Fear

Aajonus identified fear as the operating mechanism behind nearly every major institutional system that touches human health. He described the pharmaceutical industry, the medical profession, agribusiness, and the media as working in concert, whether through explicit coordination or shared financial interest, to keep the population in a state of fear about natural things. His phrasing was direct: "They are terrorists. They are the greatest terrorists on this planet."

He drew a direct parallel between fear-based political propaganda and fear-based medical propaganda. Just as the threat of Russian invasion, the threat of religious extremism, and the manufactured case for the Iraq War were used to override public logic and consent, the threat of bacteria, parasites, viruses, and raw foods is used to override people's capacity to reason about their own bodies. He said that with fear, institutions can "wipe out your logic and sensibility," causing people to make "very stupid decisions" they would not otherwise make.

The mechanism he described was consistent: introduce a frightening concept through authoritative channels, repeat it through media, attach it to something natural or familiar, and then offer a chemical or pharmaceutical solution as the only remedy. He traced this pattern through the history of raw milk, where he said Knudsen Dairy paid doctors and writers to manufacture stories connecting raw milk to tuberculosis and other diseases, specifically to redirect consumer fear away from pasteurized milk and toward raw milk, which allowed Knudsen to sell its expensive pasteurized product to a market that had previously preferred raw milk and had good reason to.

He applied this same analysis to swine flu, avian flu, and every animal-named epidemic. He noted that before the Rockefeller and Carnegie interests shaped medical and media infrastructure, epidemics were blamed on nationalities: the Spanish flu, the Polish flu. Once those interests consolidated control, the blame shifted to animals: swine flu, avian flu, monkey AIDS. This, in his view, served the purpose of making people afraid of biological nature itself, not just foreign people. The goal was to make people distrust animals, distrust raw food, distrust the natural world, and thereby accept chemically produced and industrially processed alternatives as safer.

The agricultural connection was explicit in his analysis. He described agribusiness chemical companies, including Gulf and Western and Dow, as being in bed with the pharmaceutical industry and the media. Their shared interest was in eliminating organic farming, replacing it with chemical agriculture, and eventually controlling the food supply through cloned and patented animals. Fear of mad cow disease, mad deer disease, and similar manufactured threats was, in his reading, a mechanism to justify outlawing natural animal husbandry and replacing it with industrially controlled alternatives. "They want you afraid of bacteria. They want you afraid of parasites. They want you afraid of insects. They want you afraid of everything natural. So guess what? You'll stop organic farming and you'll grow everything with chemicals."

A central project of Aajonus's workshops was dismantling the fear of the body's natural microbial environment. He stated plainly that according to contemporary microbiologists, humans are 90 to 99 percent bacterial by composition. In his framework, the premise that bacteria causes disease is therefore not merely wrong but internally incoherent: if we are bacterial organisms, then bacteriophobia is a form of self-hatred that has been engineered into the culture.

He described the actual role of bacteria as decomposition and digestion. Bacteria eat substances and break them down into smaller waste products. What human cells then absorb and metabolize is, in his framing, the feces and urine of bacteria. He was blunt about the imagery: "We live on shit and piss. That's basically it." His intention was not to be provocative but to collapse the disgust response that had been manufactured around bacterial processes, because that disgust response was the emotional foundation on which bacteriophobia rested.

On parasites, he described a specific thirteen-year period during which he ate raw meat while expecting, every single time, to contract a brain fluke or become seriously ill. He was in a state of fear every time he consumed raw meat, and that fear was, in his words, "schooling him up," meaning it was reinforcing the conditioned belief against all physical evidence. After thirteen years of consistently feeling better after raw meat and never suffering the predicted consequences, he recognized that the fear itself had been the only problem: "The fluke that was put in your head was the idea because it was not founded."

He described eating pinworm-infested salmon, flukes, fecal matter on eggs without cleaning it off, and consuming what would conventionally be described as E. coli and salmonella contamination, all without developing disease, and often feeling better than before. He noted that by this point in the 1970s he had already been through vagotomy surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and that his body was too toxic for most parasites to survive in. He could not even get parasites to take hold, while simultaneously being very ill.

His research into trichinosis, historically the most feared parasitic threat associated with raw pork, led him to the work of Dr. Joel Weinstock, who approximately eighteen years before the time of the lecture demonstrated that the whipworm had coexisted with humans for millions of years, that the pigs raised in sterile university conditions who were sick recovered when whipworm was reintroduced, and that animals with whipworm digested better. Aajonus used this to establish the principle that fear of parasites and bacteria was not evidence-based but was, instead, an artifact of industrial conditioning. "A lot of things you're taught to be afraid of, you should not be afraid of. These we have coexisted with for millions of years."

He also described feeding raw meat and rotten meat to sick animals, including animals who had been declared terminally ill by veterinarians. None of the animals, including himself and the other people present, developed disease. In fact, the sick animals began recovering. He presented this at a symposium at Yale in the early to mid-1980s, and noted that fifteen of the doctors in attendance subsequently moved into viral, bacterial, and parasitical research oriented toward reversing disease rather than fighting microbes.

He specifically identified fear of fat as a manufactured condition that had been engineered against the population's nutritional interest. He told audiences plainly: "Don't be afraid of fat. It will be your best friend, period." He positioned fat as the primary nutritional ally, followed by parasites, bacteria, and fungi, all of which he described as the body's natural helpers. Everything the mainstream medical narrative had framed as the most dangerous thing for human health was, in his framework, actually the most beneficial. The inversion was complete and intentional in his presentation: the things marketed as safe and clean were the things that damaged people, and the things marketed as dangerous were the things that healed.

Aajonus described an encounter with a retired Miami police officer who told him that in emergency situations involving severe blood loss from gunshot wounds or accidents, officers in the field would urinate into a cup and pour it over the wound, stopping bleeding within approximately two minutes. This practice was outlawed in 1928, and the officer stated directly that they watched thousands of people die as a result of being unable to use that intervention. Aajonus used this account to make the broader point that every part of the body, including its secretions, has value, and that the fear and disgust trained into people around bodily fluids is a culturally manufactured response that costs lives.

He urged audiences explicitly: "Don't be afraid of your body. Don't be afraid of your body and your secretions unless you're drinking poison. Then be careful." He connected the fear of bodily secretions directly to the medical profession's interest in keeping people alienated from their own physiology. When someone is afraid of their own body, they cannot trust it, cannot read its signals, and cannot care for it without professional intermediaries who profit from the relationship.

The fear of things like fecal matter, urine, and bacterial waste was, in his view, particularly destructive because these substances are either directly nutritive (in the case of bacterial metabolic byproducts) or medically useful (in the case of urine), and the disgust response around them had been culturally amplified to serve industrial interests in selling antibacterial products and chemical cleaners.

Aajonus singled out antibacterial soaps and sprays as a direct product of manufactured fear. He described them as chemical poisons that damage lungs, skin, and cells, marketed through the language of bacterial threat. "Your antibacterial soaps, your antibacterial sprays, those are your deadly things. Those are chemicals which will damage you." He framed the messaging around these products as an example of how fear is the sales mechanism: first establish terror of bacteria, then offer a chemical intervention as protection, then profit from repeated use of that intervention.

He noted that the entire logic of the antibacterial product industry depended on people believing that bacteria is an external enemy to be killed, rather than an internal partner to be maintained. Once someone understands that human beings are predominantly bacterial organisms, the premise of the antibacterial product collapses. The product is then revealed as something that damages the organism it claims to protect.

He made the same argument about antiseptics and antibiotics in medical settings, describing them as tools "not as an aid to your health, but as an aid to them to keep gaining money from you."

Aajonus was specific about the relationship between fear, anxiety, and physical biochemistry. He stated that 95 percent of anxiety is produced by the failure to physically discharge hormones produced for physical activity. He identified testosterone, estrogen, and adrenaline as activity hormones, and said that people who produce large quantities of them will experience anxiety if they do not engage in sufficient physical movement. He read the number of activity rings visible in the iris as indicating how many hours per day the body generates hormones for physical activity, with athletes showing seven to fourteen rings and requiring correspondingly large amounts of physical output.

When those hormones are not discharged through activity, they do not dissipate; they accumulate and manifest as anxiety, which then gets projected outward onto relationships and the surrounding world, creating perceptual distortions. In this framework, chronic anxiety is not a response to real external threats but an internal biochemical event produced by undischarged physical energy. Fear and paranoia arising from this state are therefore not accurate readings of reality but biochemical artifacts.

He also connected paranoia and depression directly to intestinal environment. He described E. coli as essential for the health of the brain and nervous system, and stated that if someone is depressed or paranoid, a poor intestinal environment is the biochemical cause. High meat, which is meat pre-digested by bacteria, was described as a way to restore the intestinal E. coli environment and thereby shift the emotional and psychological state.

He described his own experience of this biochemical relationship. When he was a vegan eating primarily fruit, he spent hours every day plotting violent political fantasies with an intensity he described as extreme. When he shifted to eating raw meat daily and eliminated fruit, "I became an entirely different person. I approached things without all that anxiety and that anger." He also noted that during three years of severe dietary damage following a period of toxic exposure, he was driven into panic and fury constantly, forced himself to maintain kindness while feeling destructive and chaotic, and feared the state might be permanent. He found that small amounts of cooked starch combined with raw fat and fresh fruit could bring the state under control during that period.

He described fear having a specific effect on the brain: putting people into a state where logic and sensibility are neutralized. "They put you in fear and terror and they get your brain to just melt and say, I guess it's true. I guess I better do what the doctor says. And people just become dumb. Stupid. And they make very stupid decisions." This was not a metaphor in his framework but a description of an actual physiological event where the emotional centers override rational processing, which is precisely why fear is the preferred tool of institutional control.

He drew a direct connection between the quality of food consumed and the degree to which a person lives in fear. "Bad food makes life difficult and distorts perception, like bad fuel makes a machine run poorly, become faulty, wear and die too soon. Life becomes imbalanced and painful. Fear and ugliness dominate the mind. Then life is seen as dangerous and we live defensively, attacking the outside when it all begins inside." This passage, drawn from a conversation rendered in his book, expressed his understanding that the fearful, defensive orientation many people inhabit is not an accurate response to a genuinely dangerous world but a perceptual distortion produced by a body running on industrially damaged food.

The converse was equally important in his framework: eating correctly, particularly consuming adequate raw fat and raw animal protein, shifts the organism out of a fear-dominant state into one capable of calm observation and rational response. He described this as something he had experienced personally, not merely theorized.

Aajonus described his own childhood as saturated with fear across multiple dimensions simultaneously. He was beaten regularly by his older brother and his father, sometimes with golf clubs, paddles, belts, and other implements. His father once put a nine-iron golf club through his skull. His brother would come into his room at night, punch him in the stomach, and knock the wind out of him, causing him to black out. He rarely slept, partly from fear of his brother and partly from fear of religious imagery, including the devil, instilled through Catholic upbringing. He feared the dark, feared monsters under the bed, and at approximately age ten used his father's handsaw to cut the legs off his bed so that no monster could hide beneath it.

He was also afraid of his own inability to communicate, due to his autism, and lived in constant terror of being recognized as incapable of understanding ordinary language. Every social interaction carried the threat of exposure, ridicule, and rejection. He described this as a psychic and emotional state of continuous anxiety that could not even be articulated in words because he did not have adequate language for it.

His mother's fear of getting cold and contracting pneumonia was one of the specific fears he remembered from his early childhood, and he described it as an example of how fear, when not grounded in reality, becomes self-perpetuating. His response, at some point in childhood, was to immerse himself in an icy creek in winter and walk a mile home in the freezing cold specifically to test the premise. He did not get a cold. He observed that all the emotional weight and fear attached to the cold exposure was entirely contradicted by what actually happened to his body.

He described a specific incident involving a woman who had eaten high meat, which is meat aged beyond normal parameters to allow extensive bacterial pre-digestion, and who called him late at night in terror, convinced she was going to die. He described the fear response as the belief that the bacteria would "take her over," that she would "melt" or "dissolve," comparing the feared outcome to what happens to the Wicked Witch of the West when water is thrown on her. He chose not to answer the phone because he recognized that answering it would require spending the entire night providing reassurance to someone whose fear had overridden any capacity to process information rationally. He noted that she was not going to be harmed, that the fear itself was the only real problem, and that the bacteria was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

This incident illustrated his view that people who have been thoroughly conditioned to fear natural bacterial processes will experience genuine physiological terror responses when they consume something like high meat, and that this terror is entirely a product of conditioning rather than any actual threat. The fear response is real; the thing that triggered it is not dangerous.

The explicit stated goal of his workshops was to eliminate the fear of the human body and of nature entirely. He framed the workshop itself as an antidote to the fear conditioning installed by the pharmaceutical and medical industries. "I'm here in this workshop to dispel all that so you never go into fear again. Understand how the body works and you take care of it. You nurture it. You don't attack it."

He told audiences that after understanding how the body actually functions, they should never need to panic over anything said by a doctor or pharmaceutical representative, and should never need to run to a hospital out of fear rather than genuine need. He positioned his book, We Want to Live, as a reference that could substitute for the panic-driven emergency room visit, providing enough information about the body's actual processes and about food-based remedies to allow people to care for themselves with knowledge rather than fear.

His summary of what, exactly, should and should not be feared was consistent across many passages: "You should never be afraid of the human body or anything in nature unless it's a very hungry tiger or lion or a whole swarm of crocodiles." Industrial chemicals, antibacterial products, vaccines, pharmaceutical drugs, and processed foods were the things that warranted caution. Natural bacteria, parasites, fungi, raw fats, raw meats, fecal matter in appropriate contexts, and the body's own secretions were not.