Gelding

From Menletter October 2010

By Tim Baehr

Castration, or gelding, is a common practice among horse breeders to make male horses more manageable and docile. I've been wondering lately if we are being gelded, and in what ways, to make us more manageable and docile in the workplace and in society in general.

Physical gelding is not at issue here except perhaps among some sex offenders. Chemical gelding is not hard to find, however. Alcohol is one of the biggies for men starting in their teens. For the boys (and it's mostly boys), Ritalin and its cousins are the drug of choice, to the extent that it is over-prescribed for boys who are merely unruly.

One insidious form of chemical gelding is through our food. Much of what we eat comes out of packages with ingredient lists that read like chemical experiments. Between sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fats and unpronounceable chemicals, these food products (as opposed to just "food") attack our well-being. They are probably contributing to our becoming a nation of overweight, obese, lethargic lumps.

More interesting are the behavioral and situational methods of gelding us. Many of us work in small, fabric-lined padded cells called cubicles. We may spend whole days, weeks, and months without much contact with our fellow workers - all the better for keeping us from comparing notes and seeing our exploitation as systemic and not personal.

Then there's the one-eyed monster in our living rooms, dispensing predigested "news," inane sitcoms, ritual violence, unreal (and scripted) "reality," and - oh, yes, sports. We can almost feel our brains rot and our stomachs expand from inactivity. And how about the other one-eyed monster, offering escapist and violent video games and pornography, sometimes both at the same time?

One thing that can really sap our energy, and our ability to think critically, is constantly being lied to. Our bosses. Advertisers. Republicans. Democrats. Tea partiers. News outlets, especially cable.

My wife claims that I am a conspiracy theorist par excellence. Maybe so. But consider this: Everything I've mentioned above involves huge corporations or conglomerates in one way or another. These companies have only two loyalties: investors (often themselves huge companies) and executives (with salaries thousands of multiples of our own and no desire to close the gap). There is huge motivation to keep us workers and consumers docile and easy to manage. It's working, too. Real income for 90% of us or so has stagnated or gone down over the past couple of decades, while it has skyrocketed for much of the executive class. And we sit here numb and docile. Don't we?

We are not about to start a revolution to bring down the large corporations or get millions of people to rediscover their ungelded selves. But we can make personal efforts to enhance our individual lives: Cut out, or cut down, on the booze. Eat real food. Get out of the cubicle and walk around, even into other departments. Move around more anyway. Watch TV more selectively. Turn off the news, or at least realize it's for entertainment and for selling stuff. Dig for more information to make better purchasing decisions, better political decisions, better life decisions.

And maybe we'll discover we've grown a pair.