THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 467
For this very reason such a plan appears crazy and, although it hovers at least before the fight against the ageing process, it is never seriously admitted. Which is
understandable, even ante rem, because continuation in the flesh even as a wishful dream does not occur without mixed feelings, nor without horror; the legends of the
Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman demonstrate this. We do not even first need to imagine the social non­sense of an earth which is incessantly becoming
overcrowded: no entrance without any exit, no possible society without a spacious graveyard. All in all, even without grotesque visions, every organic desire for
improvement remains up in the air if the social one is not acknowledged and taken into account. Health is a social concept, exactly like the organic existence in general
of human beings, as human beings. Thus it can only be meaningfully increased at all if the life in which it stands is not itself overcrowded with anxiety, deprivation and
death.
Malthus, birth­rate, nourishment
So hardly any of the ills of the body are removed when it is seen in isolation. That is why all improvers of our situation who merely concentrate on health are so petitbourgeois
and odd, the raw fruit and vegetable brigade, the passionate herbivores, or even those who practise special breathing techniques. All this is a mockery
compared with solid misery, compared with diseases which are produced not by weak flesh but by powerful hunger, not by faulty breathing but by dust, smoke, and
lead. Of course there are people who breathe correctly, who combine a pleasant self­assurance with well­ventilated lungs and an upright torso which is flexible to a ripe
old age. But it remains a prerequisite that these people have money; which is more beneficial for a stooped posture than the art of breathing. The splendid Franziska
Reventlov wrote a book along these lines about the money complex, the root cause of which nobody can ask their doctor to remove; it is the true glutton, the main
problem, ninety per cent cancer. All the more interested, of course, was and remained the capitalist desire to cut into the social turnour by purely medical means.
Breeding, or rather that which was perpetrated with it, only constitutes the most immediately repulsive, not the sole example. But no less repulsive is the greatgrandmother
of imperialist decimation, Malthus's theory of population. While no elaborated, purely medical utopia exists, a social utopia here appeared as it were with
a medical base; by an economist, incidentally,