HEALTH NAZIS AND THE CULT OF THE PERFECT BODY: SOME POLEMICAL OBSERVATIONS.

This paper explores critically some of the implications of Health Fascism, an emerging movement, as of September 1990, aimed at exercising increasing vigilance and control over what people put into their bodies and what they put their bodies into. Also, this paper offers some reflections about the movement's direction, meaning, and ultimate ends. Just as the Third Reich motored through Europe a piece at a time, Health Nazis are rapidly creating a certain kind of proprietary fascism in the name of health. Just as German National Socialism sought an Aryan social order that would stand for a 1,000 years, the new Health Nazis seek a kind of organic utopia where health, morality and well-being may live undaunted by the resident dangers of life. This paper argues that there is surely nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of either health or virtue. But to equate morality with health as a way of facilitating conformity to certain moral values is, at the same time, to obscure the very moral consequences of such conformity. Both the ends and means of that shared ideology known as healthism are frought with troubling questions about what will have to be done in order to achieve that which is, according to the paper, an unachievable goal.