This post tries to respond – in a certain way and in a concise manner- to what may be being generated in the deepest substrates of the mental structures of human beings, by limiting them in their early age, to move as they normally do since they start walking. I am referring to the new paradigm that may be being shaped by the prevailing circumstances, worldwide, as a result of the 2020-2021 health contingency.
Children all over the world have been induced to stay confined within 4 walls, because they are forced to stay at home to avoid contagion. The best case scenario has been when they have been allowed to return to school, but they are also restricted because they are not allowed to go out for recreation; that is, they are kept in almost complete immobility.
Very probably that final stage that I have pointed out in the posts CHRONICLE OF A DISAPPEARANCE ANNOUNCED IN THE PLEISTOCENE, HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART I, ..HOMO-ITER: MAN-WALKER. PART II, HOMO-LECTOREM AND HOMO-ESCRIPTOREM, in which the human being hardly walks anymore and has been atrophying in some physical and other mental functions, in addition to the decay he has suffered in his own immune system and self-repair and adjustment of ailments, affections and diseases, which he can no longer face as he did some centuries or millennia ago, because he has become a 99 percent sedentary being, depending exclusively on medicines.
According to the statistics we have been able to gather, 93% of children – in the cities – who should go to school, are now at home, and only 7% worldwide have the space to take a few steps outside. Of this -urban- minimum percentage, only ½ percent can enjoy a walk beyond a 300 square-feet garden.
The question we ask ourselves is: What will be the consequences for the human race of continuing to reduce its walking from the early years? We already know -and we have already commented- that these consequences have a physical scope, but above all a functional organic and mental, intellectual, emotional and psychological one, such as the increase of depression due to the omission of this basic activity of walking.
For the moment, we cannot answer this question with numerical certainty, however, we are already beginning to obtain some objective results in the research and responses that are being recorded in various regions of the world.
We can remember Ivan Illich in his acclaimed thesis: A world without schools. But he never said a world without walking. Illich proposed to give more responsibility to the human being so that he could learn according to his needs. He proposed an unschooling -considering it imminent- that would give human beings the true sense of responsibility in this line of teaching-learning; and he said that the individual could -under this new system- teach and learn within his physical and mental needs. Unfortunately, he did not opine anything about walking; in post WALKING THROUGH STREET FORESHORTENINGS, I mention my book Pueblo Quieto (*), although I was already ahead in post WHAT WOULD GREAT THINKERS RESPOND ABOUT WALKING?, in the month of April 2019, what Ivan might have thought about this fundamental function of the human being, in relation to educational centers; I put in Illich’s voice, the following sarcastic question: “Should I attend some course in order to walk, or enroll in a school?”
Without wishing to be alarmist, the disappearance of the human being on the face of the Earth is already announced, and not precisely because of wars or viruses, in a peremptory term, due to the fact that his walking has been drastically reduced, almost to zero, now with greater intensity since his childhood.
This decrease and limitation, which has been minimizing the essential function of walking in the human being, which was the fundamental cause of the emergence of HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS -according to the evolutionist theory- post CHRONICLE OF A DISAPPEARANCE ANNOUNCED IN THE PLEISTOCENE, where we mentioned: “Very probably this transformation in the feet that we observe, is the one that allowed Homo Sapiens to place itself in a superior position with respect to the rest of the animals, but above all above mammals and its hominid brethren”. Its erect position and its feet were the essential things that made a hominid, 2 million years ago, to develop as HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS, according to the developmentalist theory, becoming the current human being.
L E T U S W A L K holding the hand of that hominid who, a long time ago, showed us the path we should take.
(*) Loya Lopategui, Carlos, Pueblo Quieto. Las caídas de la Libertad, EMULISA, Mexico, 2015.
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