It probably began thousands of years ago in ancient Greece; all this questioning. The father of philosophy seemed genuinely committed to finding what fundamentally mattered in life. He asked his students, “What is a good man?” and “What is justice?” And when the Athenian government demanded he stop ‘corrupting the youth,’ Socrates proved his sincerity by accepting a death sentence in 399 BC rather than ceasing those questions. “The unexamined life,” he said, “is not worth living.”
Now, the rival school of Sophists had no such inhibitions. They already knew what ‘justice’ was, discovering the means to get what you deserved. And ‘good’ was anytime you got what you wanted. The Sophists prompted Diogenes (412-323 BC) to wander through Athens at noon with a lighted lamp, saying he was searching for an honest man! In 1740, David Hume, a skeptic Scot, in A Treatise of Human Nature, questioned whether anything at all could be known without scientific proof. The ‘good’ and the ‘just’ that Socrates sought were unverifiable.
Birth of a Nation
Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) in Germany rescued morality by positing certain values as given, a priori, recognized without scientific or objective proof. In 1776, in the American colonies, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. “David Hume would argue this is a sentiment with no scientific basis. But this was true for 18th-century Americans, prima facie and ipso facto! End of discussion!
More than 100 years later, the women’s movement, invoking the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech, publicly asked a profound question: Since ‘women’ were subsumed under the term ‘men’ and ‘men’ had the right to vote, why weren’t women allowed to vote? And so, in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution franchised 26 million American women in time for the U.S. presidential election. The Roaring 20s followed.
Meanwhile, in Frankfurt, Germany, the success of women in winning the vote was not lost on a group of young intellectuals who saw an opportunity in the cultural victory of the suffrage movement. In 1923, they established The Institute of Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One Dimensional Man, and Eric Seligman Fromm (1900-1980), author of Reason and Revolution, the founders, sought to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslaved them. They believed the best way to change society for the better was to change it culturally. Their tool was Critical Theory. They reasoned that the public would see the benefits of change by criticizing the norms of societal behavior. The philosopher John Dewey, in 1934, invited the Frankfurt School advocates into the Teachers’ College at Columbia University in New York. The movement flourished, establishing a presence at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.
Post-war America in the 1950s was an innocent time of prosperity, suburban growth, and optimism. Every year, from 1950 to 1959, over 4 million babies born. More men and women were enrolled in higher education, and more leisure time was available. This seemed an ideal time to reassess the past and reevaluate the future. Here, the relocated Frankfurt School and Critical Theory provided the tools for change, advocating feminism, humanism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism. Over the next 60 years, Critical Theory expanded to influence students and professors across America. The idea of questioning both policies and values of a society enjoying prosperity and success had broad appeal.
“Here, the relocated Frankfurt School and Critical Theory provided the tools for change, advocating feminism, humanism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.. expanding to influence people across America.”
One prominent advocate of the movement was Saul Alinsky, a community organizer from Chicago (1909- 1972), so influential that he inspired three future U.S. presidential candidates. His book, Rules for Radicals, provided ten practical lessons for uniting people into active grassroots organizations with the power to effect change. Hillary Clinton discovered Alinsky while at Wellesley College. She wrote her Honors Thesis on his work, inviting him to speak at Wellesley.
In Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shake Down, the author explores the career of Reverend Jessie Jackson, breaking down barriers to political and economic access. By questioning major corporations about their hiring practices and demographics, Jackson funded his organization People United to Save Humanity (PUSH) with millions in federal grants and set-asides and millions from companies like Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, 7-11, and Burger King. By 1984, Jackson was a household name and candidate for president. Barack Obama completed Alinsky’s national training course and became a teacher of community organizing techniques in Chicago. The Washington Post described Alinsky’s justice approach as “relying on generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed.” The triumph of the art of the question! Questioning whether actions were consistent with values espoused.
Over the same 60-year period, from 1960 to the present, Hollywood cooperated with a similar challenge to traditional values. Edward Bernays, who was proud to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud and who inspired the Madison Avenue advertising phenomenon, said in his book, Propaganda: “Americans cannot underestimate the effect of movies on their psyche.” The 2006 film Hollywoodland, starring Ben Affleck as George Reeves, the original Superman in the 1951 television series, recounts the mysterious gunshot death of the star in 1959 and the devastation the news that ‘Superman’ had died had on millions of American boys who worshiped ‘the man of steel.’
The 1978 revival of Superman starred Christopher Reeve, who in 1985 was paralyzed in a horseriding accident. Reeve died in 2004 at the age of 52. The death of heroes in movies and television, and the emergence of the antihero, transformed entertainment media dramatically. Shows from 60 years ago, like, I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, and Ozzie and Harriet were replaced by All in the Family and, more recently, Sex and the City and The Big Bang Theory. The ideal of hegemonic masculinity and idealized femininity had been replaced. Men are now more emotional, considerate, and less dominating. The father as the leader who provides structure and the mother as the nurturer who follows the husband are receding roles. Even television advertisements that have become the equivalent of Medieval Morality plays no longer portray males as alpha. In the 1997 war drama GI Jane, Demi Moore is a 5 ft. 6 inch, 135 pounds, shaved-headed female who outperforms all the manly men on the front lines as a U.S. Marine. In the July 2010 issue of the Atlantic, Hanna Rosen wrote, “American pop culture keeps producing variations on the omega male who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent in Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin or a happy couch potato on a Bud Light commercial.”
In addition, a book like Open Secret by David Ehrenstein disclosed that many male screen idols that made women swoon were more attracted to the same sex. Female stars, too, it seems, though adored by male moviegoers, were more enamored by female companions. Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and, more recently, Kelly McGillis, Tom Cruise’s squeeze in Top Gun. Behind the Scenes, How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, by William Mann, endorses that view. Furthermore, in Full Service, The Secret Sex Life of The Stars, Scottie Bowers claims romances with Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant. The assault on masculinity even became a military operation in 1994 when the Wright Laboratory in Ohio, a predecessor of today’s U.S. Air Force Research Lab, proposed a $7.5 million project which would spray an aphrodisiac on enemy troops, perhaps by chemtrails, to dissuade the soldiers from fighting and interest them more in amorous activity with each other. The non-lethal ‘gay bomb’ was an outgrowth of the military research, documented in the George Clooney movie Men Who Stare at Goats, into remote viewing.
In 1972, Congress proclaimed that college funding for female sports had to be as plentiful as funding for male sports. Title IX was an extension of the right-to-vote legislation. Tennis credits Title IX for inspiring equal payouts for women and men in major tournaments. Although women play two out of three sets while men play three out of five, both champions at the US Open receive $2.6 million. However, in 2022, a 22-year-old male college swimmer, William Thomas, decided he was female. Changing his name to Lia, Thomas entered the NCAA women’s swimming championship.
The transgender swimmer told Sports Illustrated that he demonstrated that young trans athletes “don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love .”In previous swimming contests, Thomas had won several women’s titles, setting records in the 200 and the 500-yard freestyle.
Everybody thought the difference between a man and a woman was the Y sex chromosome. Women have 2 X chromosomes, men an X and Y. But Critical Theory finds even this open to question. Since William Thomas’ attempt to swim as a woman would generate legal challenges when Judge Ketanji Brown sought U.S. Senate confirmation for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, a Senator, Marsha Blackburn, asked her to define a ‘woman .’Judge Brown declined, claiming that since she was not a biologist, she could not say what a woman was. Justice Brown was then confirmed.
All this is important because, over the last 60 years, American males’ testosterone levels have been concomitantly dropping like a stone. The Urology Times Journal, in 2020, confirmed that from 1999 to 2016, in America, testosterone levels declined in adolescent and young adult men. Sourn Lokeshwar MD, a Urology resident at Yale School of Medicine, said, “Testosterone deficiency has a prevalence of 10% – 40% among adult males and 20% among young adult men (15-39 years.) We have seen that lower values of testosterone have been associated with increased comorbidities. This decline, with increased obesity, may lead to an increase in precocious cancer. Such decreases can also lower libido and increase the risk for erectile dysfunction.”
This drop in testosterone levels is even more alarming because of the link between higher testosterone levels and high IQ. University of Alberta researcher Marty Mrazik, Ph.D., suggests prenatal exposure to testosterone could result in cognitive giftedness. A decline in testosterone can also be related to fertility, a decline in baby production, and a decline in marriages. In The Decline of Men, Guy Garcia writes: “The classic male virtues – physical strength, aggression, self-sufficiency, resolve – that were useful in agrarian and industrial societies are increasingly outdated in a postmodern world where networking, cooperation, and communication are key.”
Is the traditional ideal of masculinity in danger of becoming obsolete?
The reason for this dramatic decline, however, puzzles researchers. Some blame obesity, which is rampant in America. But Dr. Joel Wallach, author of It’s All in Your Head, claims that the lack of testosterone causes the routine pot belly of many men over 40. He recommends the supplementation of 90 essential nutrients, 60 minerals, 16 vitamins, 12 amino acids, and 3 fatty acids to correct the deficiency.
“All this is important because over the last 60 years, American males’ testosterone levels have been concomitantly dropping like a stone.”
In Killer Clothes (2011), Anna Maria and Brian Clement cite how the flame retardant Tris is a human carcinogen. “This chemical causes testicular atrophy and sterility” (Science 1977). And in Poison Poultry (2017), Brian Clement, co-director of Hippocrates Wellness, reports, “If you eat chickens and their eggs, your chances go way up that you will contract prostate cancer at some point in your life.”
The usual suspects of laptops, cell phones, sedentary lifestyle, pollution, plastic bottles, pesticides, additives, soy-based foods, and even estrogen in wastewater from flushed birth control pills have been accused of the increase in ‘soy boys’ and, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, ‘girly men.’ In, Let’s Get Well (1965), Adele Davis claimed, “The Great American Hamburger has done tremendous harm to health .”She explained that beef is fattened with synthetic female hormones contributing to cancer and harming male virility. I’m amazed there are any functioning males in this country of steak eaters.
We are literally at the mercy of the unethical refined food industry, who take all the vitamins and minerals out of food.” In Eating Ourselves Sick (2017), Louise Stephan writes,” Big Food is picking up where Big Tobacco left off, employing skillful marketing to nudge us towards increasingly processed food while hoping we’ll fail to notice the commensurate rise in obesity and decline in health.”
Historically, Big Tobacco companies took over Big Food companies, including R.J. Reynold’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Nabisco in 1985 and Phillip Morris’s $5.75 billion acquisition of General Foods. One researcher, Suzanne Burdick, concluded that having spent decades optimizing the speed of delivery of nicotine to the brain, Big Tobacco then continued to harness that science in their food products by turning food into “another addictive drug.”
So, what can be done to boost the male hormone and fertility in, as Brian Clement aptly put it, “the abundant darkness that prevails in our broken society and misuse of culture”? The usual remedies are a plant-based organic diet, sprouts, (especially fenugreek), adzuki beans, and good cholesterol, the building blocks of hormones. Hippocrates Wellness offers the ultimate programs for increasing testosterone and optimal health. Its on-campus store offers targeted supplements, Hormone Power, Nitrate Oxide, Ginseng, Circulation Max, Zinc, pumpkin seed oil, and vitamin D, itself a hormone.
But it is also important to remember Adele Davis’ warning, “You are what you eat, but you are also what you think.” Benjamin Franklin urged Americans that “it is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.” But constantly providing your body and mind with signals of worry, anxiety, and negative emotions moves your being into a sympathetic state, unable to regenerate. Constantly questioning basic values and behavior like that of Critical Theory and Woke culture can produce devastating effects. Adele Davis defined stress as anything which causes disease. And this explains, in part, why so many otherwise intelligent people get sick.
In the 2019 movie, No Time to Die, the usually sophisticated, confident, patriotic, and womanizing James Bond was suddenly no more. Sean Connery’s Bond promoted M16 and Great Britain’s extreme measures to defend the country. His films even developed some sympathy for ignoring laws to protect the realm. But Daniel Craig’s Bond is now a troubled and depressed man, moping around for three hours waiting to be killed by a weaponized virus escaping a London lab. The emasculated Bond is driven around by a new agent who tells him she is 007 now. And so, the death of Bond had a similar effect on the 007 lovers around the world that American boys of the 1950s felt when their hero, Superman, died of causes other than kryptonite.
And now, GQ magazine, in 2022, interviewed Brad Pitt, who played the god Achilles in Troy, in a dress, talking about his recurring nightmares. On the cover, Brad is depicted dead, floating in flowers. Avatar director James Cameron even claims, “Testosterone is a toxin that needs to be worked out of the system.” However, the universe we inhabit, along with delivering a great challenge, sometimes provides the healing antidote. In this case, Hippocrates Wellness has assembled a splendid array of state-of-the-art technologies that encourage the human body to heal itself and, indeed, to generate more testosterone. Sabrina Ciceri, Director of Immunity Health on the Hippocrates campus, provides the ultimate estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone testing and intravenous therapies. “Synthetic hormones can be dangerous, but bioidentical hormones are safe and effective. All the eleven organ systems communicate through hormones.”
“Constantly providing your body and mind with signals of worry, anxiety and negative emotions moves your being into a sympathetic state, unable to regenerate. This explains, in part, why so many otherwise intelligent people, get sick.”
One premium technology at Hippocrates Wellness is Red Light Therapy, an LED source bathing the torso and testicles with 600-950 nanometers wavelengths. The red light stimulates ATP production, increases the energy available to cells, and significantly increases the activity of the Leydig cells in the testes, which produce both testosterone and sperm cells. Women in menopause can enjoy the benefits of Pulsed Electromagnetic Fields (PEMF). Increasing their testosterone levels supports their bones, cardiovascular system, and cognitive function. Ovaries produce testosterone, and PEMF can restore healthy levels with healing frequencies in 20-minute sessions.
PEMF is a vibrating electromagnetic field that penetrates deeply into the body’s tissues nourishing and stimulating healthy cellular regeneration. Hippocrates Energy Medicine Department provides over a dozen proven technologies, including CoMra, QRS, and BrainTap, to soothe the guest into a parasympathetic state to counteract the anxiety and depression of the sympathetic state; to encourage healing over a wide range of challenges. Specific frequency protocols can target a particular organ, including the endocrine system, to accelerate healing. Dr. Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner and advocate of Vitamin C for healing, said, “PEMF is a benefit for humankind from infant to the geriatric and will lead to a change in the paradigm of medicine.” Hippocrates Wellness has applied this “new paradigm of medicine” for over 40 years!
Energy Medicine supports anti-aging, cell regeneration, immunity, and optimal health. Affordable, portable Energy Medicine technology is now available for home use. Some of these devices are currently on promotion.
