Tuesday, July 24, 2007
HIERARCHY VII
HIERARCHY and OBESITY in WHITE and BLACK CHILDREN
Again I have found several interesting articles in the internet; they dealt with the obesity in US girls going or not enrolled to colleges; another article- called Psychological Status and Weight-Related Distress in Overweight or At-Risk-for-Overweight Children compared even the psychological stress in obese girls, boys, white as well as black.
The results in short are that girls reported more distress when obese than boys, black children reported also more distress than white children.
I see in this example par excellence for my idea of hierarchy in humans. A human feels relatively well when it feels that there is still somebody “under” him/her; that means the person does not feel the last one in the row. The person who feels last in the row will feel the highest distress. The row in this case is rather too simple and perfectly obvious: white boys feel being on the highest level in this group of humans, white girls feel subordinate to white boys; white obese girls are “under” the white boys but also under white non-obese girls. Black children altogether have the feeling of being lower in the hierarchy, they are “under” all white children, and obesity is the next “status symbol” showing the person’s rank.
Once we realize how important it is to feel or perceive our rank, and what everything we do, manifest, display by our behavior, we start to understand the responses of other people. I think that a remarkable number of all our reactions is based solely on our perceived rank in the human hierarchy.
But I also know that there are some limits to it. All poor people in one village are prepared to measure themselves against the richest man in the village. But this man’s wealth makes up not up to per cent of that of Bill Gates, and no one in the village would come with the idea to compare himself with Bill Gates. Out of which follows that humans make these comparisons of the ranks in human hierarchy only in certain layers of this hierarchy. Only those will be compared who seem standing “relatively” close in hierarchy and those who are “too” distant will no be compared. They will be taken as kings, as nobility, and nobody even tries to compare oneself with the king or nobility.
This idea is short by I hope it is also easy to grasp.
Again I have found several interesting articles in the internet; they dealt with the obesity in US girls going or not enrolled to colleges; another article- called Psychological Status and Weight-Related Distress in Overweight or At-Risk-for-Overweight Children compared even the psychological stress in obese girls, boys, white as well as black.
The results in short are that girls reported more distress when obese than boys, black children reported also more distress than white children.
I see in this example par excellence for my idea of hierarchy in humans. A human feels relatively well when it feels that there is still somebody “under” him/her; that means the person does not feel the last one in the row. The person who feels last in the row will feel the highest distress. The row in this case is rather too simple and perfectly obvious: white boys feel being on the highest level in this group of humans, white girls feel subordinate to white boys; white obese girls are “under” the white boys but also under white non-obese girls. Black children altogether have the feeling of being lower in the hierarchy, they are “under” all white children, and obesity is the next “status symbol” showing the person’s rank.
Once we realize how important it is to feel or perceive our rank, and what everything we do, manifest, display by our behavior, we start to understand the responses of other people. I think that a remarkable number of all our reactions is based solely on our perceived rank in the human hierarchy.
But I also know that there are some limits to it. All poor people in one village are prepared to measure themselves against the richest man in the village. But this man’s wealth makes up not up to per cent of that of Bill Gates, and no one in the village would come with the idea to compare himself with Bill Gates. Out of which follows that humans make these comparisons of the ranks in human hierarchy only in certain layers of this hierarchy. Only those will be compared who seem standing “relatively” close in hierarchy and those who are “too” distant will no be compared. They will be taken as kings, as nobility, and nobody even tries to compare oneself with the king or nobility.
This idea is short by I hope it is also easy to grasp.
# posted by Dalibor @ 6:21 AM 
