in some unit) and length squared (measured in some unit), this ratio is colloquially referred to as BMI (Body Mass Index). The WHO (the World Health Organization) defines obesity as a BMI over 30kg/square meters and overweight as a BMI over 25kg/square meters, which puts roughly half or more of the population in any given "developed" nation at or above the overweight limit, and it is estimated that between 10 – 20% of the population in any given industrialized country is obese, that is at or above the obesity limit; of course, these are quantitative measures and as such they often fail to capture the entire image, and I should also point out that the definition of a so-called "developed" country is very questionable, and in this connection it must also be mentioned that many countries that fall outside the range of being defined as "developed" still are industrialized enough and modernized enough to have similar if not worse levels of obesity, and in fact the most obese country on the planet is "American Samoa", which is not an independent country, and perhaps the American prefix in the name should be a clue as to why these people are so fat. Of course, another technicality is the mathematical nature of quantifications: since they, in this case BMI, fail to actually describe anything but the substantive, they fail to take into account the essence, which means that there are certain and perhaps exceptional individuals that are defined as obese, yet they have very little fat, but again these are technicalities and for the most part it appears that BMI is good enough, at least BMI is good enough to describe a material problem.

    My view on BMI is, as I previously stated, that it is good enough for matters of material magnitude, such as obesity, but I do believe that the BMI scale must be shifted to the left, that is to say: I believe that the BMI scale should indicate obesity when a person has an index greater than or equal to 25kg/square meters, thus I also believe that the BMI scale should indicate that a person is overweight when he or she has an index greater than or equal to 20kg/square meters but less than 25kg/square meters. A good formula for describing when a person is overweight would be |x - 22½| ≥ 2½, that is to say anything above the number 20 is overweight and anything above the number 25 is obese, and subsequently it would be enough to use the formula x ≥ 25 to define obesity (unit: mass/length squared). Again, these may be technical points, but I do not mind technicalities when describing a material problem, because obesity in particular is a material problem and could be understood by material means, but I should point out that the metaphysical description of obesity would likely fade in and out in the corporeal sense, which would mean that most men would fail to understand such a description. Whether there any material means cold "solve" obesity in the future is another matter, but my guess is that yes, material means will eventually be provided that could completely cure obesity, but such measures would of course miss the overriding cosmological point: only a very depraved civilization could allow these monstrosities and tragedies, and many people even go as far as to "accepting" and promoting obesity as an "alternative lifestyle". If it was considered a bohemian and libertarian style to be fat, it was sure to be adopted, but these days it would be just as well to argue that the opposite is true, that being skinny is considered bohemian and libertarian, and this is connected to "the compressed time syndrome" that I described in "The End of History".

    There is also a beauty aspect when it comes to obesity that is very interesting: most fat people are not considered beautiful, and most beautiful people are hardly fat, and this is a profound truth, especially in the current age of the Kali Yuga. Yet there is still a kind of quality to speak of, even though this quality has almost been completely stripped of its essence, namely biological beauty, and for most people it seems that this biological and naturalistic beauty contains one of the last vestiges of the primordial body, of the essence that shapes each substance, and this is why it would be quite right to assert that obesity has to be not only a material monstrosity in the literal sense of the word, but a metaphysical monstrosity – a true tragedy. How hierarchy is always expressed regardless of the relentless modern insistence on egalitarianism. Verily, profane science would suggest many things about obesity, and it is clear even to the moderns that obesity is something bad, truly something evil. Let obesity serve as a kind of catharsis for the modern age: allow yourself to psychically gain your ground when you realize how obesity came to be; I believe this could be a potential relief from mental illness, and it is also true, while I am on the subject, that obese people, generally, are mentally disturbed. I do not intend to dwell in terms of psychoanalysis, but the connection between a sound mind and a sound weight is striking.

Reginald Drax – March 26, 2026.