Hands up if the way you think your body looks has ever made you miserable? If so, I feel for you, and I mean that. It turns out that the perceived need to control our bodies can be directly linked to loneliness. That personal resonance is what made me select today's example industry to illustrate part three of our dogma theme. This post is a tour into one specific arenas where dogma presides: where profitable facts get reframed within a worldview that sells well, yet makes us miserable.
As we saw in in the last post, Dogma begins where curiosity dies — when the desire to know gets replaced by the need to control what counts as knowledge. In that context, facts can be so removed from context that their usefullness lies in creating obedience, rather than in any truth. Foucault talks a lot about this and we will too today.

Now, when we get to apply control to ourselves, instead of having it applied to us, it can help us feel safe. It can serve as an antidote to fear. But all too often, the fear that lies behind control can have undesired effects. If you have ever dated a manipulator, you will have experienced an example of this – when control presides, connection dies. In the cult and culture of bodily control – be that for appearance or health motivations - something similar happens. Within the framework dogma – our belief in the tools for controlling our bodies, and the NEED to constantly control them, also leads to loneliness. Measurably and often, tragically. This is almost the exact opposite of what is promised – which is along the lines of hundreds of people flocking toward you like you’re in a high-gloss deodorant ad.

As you will know if you are male, non-binary, or any other gender, this is not a gender-specific problem. The market knows that regardless of who you are, or which gender you have, want or abstain from performing, it can sell you an idealised version of how to look. A version no body can live up to for more than five minutes, BUT that everybody can be convinced, via un-reason, is one they SHOULD still want and strive for. The messaging is that having such bodies will gain us acceptance, love, health and an easier life. Regardless of the fact that control of every aspect of our bodies rarely works long-term. No matter what the current, most trending factoid-based tool professes.

In this post, we enter the territory where dogma starts selling us shiny solutions and dreamlike promises in response to our fears. Particularly our fears of rejection. We look specifically at how our bodies become the the battleground on which dogma, power, self and market forces fight for dominance. In Foucauldian terms, we are looking at how power inscribes itself directly onto flesh. In Butlerian terms, we look at how bodily control is tied to identity and its performance. There will be a lot of lived experience in here too cos we are going to trace a long road from philosophy, to the sociological impacts, to the psychological impacts.
So tune in as we follow the trajectory of what happens when science delivers facts to markets, only to have those markets rip said facts from their context, and gift-wrap them in the values of capitalism. This is all about how the fixation with applying constant control to our bodies leads to massive, massive profits, but also to in-group out-group creation, policing ourselves and each other, isolation, loneliness and even the decimation of the very thing we were hoping we could polish to perfection.

Everyday Example:

“It’s Friday. Imagine you’re about to go out to a staff do where someone you quite fancy is likely to turn up. But you’ve had one of those days — work was tedious and awful, a friend sent you snarky texts, the when you got home the cat had pissed on your bedding. You glance in the mirror and somehow, everything is wrong: your face, your clothes, your posture, even the way you stand. Maybe you notice a bit of puffiness in your face, or the hairline that’s not quite what it used to be, a lack of desired musculature or the gut you swore you’d eliminate after last Christmas. You start cataloguing faults like evidence in a trial against yourself. Jesus. What is he/ she/ they going to think of YOU looking like THIS. You must have gained weight or aged suddenly, or sagged like an old mattress overnight, or worse.
Eventually, declaring yourself unworthy of public appearance, you decide to wait until you've hammered down in the gym and intermittent fasting for at least 4 weeks before appearing in front of ANYONE – most especially this person you want to impress. You spend the weekend hungry, and alone, avoiding anyone you know lest they comment on what you look like. You try to console yourself that you have, at least, made a start on what you know is “self improvement”.

If you can relate to that, well, another situation where I truly feel for you. I have often caught my reflection looking back at me like, ‘Yeah, your only remaining hope is to drag bad lighting around with you.” Only half kidding – observe how badly lit my videos are. In seriousness though, I must have cancelled at least four daytime events in the last year thanks to the ludicrous levels of self criticism that come with being middle aged and non and no longer able to pull off androgyny. Yep, that’s the ideal I fell for, but the flavour of the ideal we have in our heads is actually irrelevant. The point is that we strive for it at all, because psychology shows what that striving leads to on a personal level. For example, the Perfectionism Social Disconnection Model shows that socially prescribed perfectionism (believing others expect you to be perfect) predicts shame, defensive self-presentation, lower perceived support, and, most relevant here, greater loneliness. We behave to hide flaws and curate impressions, and our relationships thin out. (That's from Hewitt, Flett & colleagues.)

What philosophy shows is less talked about, but that is where this starts. Through our striving to fit these ideals, power perpetuates itself, via repackaging the very values that ensure its continuation.

Now, this post is NOT to aimed at making anyone feel bad or stupid about opting for the currently marketed ways of controlling their appearance. I have been a slave to so much of the so-called “health” industry's tools for most of my life. As I have said before, I am not doing this because I am healed. I found myself acting out a living example of this stuff, as you may have too. I have repeatedly hidden from the world thinking I am not up to scratch visually, and at 51, in hormonal upheaval, the marketed promises of bodily control become transparently flawed. Yep, we are actually NOT in control of a lot of things – like our hypothalamus, or whether or not we are hit by a comet.

Now, your reaction to that might be of interest. Some may be thinking
“But Jordan! There ARE things you can do to stay in control! HRT, keto, intermittent fasting, weight training, blah blah”.
Like all the solutions we are sold, they are not a holy grail, meaning, they work for some, not all. If those are your first thoughts though. It is useful information – and no judgement. That exact response is how the market trains us to respond – with a so-called reassuring “don’t panic!! It’s OK! Control CAN still be yours.”
I mean, it is how I responded too – fuck! There must be SOMETHING I can do!! Which all shows us how much we desire control, and how much the idea of it can feel reassuring.

And even if you are something like I am, and generally associate control with Orwellian dystopias or people so stiff with self-censorship that they have no personality, it seems that NONE of us are fully immune to the ideal and drive towards bodily control. I mean medical professionals will obsess over YOUR BMI for you, despite it’s poor correlation with health outcomes, so it’s almost impossible to escape. Recalling the last post, though, flawed tools like BMI are spoiler alerts for dogma – because when we cling to tools that research has undermined, simply because it is habit, or what everyone ELSE does, we are prioritising conformity over validity.

Now, most dogma has a moral element too. The whole “you CAN control your body” thing, has become a “you SHOULD.” In terms of logic, a category error, so no validity – and yet, a system of ethics, and even worth, has been woven into bodily obsession, meaning we feel guilty or flawed when we fail at it.

In short, and what today is all about, controlling our bodies and appearance is a an example of dogma that has become part of our world view- it is a paradigm whose foundations are invalid, but yet still refuse to shift. Our cultures fixation on youth, body-perfection (which is often done on the pretence of health) are now established. They resonate perfectly with capitalisms values – especially control. So for markets that perpetuate this dogma, the sales pitch is always the same – you CAN reach these ideals, you just need the right tool, and to try hard enough. You likely have Deja vu, there too. Yep, ye olde neo-liberal mantra, blaming YOU when products do not work. Perfect, perfect fit.

Today is in three parts. We start with the philosophy - looking at WHY our rituals and beliefs around bodily control is actually dogma, and not simply about the marketing of tools of questionable efficacy. For that, we recap Jaspers and Kuhn, with how knowledge stagnates into dogma when curiosity is publicly lynched on gym bro forums. Foucault will show us how dogma perpetuates power, by shaping what counts as knowledge. And via the construction of moral Satans who induce fear in us simply by virtue of being overweight and old. Part two explores the sociological effects of all this – the values and behaviours that emerge when bodily control dogma and capitalist ideology get married. Here Christopher Lash, and standard marketing text books show us how purchases and practices are tied to individualism in terms of identity, and identity performance – and where in-groups and out-groups are made. Part three is the personal, psychological outcomes of all this. We will show how adhering to the whole “control it all” mandate leads to social withdrawal, low self esteem, loneliness, isolation and worse. Trigger warning on that. I will warn you again when we get there. We will end with stuff on where to go if you want out of this eye-swide-shut, blood-ritual farce. This is for anyone who feels like the first part of their life was wasted, conforming to practices that fail to buy belonging–and that rest is wrestling with undoing all that messaging.

1. Signs this is Dogma

For part one, we welcome back Karl Jaspers, who built us a bit of a radar for detecting what he calls “un-reason.” Jaspers points out that when inquiry is shut down, we’re no longer interested in deepening knowledge. We want whatever factoids we have to remain as they are, cos we LIKE them that way. When we block curiosity and shut down inquiry, we aren’t doing, reason at all; we’re performing what he calls un-reason. Examples of this ABOUND in diet, and fitness culture, where anyone who questions the current holy grails is slain in public, to the cheers of forum-addicted onlookers.

Try saying “But it looks like calories in, calories out is NOT the whole story” in a gym forum and you’ll be excommunicated before your spirulina protein shake has settled. The personal insults flood in, about “making excuses” for being overweight.
How about “Did Keto make anyone else feel like death.”? I have done this one personally myself. I got the usual mantra “Anyone who feels bad on Keto isn't doing it right.” (Translation: you failed, not the diet.)
And then, in middle age, you get to unlock more dogmatic horrors like the final level on some video game where the prize is a massive turd. I once posted this:

“Anyone find that intermittent fasting worsened their hormone issues?”
I mean, the rage that got met with DID look a lot like the pre-menstrual meltdowns I was experiencing on a daily basis, and should really have proved my point.

Now in all of those examples, content providers themselves will defend things more rationally. There is usually some paper they can cite that has an inkling of logic too it – though be wary, and see the last post for the tricks of the trade that kick around. Most of you will know that if you hang out on pub med long enough, you can often find evidence for both sides of any story– studies concluding that hormones are not effected in the 9 women in the study, for example, alongside studies that show that they were.

The use of research papers illustrates something important though. When science furnishes saleable data, data that has been made marketable—THAT data is prioritised. It is held up to discount FURTHER data. Meaning, debate is not entered into. We cherry pick what backs us up and say “that’s the definitive answer. End of story.” We talked more on the mechanics of this in the last two posts – which outlines the signs of inquiry being shut down.

To quickly recap though, Kuhn talks about how the quest to deepen our understanding gets stalled – especially when it involves questioning current world views. When research goes beyond our favourite facts, and DOES un-earth contradictions to the current way of thinking, well, THAT research is steadfastly ignored, for as long as possible, until something really breaks. See Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” or the previous post for more on that. During these stalling periods, citing stuff that contradicts the favoured world-view is met with the anger or discrediting of the messenger. Like the first time a friend of mine informed me that the gut microbiome matters more than willpower — and I accused them of being a faecal fetishist. Yep, I’m no saint either.

For more live example of such ad-hominem madness, look at the comments under Dr. Stacy Sims’ videos (one of the world’s leading researchers on female physiology) when she presents data that intermittent fasting and keto DO in fact have some very deleterious results for women in perimenopause: the reactions, often from women themselves, are extreme, personal and designed to shut down dissent.

Now, in the case of most holy grails today, if you don’t cherry pick your own data, it’s clear that they don’t work for everyone. Some people find them useful, or half useful. Some people are actually harmed. It’s not our main focus here, and I really do assume its a no brainer for you guys, seeing as we are all quite different sacks of chemicals, meaning, the whole one-size its all thing should be fairly unconvincing. Human beings are not a standardised central unit for plug and play devices. If you could just reboot your hormones and install a new mindset patch, I wouldn't be here.

What really matters here, in terms of identifying dogma, is the reaction when you question a popular theory. You may even notice your own reflex when a holy grail is questioned. Even my saying “yeah, it works for some, not for others, and sometimes it’s even detrimental” can feel like sacrilege for some. Again, no shame, cos that’s how strongly this whole system perpetuates itself. The point is this, though: if a tool has become unquestionable, we’re in the land of un-reason. The vehemence with which holy grails are defended is a sign this is NOT about facts. In fact, what it IS about instead is very personal, and sometimes, very surprising. A surprise we will get to soon enough.

1.2 How Dogma Hides in Plain Sight

For now, a little more on the human involvement in truth making. Humans, as we know, are not perfect! Surprise surprise! Kuhn reminds us that when new evidence contradicts a beloved world-view, science itself stalls. The research gets ignored, the messenger discredited — and curiosity goes out the window.

Now, if even scientists can turn away from deeper questioning for reasons as small as reputation or tenure, imagine the motivation when money is at stake. Markets have their own reasons to stall: questioning a product, a tool — or the theory underwriting it — can end profit.

If we found out, for example, that smoking did NOT promote health, rather, it compromised it, the tobacco industry might lose revenue! Oh. Yeah. That already happened – after years and years of that industry stalling the release of information that threatened their profit.

A more current example please! Calcium. STILL marketed as essential for bone health — even though studies have started to show it could actually increase the risk of heart attack when taken in excess. Strangely, that bit of news isn't part of the ad campaigns. Happy bones, shame about the bypass has a certain ring to it.

But I actually don’t want to get sidetracked into debunks. The point here is that facts will be coveted or filtered, depending on their use. Potentially old news. What I really want to get to is that all this goes must deeper. Take intermittent fasting and keto. There’s an industry around it, but many will argue “it costs nothing.” Especially those doing content around HOW to do both effectively. But here is the crucial point: holy grails hold up more than profits. They hold up entire way of seeing. Ways of seeing that the system wants intact. This is the REAL clincher. Intermittent fasting might not cost you extra, but imagine saying this:

“I am not interested in intermittent fasting, cos I really don’t care about my body size,”

Cue protein shakes imploding on company executives, and the distant grinding of capitalism recalculating its macros.

You are not just refusing a tool here; you’re refusing the foundational fear a much broader market runs on. The anxiety around “not looking attractive enough” props up the entire adjacent ecosystem. Not giving a shit about how attractive you are to others might actually be the biggest act of so-called sacrilege there is in this system. Hence, it is the biggest rebellion. I mean, imagine how different your day would look if the fear of looking “unacceptable” were gone—how many things would you stop buying, watching, aspiring to? How much time would you save?

Let’s remember the other signs of dogma though. Dogma doesn’t ONLY shut curiosity down. It instils fear—fear of being rejected, of being alone, of looking uncool, of being not in the know. The amalgam of these fears becomes a sort of Leviathan-Satan—to borrow loosely from Hobbes’ image of the great artificial creature we’ve built to protect us. Only in this case, the monster isn’t political order, but cultural control.

For the health and beauty industries—and all those that deal in bodily control—that Satan is a patchwork horror made of “old,” “fat,” “rejected,” and “terribly, terribly unhealthy.”
With our curiosity trumped by fear, the self-flagellating thought-loops keep on churning. Even if you don’t buy some marketed tool like IF, the worry that you should, or must find some other way to reach the goal, still reinforces the system’s core values: the control myth, competition (for mates, attention, status), self-focus (meaning individualism), and heteronormativity (I’ll explain that one later).

What’s striking is how that fear isn’t just psychological—it’s moralised. The system turns discomfort into sin and compliance into virtue. And that brings us to another of dogma’s oldest tricks.

1.3 Dogmas Necessary Archetypes: God and Satan.

No successful dogma is complete without these aspects: Good and Evil. Because to make a holy grail look holy, you must have something unholy to hold up against it as contrast. In short, you need a Satan. That Satan holds up the fear end—it’s the thing we must not be.

Now, I think I need to call Foucault a friend of the podcast, because so much of my work comes out of his ideas. We talked about this in more depth in the post on manufaturing loneliness, but here’s a quick recap. Foucault shows us how the values that those in power want us to hold, and often upheld by pathologising whatever is opposite to them. Quick example, in rationalist societies, where reason is the ideal, those who saw angels, which was considered very unreasonable, were deemed mad. However, previously, when the church held power, seeing angels was considered great cos it supported the doctrine of the time. Seeing angels was not mad at that point. Rather, those applying reason to question the bible were the crazy ones.
This shows how what's labelled good or bad is not fixed. It changes over time, and depending on who is in power.

So if you want people to think in ways that support the current system, there is a simple recipe to do it. Take whatever adjectives are applied to that systems holy grails, and invoke their total opposites. Those total opposites become your useful Satan. As an example, Under capitalism, individualism is seen as a holy grail, so depending on one another is seen as weak, negative or even “co-dependent”.

Now, in terms of body control dogma? Well, heteronormativity comes in already, betraying that this industry really does do capitalisms work for it. More on that in a sec. In any case, the holy grail for female people is thinness. For male people? Muscle. What is the handy opposite to those? Being fat. So being fat gets entered into the “bad” column in capitalism’s Excel spreadsheet of moral assessment— right next to “unproductive,” “enjoys carbs,” and “owns cats for non-instagram purposes.”

The lack of links to truth when it comes to the “evils” of fatness won’t be news to a lot of you. Fatness is not necessarily unhealthy. Thinness is very not necessarily healthy – I managed thinness all my life and have a list of health issues that are too depressing to name. But dogma needs us to FEEL like those holy grails are true – even when the facts will speak against it. So fatness has been MAPPED to unhealth, and FEAR of fat arises out of that. This helps us turn away from it, and towards the idea that thin or muscly is healthy. So now we have our Satan with “fat” and “unhealthy” listed in it, and start to equate the two, DESPITE THE DATA.

1.3.3 Case Study: L'Oréal

Let’s look at L'Oreal for a live example of how markets take this up and run with it. L’Oréal now pride themselves on doing what they call “future-based marketing” — which basically means monetising fear of problems you don’t have yet. Namely, ageing.

Youth has been an ideal for a while, so L’Oréal have turned its opposite into a pathology. Ageing is now a kind of failure; products are the cure. And while you could be forgiven for thinking L’Oréal are just the usual profit-hungry parasites, they seem to have read their Foucault — and mistaken his warnings for tactics. Their “future-based marketing” pathologises whatever is opposite to youth. Ageing becomes the new Satan: something to be feared, fought, and erased.

And even though ageing is the one thing that has never not happened, our language already reflects the dogma this industry is preaching. Fat and old are now common word-associations, just like slim and healthy — even though neither pairing is inherently true. In making youth and slimness into ideals, fat and old get added to the feared Satan image, and we buy weapons in the hope of annihilating it.

With this Satan already accepted, science can be scanned and repurposed to furnish supporting factoids. When a study shows that collagen depletes with age, re-framing that data makes buying collagen look like an act of rational self-care — a kind of moral hygiene against the evil that is ageing.

Even if you never buy a single serum, the adverts still do their job. They re-anchor the values of the worldview itself: ageing is to be feared, and control is the cure. No one would even think of wasting money on collagen if we were culturally fine with getting older — just like no one does buy “anti-sunset” lamps, because, fortunately, we still consider nightfall normal.

1.4 But This Is Science!!

L’Oréal also makes something clear about the relationship between science and dogma. We like to think the two are opposites — that science dispels dogma. But their marketing shows the opposite can be true: dogma can wear a lab coat.

Their ads throw around words like “Gene-science,” “youth stimulating protein,” as if the syllable count alone guaranteed truth. They got shut down, by the way, for doing this, cos it turned out it WAS pseudo-science. What is shows though is that framing things as science isn’t about a love for rigorous method — it’s the branding value of science. They know we have more faith in things that sound scientific, which is why labelling things as such has become a standard marketing strategy.

If something sounds like science, we tend to trust it — even if the methods are shoddy, undisclosed, or entirely non-existent.

And this is where Foucault never really leaves the stage. Science, for most of us, is the ultimate procurer of knowledge — but for Foucault, knowledge and power are co-constitutive. In plain terms, truth doesn’t float freely in the ether waiting to be discovered; it’s approved, circulated, and rewarded by institutions with something to gain.

Universities, research bodies, funding councils, and corporations all act as gatekeepers of what is recognised as “truth.” Some findings are published, funded, or publicised — others are buried, de-funded, or dismissed — depending on whether they serve or threaten the prevailing order.

“Each society has its regime of truth.” – Foucault, Power/Knowledge

So the truths that survive are the ones that are useful to power. When I say factoids get pulled out of context and re-contextualised to fit capitalist values, that’s not an accident — it’s the same mechanism. Truth is not neutral discovery; it’s a process of institutional approval. What counts as “scientific” is, in many cases, just what has passed through power’s filter. And, once a truth has proved it serves the system, it gets woven into a worldview. When it’s woven in, it supports, and is supported BY, all the other transplanted factoids and values around it. They mutually perpetuate each other — like ideological cold sores on the lips of two closeted, geriatric congressmen.

2. When Capitalism and Dogma Marry.

Now it should be clear why it’s such a massive win for markets when the values they’re selling match the values of the broader ideology. It’s like when some band writes some god-awful, meandering ballad, and it charts because the chorus craps on about how great the chart system is.

When a market stumbles on a profitable value that also props up the moral order, it’s gold. That idea will stick around, not because it’s true, but because it’s useful. The beauty industry doesn’t just sell youth — it sells obedience to an ideal that keeps half the population busy chasing it. Fitness culture doesn’t just sell strength — it sells self-control and competition, which happen to be capitalist virtues. In selling two, disparate, heavily gendered ideals, the market serves another key capitalist value we talked about in post the post on Heteronormativity. Hereornornativity being a sort of chariacatureised, polarised version of only two genders, each of whom are assumed as wanting to bang the other. You really notice the latter if you are non binary, cos you are somehow left with the puzzle of striving to look like both a brain damaged battering ram and a deprivation-powered sex toy, at the same time. At least, until the rainbow scene comes up with it’s own equally unattainable ideals.

In any case, when the dogma of profit-hunting finds a match in the dogma of the broader ideology, both get reinforced. Because both benefit and perpetuate each other. Capitalism itself gains moral legitimacy — “it’s not vanity, it’s self-care!” — and dogma gains the advertising budget of a multinational. Each props up the other like a matched set of bookends holding up the same collapsing shelf.

What I’ve just described is pure Foucault. He showed that power doesn’t just sit in governments or corporations barking orders; it works through the production of “truths” that define what’s normal, acceptable, or good. Power manufactures knowledge, and knowledge manufactures morality. Meaning: once a claim gets dressed up as “science” or “fact,” that certificate of marriage gives birth to the next step. The “fact” becomes more than just a fact — it becomes a rule for how to live. Not because it’s true (even when it might be), but because of who gets to say it’s true.

Fact: you are overweight (according to an outdated measure, let’s remember).
Rule: you need to lose weight.

In this example, the measuring stick isn’t a conveyor of truth; it’s a producer of norms. The reason it’s called true is because it circulates within the networks that define truth itself.

2.1 When Facts become Moral Imperatives

This how the moral not-really-love child appears. Born through the certification of dogmas saleable facts, by ideologies rubber stamp. Facts become moral imperatives. The belief that we CAN control our weight, or muscle mass or ageing becomes an idea that we SHOULD.

No, this is not because armed guards start shouting “exfoliate or die.”

What comes in here is something we have talked about before. The panopticon effect, and it marks our entry into the sociological effects of all this. The panopticon effect, outlined by Foucault, is the idea that we don’t need watchers with guns to tell us “Put down the baguette!! Carbs are forbidden!” In western culture, we internalise a the watcher in our own minds. No external surveillance is needed, cos we regulate ourselves in accordance with what we thing that watcher wants from us. In other words, not because we’re forced to things, but because we’ve learned to WANT to. We learn to monitor, measure, and correct ourselves. We will get to the psychological effects of this soon enough, but for now, the sociological. Because oh so helpfully, our internal watchers, become watchers we apply to one another.

Yep, recall your doc, who is trained to be obsessed over YOUR BMI for you, in case you do not, and will decree it a problem, even when you’re actually feeling fit and strong.

Once power and dogma align, we “know” what counts as normal, healthy, moral, or acceptable. We take on the policing step ourselves – sometimes in the form of screaming rants and character assassinations online. Sometimes in the form of swiping left on anyone who isn’t a 20 year old anorexic, or a towering, drooling, brick shithouse. It starts at an early age too – in schools, where kids with unusual ears, larger noses, bodies that are too short, tall, thin or fat are teased for it, and told they are ugly or wrong. All of these are symptoms we’ve internalised a certain way of seeing.

A lived example: Policing Each Other, until we Internalise Dogma

Now a shout-out to all of you who were classified as fat, as kids, like I was. I went to school in the 70s and 80s. Back then being fat was not so much considered “unhealthy” but it WAS considered ugly. And living in that body taught me just the kind of policing and punishment it resulted in. Being outcast, called lazy, and so on. The kids at school did societies bidding, having swallowed the cool-aide without a though - as had Bertha, the woman who gave birth to me.

Now, Bertha resented having to do anything for anyone else, including her children, so she sent us to school with potato chips for lunch cos it meant she didn’t have to go to any effort. At home, there was only bread and chocolate, cos that is what SHE liked. So my being fat should not have been much of a surprise. The interesting part is, it kinda WAS to her. Not only did she think being fat made me ugly, she also considered it evidence of my own moral failing. To her, I became an embarrassment. She treated me as if I had somehow done this to myself, or to shame her, so she started the whole control and monitoring thing too – by putting me on a diet at age 5. Beauty already equalled “thin” back then, and she was indoctrinated enough to think that beauty was the be all and end all for females. She constantly sought it herself, and wanted it by proxy too, through any female child.

So Bertha did dogmas work for it, unpaid. She rejected me for my so-called ugliness, and felt the need to teach me how important beauty was, rather than brans, for example, by virtue of my having a vagina. She may not have been able to pronounce the word heteronormativity, but she certainly believed in it unquestioningly.

This is what Foucault is on about. Whether doctors, kids or parents, we internalise whatever values float around, and not only police ourselves, but we police everyone else too. Most people, even today, see fit to judge others bodies, praising weight loss, even when it results from horrible diseases, and getting all concerned about weight GAIN like it’s inherently a sign of ill health. This is, of course, totally ass about face in terms of actual health indicators, but we do powers work for it, by reproducing dogma, and ideology. As we are forced via guilt and judgement to fit in, and we return the massive favour to our friends.

In Groups and Out Groups

This is actually the point where dogma shines. I’m just starting to get into René Girard, and he points out how perfectly dogma performs one of broader ideologies favourite tactics. Ye olde divide-and-conquer trick. In Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982), Girard argues that every ideology needs a scapegoat — someone to embody the Satan that keeps the system coherent. Dogma promises belonging by showing who to cast out. The faithful prove their loyalty by railing at the scapegoat; division becomes the glue that holds the faithful together. It’s performative solidarity: you don’t have to believe more, you only have to hate the right person.

Think: if I was worried I didn’t fit the ideal for my gender, I’d swipe left on anyone not clearly punishing themselves toward the ideal for theirs — and label them “lazy” or “not health conscious.” Because nothing says “great match” like shared self-loathing dressed up as virtue.

We see this logic everywhere—from politics to dating to playgrounds. Maintaining an in-group means ensuring there’s always an out-group. In political terms, we call it a Feindbild—an enemy image that keeps the story moving. On the societal level, it’s the same effect. Promise something better for those who comply; blame those who don’t for standing in the way of paradise. As Hannah Arendt observed, systems built on dogma survive by constantly generating enemies—real or imagined. Without division, their moral certainty would collapse.

Online, the same mechanism hums quietly beneath the hashtags. Discussions about weight, beauty, or fitness stop being “does this work?” and become “are you one of us?” Practices turn into flags; bodies become banners. A #keto selfie or supplement stack isn’t just nutrition—it’s a certificate of striving that earns applause. And a single “this didn’t work for me” or “I have enough muscle mass, thanks” reads as heresy. The heretic must be shamed, blocked, or cast out.

It’s not that different from being a teenager, when you don’t really know who you are yet. All you know is that you sure as hell don’t want to be mistaken for a nerd, and that the jocks seem to get a tonne of admiration. So you deride reading and computer games, and hassle any nerd relentlessly, until the jocks accept you.

Once those in-groups form, they defend the dogma FOR the system, free of charge. Everyday people parrot that keto fixes everything from cancer to depression. Fear of the Satan that is fatness, age and unhealth keeps everyone else in line: conform or be exiled. That’s where one path to loneliness begins—for those who don’t fear Satan, and won’t adopt or praise the holy practices.

But as we move into now, even those who comply aren’t delivered what was promised. The belonging built on scapegoating doesn’t buy connection. It buys conditional acceptance — conditional on maintaining a subscription to dogma. This breadcrumb version of belonging falls straight into what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch argued that under late capitalism, we don’t construct a stable self at all, but a false one — a self built for display, for approval, for survival in an economy of appearances. Again, not unlike the teenage fragile identity, not based on who I know I am, but rather, on what I don’t want to be judged as. Lasch describes how the real self withdraws while the performance takes its place. We learn to manage impressions instead of relationships. And because that performance-self depends on constant validation, it’s inherently fragile. It can’t tolerate contradiction. Someone calling you a nerd after all that nerd bashing, well, that’s how fist fights start at school.

All this is a kind of emotional capitalism: we invest in the version of ourselves that sells best, then defend it like property. So even when we appear to belong, we’re still performing alone. Because conditional acceptance doesn’t connect us; it auditions us. When we try so hard to gather all the trappings and practices that ensure we’ll be judged a certain way, any questioning of those trappings feels like a personal attack.

Identity Politics

This brings us to the ugliest thing about the dogma of bodily control: the MANNER in which curiosity is banned. Here is where the sociological and psychological walk hand in hand for a while. As we talked about last post, there are myriad ways to shut down inquiry. Shutting it down at all is dogma’s footprint — but personal attacks, the ad hominem kind, are the end-state of Lasch's observations. They mark what happens when fragile self-concepts are propped up from the outside, rather than grounded from within. This is the fusion of creed and identity.

When we automatically rail against the person, not the argument, we’re no longer debating ideas; we’re defending the self we’ve built out of them. When dogma fuses with identity, questioning an idea is not FELT as questioning the idea. It is felt as a personal attack.

So when someone questions whether cutting out carbs is really beneficial, and I snap back, “you’re doing it wrong if you don’t see the benefits,” it shows how much I’ve tangled by self up in this. Instead of engaging, I assume you’re the problem, not the tool. My logic is simple: I’m doing it right, therefore I’m right — and you’re not. I’ve built myself a sense of superiority - entirely grounded in abstaining from baguettes.

Psychologists Leon Festinger and Elliot Aronson showed how this happens. When facts clash with what we’ve built our identity around, it creates cognitive dissonance — that unbearable static between what we believe and what we see. To ease the discomfort, we don’t change the belief; we defend the believer. As Aronson put it, we’re not rational beings so much as rationalising ones. Once a belief fuses with who we are, doubting it feels like doubting ourselves.

Psychoanalyst Karen Horney adds another layer: when our “idealised self” is threatened, we react with shame or hostility. The more we’ve invested in our self-image — the disciplined one, the virtuous one, the “healthy” one — the more fiercely we protect it from contradiction.

And the market knows this. Entire branding manuals teach companies to fuse products with the consumer’s self-concept: don’t sell an outcome; sell the self that outcome represents.

You see the identity effect in how we talk. People who say “I’m a gym bunny” rather than “I go to the gym” are making identity statements. When I heard someone say, “I’m plant-based,” I couldn’t help wondering if they were under the delusion they weren’t made of muscle and bone. When language turns habits into citizenships — when verbs for what you do become nouns for who you are — we might as well just say, “I’m marketing-based,” and let the actual marketers go home.

Once a belief or brand becomes part of someone’s identity, they’ll defend it for free. Questioning the product starts to feel like questioning who they are. Those trapped in the cage of counting macros won’t like it when you ask whether the control is really worth it. To them, your question sounds like sabotage — as if you’ve suggested they swap out protein powder for pleasure. And pleasure, lets not forget, has been rebranded as moral weakness — and there is no flavour of ice-cream worth the internal performance review that follows.

At this point, dogma has anchored itself within us. Defending it isn’t about defending truth at all — it’s about defending the self that dogma built. If the thing I’ve invested my time, money, and identity in turns out to be flawed, then I might be flawed too. Rather than risk that collapse, I attack the messenger.

And that’s the panopticon effect. What began as a marketable, decontextualised factoid, became a moral imperative. That moral imperative became social policing, and finally, self-surveillance. The full absorption of the system’s gaze. It lands, finally, and effectively, as another instantiation of capitalism’s favourite myth — the cult of I.

It becomes:
Fuck truth — it’s all about me.

Yep, arguably capitalism’s favourite core value: individualism.

If Foucault showed how power produces truth, Lasch shows how truth produces self — not a stable self, but a display version that depends on constant affirmation.

Here, Byung-Chul Han’s contribution is the final turn of the screw. Once self-control becomes moral law, we don’t just obey; we exploit ourselves in the name of freedom. “Achievement,” Han writes, “is the new form of obedience.” We are both slave and master, boss and worker, punishment and punished.

In that sense, “fuck truth — it’s all about me” isn’t just a slogan. It’s the invisible logic of our age. We defend the systems that exhaust us because they’re also the systems that define us. To question them feels like disappearing.

So even when the methods fail — when the diet, the practice, the product, the belief all break down — we don’t abandon them. We double down. We “optimise” harder. Because control has been moralised; it’s what makes us deserving. Losing it isn’t just inconvenient — it feels like a moral lapse.

And that’s where loneliness starts to metastasise. The more we turn inward, the less room there is for anyone else. Self-monitoring replaces connection; confession replaces conversation; wellness replaces mutual care.

Capitalism’s genius is that it doesn’t need to isolate us physically. It only has to convince us that our private performance of perfection is a relationship — with ourselves, with our “best life,” with some fantasy of mastery. And even though it isn’t, dogma steps in to make it look that way. The dogma that resonates most with capitalism’s goals is the one that echoes the self-policing inside every skull.

Internalised Policing and the Self as Battleground

The gaze that once judged us from outside is now seated in our heads. That’s why the next battles don’t happen on timelines or in locker rooms; they happen in mirrors, food logs, step counters, and sleepless 3 a.m. audits of “discipline.”

We’ve now made the journey from the philosophical through the sociological, and now the purely psychological. And really, psychology itself reflects capitalism’s mandate — it’s a discipline that’s all about me as well. Everything, including the locus of control, cause, blame, gets routed back to the individual. As we saw with Foucault, this is inaccurate. We are by no means immune to the external. Still, psychology offers us some insight, because it’s subject, the atomised self, is where all ideology finally lands. Our bodies and minds will house the symptoms of our cultural dis-ease.
Where social control has become self-control. Where dogma has become a diagnosis. Orthorexia, bulimia, anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and beyond all that, isolation. Either casting out others, or ourselves. That is the end point, for this particular area of dogma – the beauty, health, fitness and menopause industries. The industries that sell control for belonging and acceptance. This individual endpoint is the reason that learning the tell-tell SIGNS of dogma is so important. It can literally save your life.

And to lead into the actual psychologists, I will share how adhering to dogma played out for me. If you relate to the following, my heart goes out to you, and I know I’m not the only one whose been there. If you CANT relate, I am glad. But here goes. And trigger warning. References to eating disorders, substance abuse and other seriously sub-par experiences. If that’s not for you, that’s OK. You can opt out. You’ve made it a long way already!

Lived Vignette

The horror of all this lives in the gaps. First the external ones – the gap between what Bertha, the kids at school and wider society thought was acceptable, and how I actually looked. Then, when I joined in the judgement-fest to scapegoat myself, it was the gap between what I wanted to look like, and really simply couldn’t. Whatever it was you aspired to, you’ll know this. Those gaps don’t just hurt—they recruit us into endless “corrections.” They recruit us into hoping, buying, believing that at some point, we might find acceptance. We might get to belong, or to relax and feel OK, or, for some of us, to be loved for the first time.

I saw myself as I imagined others saw me: lacking, unattractive, needing to try harder. I remember the chant—“fat and ugly.” One felt unsolvable; the other I thought I could fix with the holy grail of the 80s: calories-in/calories-out. Exercise more; eat… well, almost nothing.

Thus began self-surveillance. Once the observer installs behind your eyes, the day becomes micro-audits:

• The morning weigh-in that decides whether you’ve “earned” breakfast,

• The run that leaves you too exhausted to learn,

• The punishments after dinner out—if you went at all,

• The cancellations: I’ll go once I’ve fixed X, and half your life gets postponed,

• The refusal to go anywhere where people took group photos—which is everywhere by now,

• The comparisons with strangers and past selves you can’t resurrect,

• The private verdict: you’re single because you don’t look right.

At the worst point, rituals multiplied: macros, fasts, “what I eat in a day,” biomarker dashboards. Keto, intermittent fasting, hauling a cross-trainer across Europe like a tribute to my determination. Relationship time traded for regime time. Social invitations lead to fear—of being told I’d slipped: older, heavier, not toned enough.

And I learned a few things. Things the advertisers edit out of adverts. Like, the most effective “weight-loss drugs” are trauma, serious illness, and actual drugs. If you’re smoking or taking cocaine to stay slim, that is not health. But being congratulated for thinness while falling apart taught me how completely we’ve moralised appearance.

The worst lesson? Some people praise the harm. A man I once dated said he hoped I wouldn’t recover from my eating disorder—cos he liked “his women” thin. That clarified two facts: heteronormative scripts creep into every ideal (even when you think you’ve opted out), and the more perfectly you perform, the more you attract people who chose adherence over authenticity.

This is the final stage: dogma down to the cells. Instead of being in your body, you split from it. Observing it, managing it, loathing it. Parts become projects: abs, skin, glutes, hormones.

And this is a very specific loneliness—the loneliness of the obedient. The ones so scared of being scapegoated, that they fell for the promise of belonging that came with doing it “right.” But conditional acceptance isn’t connection. You can’t arrive as yourself; you must arrive as a character—competing with others or with your own younger ghost. For some, the head-loops can be quietened, and they walk into the room. For others, the debut never comes. It’s always ten pounds, tighter abs, thicker hair away.

Markets keep the hope alive, selling the props the script requires—supplements, trackers, plans, poses. They don’t just sell tools; they sell permission to be seen. The price is constant self-monitoring—and your time, money, sanity, and chances to actually connect.

So what reads as “self-control” becomes a weapon turned inward. The win condition is always one tweak away; the loss condition is now.

Live like this long enough and your social world thins. The literature calls it avoidance, safety behaviours, impression management, perfectionistic withdrawal. Lived experience calls it: I’ll go when I fit. And that ends up as not going at all.

How Body Control Dogma Leads to Loneliness

Psychology gives us words for all this. According to the Perfectionism Social Disconnection Model (PSDM), when perfectionism becomes relational (I must look perfect because I assume you expect me to) it undermines the very connections we hope to gain. And according to Self-Discrepancy Theory, the gap between our actual, ideal and ought selves doesn’t just hurt—it isolates. The result: we stop being seen; we stop seeing ourselves. The Model explains why perfectionism leads to social withdrawal: the interpersonal style becomes aloof and inauthentic, which paradoxically fosters the very rejection the person tries to avoid’

The same model predicts shame, defensive self-presentation, lower perceived support, and greater loneliness. In practice: you hide flaws, curate impressions, and relationships dry up. (Hewitt, Flett & colleagues.)

Mind the self-gap.
Another theory, called Self-Discrepancy Theory, finds that large gaps between the actual body, the ideal body, and the ought body reliably produce anxiety, guilt and shame. Those states drive avoidance (skipping meals with friends, cancelling plans, postponing dates “until I’ve fixed X”). The mechanism isn’t mysterious—it’s standard affect regulation: avoid the cue that triggers the shame.

Now we all know that disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia can lead beyond loneliness, to actual death. These disorders are the ultimate example of what happens when societal values are internalised and played out in our flesh. These conditions aren’t limited to one gender, and in the US alone, they kill over ten thousand people a year. More recently, and arguably more hidden and widespread, what’s known as orthorexia has come under the spotlight. Orthorexia is roughly an obsession with eating only the right foods, or pure food, has become a topic of discussion and research. Across studies, higher orthorexic tendencies correlate with social impairment: rigid food rules, distress eating in public, avoidance of restaurants and shared meals, conflict with family/partners over “clean” rules, and elevated anxiety. Clinically, ON often co-travels with perfectionism and obsessive traits—the exact profile that predicts withdrawal and relationship strain. In plain language: the stricter the rules, the smaller your social world.

For those of us who feel we aren’t quite THAT bad, the research is still grim in terms of loneness.

When self-esteem is pegged to how you look, daily fluctuations in appearance concerns predict same-day drops in mood and belonging and increases in social comparison. People report “I’ll go when I look better” as a recurring postponement—code for self-isolation.

Objectification theory shows that habitual body-monitoring (“How do I look right now?”) is linked with anxiety, shame, and reduced relational presence. You’re in the room but not with people—you’re with an imagined audience. Partners experience this as distance.

Body-focused “safety” habits (body checking, mirror rituals, clothing camouflage, rule-bound eating) reduce short-term anxiety but maintain long-term fear and avoidance. Translation: the very behaviours that feel “responsible” keep connection out of reach.

Men and the muscular ideal.
Finally, the muscular ideal deserves attention, cos it’s so often defended as “health”, even though most people engaging in it have aims like having 6-pack abs. This is an aesthetic goal, not an indicator of fitness. Olympic athletes are most certainly fit. They rarely if ever have 6-packs. So this often ends up being a masculinised way of obfuscating attractiveness goals as “being about health.”

Drive-for-muscularity research ties the pursuit of a hyper-muscular body to depressive symptoms, social physique anxiety, risky practices (cycles, SARMs, extreme cuts), and relationship conflict around training/diet rigidity. In its extreme (muscle dysmorphia), diagnostic criteria include clinically significant social and occupational impairment. Different aesthetic, same isolation engine: perfectionism + identity + rules → less life.

Social media accelerants.
Internalising appearance ideals plus heavy appearance-focused social media use predicts higher body dissatisfaction, more perfectionism, and greater loneliness, mediated by comparison and self-surveillance. The feed isn’t just content; it’s a 24/7 mirror

All that is the loneliness of body control culture: the endless rehearsal for a debut that never comes.
When we constantly strive for the marketed ideals, and tell others they SHOULD do the same, connection becomes conditional. We spend out time on things we’ve been TOLD we should want, at the cost of our relationships and authenticity. We are divided from each other, and ourselves – and the body control industries rub their hands with glee.
In psychological terms, this becomes learned self-withdrawal. In sociological terms, it’s alienation: our relationships mediated through ideals that don’t win love.

And thus, the irony of buying into body-control dogma, is that for all the belonging it promises, the very efforts we make to avoid loneliness — by controlling our bodies, acquiring the right tools, performing the right image — become the tools that generate it.

We chase control because we’re afraid, and we call that chase empowerment. But dogma begins where curiosity dies, and it stays alive by feeding on fear. On our bodies, that looks like performance instead of presence; identity instead of relationship; rehearsal instead of life.

If belonging depends on displaying the right body, connection becomes conditional — and we withdraw. That’s not a personal failing; it’s a structural script. The good news is that scripts can be rewritten. Curiosity is how we start: curiosity about our bodies as lived, not displayed; about health beyond the image; about each other beyond the audition. Where curiosity returns, dogma loosens — and loneliness has somewhere to go.

What To Do About This

If your body has become a project, relationships start happening around the project, not around you as a person. The exit ramps aren’t another optimisation. Not a “five-day reset,” not another ritual of control — but recognition

The first step out is Seeing that the path is a Mirage
.
Once you see this for what it is, you still may or may not want to stop chasing the chimera. I know how hard it is on a personal level to stop the conforming behaviours.

But even if the personal fear of being relegated to the out group is still there, we can do one thing on the societal level: we can still stop policing EACH OTHER. We can become a safe, non judgemental space when we stop commenting on the bodies of others in terms of the yardsticks we are sold – youth, weight, musculature, height. People can ask if they want feedback. If you are offering it up unprompted, you are acting as an unpaid prison guard.

The other thing we can do is refuse to buy into the idea that those who don’t do as we do – or who CANT - are therefore wrong, or immoral or broken. That is one thing we can do, regardless of how hard it is to extricate oneself from this worldview.

On the personal level, YOU are a very specific, unique person and do not fit in a mould. I am also not a therapist. So I can’t tell you how to heal or which practice to adopt. My job — the part philosophy still does best — is to show how this works.
To map the machinery that turns fear into virtue, control into morality, and our bodies into a battleground.
Because Critical thinking isn’t about cynicism; it’s about reclaiming your agency from systems that script what you’re supposed to desire.

So if any of this feels close to home, start by noticing the patterns. Notice when you flinch at the word failure, when a number on a screen feels like a moral verdict, when you catch yourself rehearsing instead of living. Those moments aren’t proof that you’re broken; they’re proof that the script is still running.

This is where my work leaves off — at recognition, at the naming of the trap.
The next step, the part where you unlearn and rebuild, belongs to those who guide the process of deprogramming. People who specialise in helping us make peace with bodies we were taught to battle.

So I’ll hand you over to them here. These are the ones I personally have found helpful. I invite any of you who struggle with, or have struggled with, the tug of dogma, and it’s false promises, to post the resources you found helpful in the comments.

Eat the Rules, a podcast with Summer Innanin, who aims to free people, particularly those in female bodies, from diet culture.

Beyond The Mirror another podcast, hosted by Jonny Landels that focuses on men’s body image, fitness culture, food habits and the pressures of appearance.

More excellent podcasts are:

The Midlife Feast: Hosted by Jenn Salib Huber

Men Unscripted Podcast

The Men Unscripted Podcast is a series of anonymous conversations with men about their experiences with being in their bodies. Aaron Flores is your host, and each conversation gives more insight into the struggles that men experience as they learn to be more comfortable in their bodies

Summary

The industries surrounding bodily control are classic examples of where dogma now presides. Despite the packaging of scientific words, curiosity has been replaced by obedience.
Questioning is shut down; dissent feels like heresy. What could have been a set of neutral methods for health becomes a moral order about worth. The message is no longer can you control your body? But you should—and failing to do so is framed as weakness, laziness, even sin.

It’s also the perfect vehicle for capitalism’s values.
Control, competition, individualism, and heteronormativity are the golden children of this system, and the body becomes their playground. Each “holy grail”—the diet, the fast, the workout, the serum—rehearses those same values: self-surveillance, productivity, comparison, and hierarchy. Power no longer needs to police us; we police ourselves—and each other—for free.

Psychologically, that control curdles into fragmentation.
We internalise the gaze, turn our bodies into projects, and our lives into audits. The result isn’t mastery but isolation: connection replaced by comparison, care replaced by correction. Loneliness becomes structural—the by-product of a system that moralises self-improvement and monetises inadequacy.

So we need to say no to doing power’s work for it: to monitoring, judging, or annihilating ourselves in the name of virtue. Learn to love people, not packaging. I’m not saying this from some completed work—I still find “dad bod” hot as hell yet only manage indifference toward my own reflection—but that’s the point. The struggle itself is proof of how deep the script runs.

Body control is a colossal industry built on moral judgement—on what’s “acceptable,” “healthy,” “beautiful.” Its icons are symbols, not realities. Their very unattainability is what makes them profitable.

But if I’ve done my job today, you’ll know why we were conscripted into this battle in the first place—and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see that the war was never yours to fight.

Learn to love people, not packaging. I am not saying this because it is a completed work. I might find dad bod hot as hell, yet have only managed “indifference” to my own body.

Body control is a huge industry. It’s foundations are moral judgements on certain body types, certain ages and certain facial features. It’s vehicles are capitalisms golden children – control, competition, individualism and heteronormativity. Its ideals are the symbols derived from cherry-picked factoids and MUST be unattainable. It is unattainability – the fact that they are symbols and not realities – that makes them profitable.

But if I’ve done my job today, you’ll know exactly why we were roped into believing we had to fight in the first place — and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see that the war was never yours to fight.