Phobias

Aajonus argued that fear, when activated strongly enough, eliminates rational thinking. He described the process in direct terms: medical professionals and pharmaceutical representatives put people into fear and terror, and the brain melts into compliance. People make stupid decisions under fear. They agree to chemotherapy, to surgery, to antibiotics, to antiseptic chemicals on their skin, not because logic has persuaded them but because their capacity for logic has been temporarily dissolved by manufactured terror.

He drew the parallel explicitly to political fear campaigns. The same mechanism that sold the Iraq war by warning of weapons of mass destruction, the same mechanism that warned previous generations that "the Russians are coming," operates in medicine to sell germ theory. The Spanish flu, the Polack flu were early iterations, he said. Then when Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved in shaping medical education and research, the fear shifted to animals: swine flu, avian flu, monkey flu, monkey AIDS. Each iteration was designed, in his reading, to make people distrust nature, distrust their own bodies, and distrust everything that did not come in a pharmaceutical package.

He pointed to swine flu, bird flu, and all related panics as "absolute nonsense," not phenomena arising from biology but from corporate strategy. The goal was to associate natural organisms with danger so that people would abandon organic farming, accept chemical agriculture, accept cloned and patented animals, and ultimately accept the elimination of all natural food sources in favor of chemically managed ones. The agricultural chemical companies, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and the media were all described as operating from the same financial interest.

Aajonus identified germ phobia as the master phobia underlying all the others. In his framework, humans are 90 to 99 percent bacterial by composition, a figure he cited from contemporary microbiologists. Given this, the premise that bacteria causes disease is, in his words, "absolute horse manure." Bacteria digest food; their urine, feces, and sweat are what the human body actually absorbs as nutrition at the cellular level. When he described this to audiences, he would then point out that humans are literally eating the feces and urine of bacteria at every moment of digestion, and that this is not disgusting but foundational.

He catalogued the varieties of bacteria in the body to make the phobia appear absurd on its face. There are 2,300 varieties of Salmonella that used to live on human skin before daily bathing became standard. There are several hundred varieties of bacteria living in the nose alone. Humans carry more bacteria in their mouths than dogs or cats do. E. coli, the organism around which so much public fear is organized, is present in the colon in "millions and trillions" as the final stage of digestion, and animals who lick each other's feces and anuses daily, including their own, never develop E. coli-related disease. He asked audiences to consider why, if E. coli were genuinely dangerous, the entire animal kingdom was not dying from it, given that every species practices this behavior constantly.

The antibacterial products marketed to eliminate these organisms were his counterexample. Antibacterial soaps, sprays, and antiseptic chemicals do not protect the body; they are chemical poisons that kill human cells along with bacteria. He cited ammonia, chlorine, and fluoride as examples of genuinely dangerous substances being introduced to the body under the pretense of hygiene. Antiseptic blankets for children, he noted, often contain heavy metals and fluoride, which is simultaneously a rat poison, an insect poison, and a rodent poison, placed in close contact with children's skin under the banner of safety.

He described the pharmaceutical and chemical industries as having created a situation in which people voluntarily apply cell-killing chemicals to their bodies because they have been made to fear the bacteria that constitute the majority of their own biological identity.

Trichinosis was, in Aajonus's telling, one of the earliest and most emotionally loaded parasite fears instilled in him. He remembered the word from childhood without knowing what it meant, and the fear preceded any understanding. He described this as characteristic of how phobia operates: the emotional charge is installed before the intellectual framework exists to evaluate it.

He cited the work of Dr. Joel Weinstock approximately eighteen years before the time of the workshop, who found that pigs kept in overly clean university environments became very sick, and when the whipworm was introduced, the pigs recovered and digested normally. Weinstock also found that children who had whipworms showed no adverse effects within five to six days of incubation. This research, in Aajonus's reading, confirmed that humans and certain parasites have coexisted for millions of years and that the parasite serves a cleaning and normalizing function rather than a destructive one.

He noted that 50 percent of the known human population carries parasites, and that the people who do not, himself included for years due to the toxicity of pharmaceutical drugs given since infancy, are often among the most ill. He was so poisoned from medical drugs given beginning as a fetus, since his mother was a nurse, that no parasite would survive in his body, and during that period he suffered constant constipation, rectal scarring, and severe illness. The absence of parasites correlated with worse health, not better.

He described the fear of parasite-infected meat as particularly unfounded, citing African wild dogs who preferentially eat parasite-infected meat because it gives them more strength than fresh meat, enabling them to run down antelope for extended distances while the prey animal collapses from exhaustion.

His own experience over thirteen years of eating raw meat extended this into personal testimony. Every time he ate raw meat, he experienced the conditioned fear that this would be the time he got sick. He ate pinworm-infested salmon, multiple varieties of flukes, bacteria, and fecal matter on eggs without cleaning it, including E. coli and Salmonella, and consistently felt better, never worse. After thirteen years with no parasitic illness despite having no hydrochloric acid in his stomach due to a vagotomy, he recognized that the fear had been entirely without empirical basis.

Aajonus treated fear of fecal matter as another manufactured phobia with no grounding in the biology of the animal kingdom. Every creature except educated humans eats feces, he pointed out. Dogs and cats eat feces routinely. Mothers in most animal species eat the fecal matter of their offspring, and the bacteria from that fecal matter passes into the mother's milk, strengthening the offspring's nervous system. Tribes in multiple regions of the world, including a group in Georgia, Russia documented in National Geographic, consume the feces of animals as a food source, recognizing that when a vegetarian animal defecates, approximately 75 percent of that material has already been digested and is effectively predigested nutrition.

He described seeing people in Cambodia and Laos move directly from toileting to food preparation and eating without handwashing, and observed no resulting epidemic disease in those populations. The danger from fecal matter, in his framework, comes entirely from contamination with industrial chemicals, heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, or other toxins. Pure fecal matter from a non-toxic organism is not dangerous. He made the practical clarification that E. coli dies quickly as it dehydrates and cools, so to access living E. coli from deer feces one would need to encounter it fresh and warm.

Aajonus identified fat phobia as a specific and damaging manufactured fear, particularly harmful to women. He observed that women who were thin-conscious and fat-phobic represented a psychological block within the Primal Diet that some had to work through consciously. People who are very thin, lacking adequate fat, have no buffer between environmental and sensory information and the brain, making every stimulus register as a button, producing hysteria and emotional reactivity. He described taking Twiggy on a date in 1972 and referenced the extreme sickliness associated with that body type.

He told audiences directly that fat would be their best friend, ranking it above bacteria, above parasites, and above fungi in its importance to health. The fear of fat was, in his framing, another product of industry: the low-fat movement served food manufacturers who replaced fat with processed carbohydrates and chemical additives.

Aajonus described squeamishness toward raw meat, particularly raw chicken, as a psychological block rather than a physiological one. He presented his own history of overcoming squeamishness through repeated exposure as the model. He had been paranoid of creepy, crawly things until he reached a state where he could put a worm or centipede in his mouth without concern. He described visiting markets in Asia where cockroaches, scorpions, and bats were sold as food, fried or fresh, and observing that the people who ate these foods daily had none of the squeamishness or paranoia around natural foods that Westerners carry.

He contrasted a 14-year-old Vietnamese girl who recoiled from him not from the food itself, which she had been sitting near without concern, but specifically because he ate it, having been trained through television and news media to associate someone who ate such things with contamination and danger. Her parents, from an older generation without that media exposure, found his eating impressive rather than frightening. He used this to illustrate how rapidly phobia is installed through media indoctrination, with only twenty years of schooling and television separating a generation that lived freely from one paralyzed by manufactured fear of natural food.

He recounted a specific episode of a woman who called him late at night, at 11:45 p.m., after eating high meat she had obtained from a contact named James. She was "scared to death" that the bacteria would take her over, that she would become very sick and be dead by morning. He made the deliberate choice not to answer the phone because, as he explained, he would have had to spend the entire night reassuring her that she was not going to dissolve or die, an exercise he characterized as babysitting her through her fear. He compared the terror to the Wicked Witch of the West being dissolved by water, the kind of visceral, irrational imagery that takes hold when phobia of bacteria is activated.

He used this episode to demonstrate how completely the pharmaceutical and medical industries had succeeded in making people terrified of aged, fermented, bacterially active meat, which in his framework is a powerful healing food, precisely because the fear prevents people from using it and drives them back toward pharmaceutical interventions when they feel unwell.

In "We Want to Live," Aajonus provided a specific physiological reading of paranoia as a distinct condition related to but separable from broader phobia. He defined paranoia as an exaggerated fear that someone, something, or life in general is going to destroy you. He identified the psychological cause as cynicism and the physiological cause as low blood pressure, produced by allergies to pollutants including medical or recreational drugs and poor diet.

His protocol for dissolving paranoia was specific: eating the Nut Formula from page 194 of the book, or fresh raw garlic with a cooked starch and/or raw meat, usually raises blood pressure within minutes and dissolves paranoia within forty minutes. If drugs are continued, garlic has a limited effect on raising blood pressure and removing paranoia, because the drug contamination continues to suppress the physiological conditions that support normal blood pressure and therefore normal mental equilibrium.

This framing positioned paranoia and many phobia-adjacent fear states as problems of nutritional deficiency and chemical toxicity rather than purely psychological conditions, meaning they respond to dietary intervention rather than psychological therapy.

Aajonus identified fear as the primary obstacle people face during detoxification, which he understood as the source of all illness. Industrial toxins create all illness whether mild or severe, and the body's process of eliminating them produces symptoms that conventional medicine frames as disease requiring treatment. The first priority during any severe detoxification, even a deforming one, he stated, is not to panic.

He was emphatic that seeking medical or alternative medical attention during detoxification "will usually result in the same experience, that is, terrorization followed by poisoning." Doctors, he said, are trained specifically to scare patients senseless. He used the phrase "scare the living daylight out of you" to describe the standard of care, noting that it literally means to scare someone senseless, to remove their capacity for clear thought, and then to poison them with pharmaceutical interventions that worsen the underlying condition.

His workshop framing positioned understanding the human body as the antidote to this kind of fear. If a person understands how the body works, how detoxification operates, what symptoms mean in terms of the body's janitorial process, they will not be afraid when those symptoms appear. The medical profession hooks people through fear of their own bodies, and the remedy is knowledge of the biological reality rather than pharmaceutical management of the terror response.

Aajonus described the belief that diseases are contagious as false and as a specific trap for the mind. When people believe disease is contagious, they externalize the cause of illness to other people, animals, or microbes, and in doing so they believe themselves to be helpless victims. Subconsciously, this belief produces a state of perpetual vulnerability and dependence on authority for protection.

In his alternative framework, diseases are not caused by external agents but by the accumulation of industrial pollution, vaccines, medications, processed food, and household compounds. Animals in the wild constantly expose themselves to all of nature's microbes, lick feces from each other and strangers, and never develop diseases from these exposures. The superstitions fed daily by pharmaceutical, medical, and "opportunistic bacteria-phobic industries" through academia and media, especially television, were in his assessment responsible for an epidemic of irrational fear with no basis in observed animal biology.

The contagion belief also blocks peace of mind by causing people to blame animals, other people, and microbes for illnesses that are actually products of their own exposure to industrial chemicals. He characterized this as a kind of perceptual trap, and his workshops were explicitly designed to dispel it so that attendees would "never go into fear again."

Aajonus traced the installation of phobia through several channels. Television and news media produce fear of monsters that do not exist, as illustrated by the 14-year-old Vietnamese girl who was afraid of him after seeing him eat food that she herself had been sitting near without fear. The news clip had installed an emotional association between that food and danger, and when she saw it enacted, the phobia activated against the person rather than the food.

Pharmaceutical and medical advertising works the same way: they put you in fear and terror, and when your brain is in that state you cannot think clearly, so you accept whatever they tell you to do. He described watching audiences go into fear four times during a single workshop session, observing the physical shift in their affect, and noting that they did not relax until they had received enough information to intellectually process the threat and find it absent. Most people in that state do not realize they are in it because they are living inside it.

The pharmaceutical industry then maintains the fear through the media, academic accreditation, and school curricula, all of which teach the germ theory as established fact and frame natural organisms as inherent threats. He noted that the child who had been in Asia twenty years earlier lived without these phobias, while her child raised on Vietnamese television carries them, illustrating how a single generation of media exposure is sufficient to install the phobia from scratch.

Aajonus stated explicitly that one of the primary purposes of his workshops was to dispel all phobias related to the human body and the natural world, so that attendees would never again be afraid of the body, its secretions, its bacteria, its parasites, or anything in nature except genuinely dangerous physical threats like a very hungry tiger, a swarm of hungry crocodiles, or a hungry bear in its own territory. He had swum with alligators every day for a year and a half on Jekyll Island and in its rivers, and they never approached him, because humans are not on their diet. He used this to illustrate that even the most feared predatory animals are not actually threats in most circumstances, and that the normalized level of fear in modern culture is wildly disproportionate to actual danger.

He closed this line of reasoning consistently by pointing back to the truly dangerous things: medicines going into the body, industrial pollution, the 60,000 new chemicals introduced in the last fifty years, antibacterial chemicals on the skin, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. These are what should be feared, if anything. The things people have been trained to fear, fat, bacteria, parasites, fungi, raw meat, fecal matter, are the things that have supported animal and human health for millions of years.