French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908-1961, says that the body is the foundation of our lives. And it is said that damage to the brain or body worsens the world we live in because there is no pure consciousness and consciousness is contained in the body.
A few days ago, I wrote a request about the health of political leaders around the world. The facts were all from my problems. I had some good sports. It was once misunderstood that it was the result of mental training such as meditation. But the sad past is actually behind it. These were movements I have developed to defend myself against ideological and religious madness, acquaintances with mental illness, and a society with increasing mental illness.
According to the Duke of Wellington, his victories in the war were already made on the playground of the Eton School as a young man. There was also an anecdote that Cato, a Roman politician and soldier who finished his speech by saying that Carthage must be destroyed, never ate or drank during the battle to lighten up his body. I have embedded their history in my mind. However, I once neglected exercise to bulk up my too thin physique, and I realized the importance of exercise again at the same time. As a young man, I did quite a bit of manual labor to earn both exercise and economic income. There is quite a lot left to move the body.
I called Nelson the person who said the Eton school quote, and AI corrects him as Wellington. And people often mistake the two. - Really?-?
Saving the Mind Through the Body — Sports and Mental Health
Leaders, People, and the Path of Recreational Sports
Lee Hyeong-chun | Geopolitical & Philosophical Columnist
Preface
Human beings are embodied creatures. Yet modern civilization is evolving in a direction that renders the body increasingly unnecessary. From the agricultural age to the industrial era, and now into the information and AI age, the human body is losing its place. The consequences are severe. The number of people suffering from mental disorders is rising sharply around the world — a trend that cuts across every level of society, from leaders of nations to ordinary citizens.
My thesis is simple but unequivocal: to live in abstraction is to court mental illness. A life without physical engagement turns the brain inward, and that energy transforms into anxiety, compulsion, paranoia, and delusion. Conversely, a life that moves the body anchors human beings to reality. This is not merely a personal health philosophy — it is a civilizational diagnosis.
Part I: The Body and Mind of Leaders — The Extinction of Vital Alertness
For many years I have closely observed the faces of world leaders as they appear in media. Xi Jinping, Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un — what they share is the use of the body as political spectacle. Putin's judo, Xi's swimming, Kim's horseback riding, Trump's golf. Yet there is a decisive gap between the body as performance and the body as lived vitality.
What I watch for is what I call chonggi (聰氣) — the vital alertness in the eyes, the signal of an engaged and living mind. When that alertness is present, a leader calculates, restrains, and maintains balance. But when it begins to fade — through aging, isolation, or illness — impulse replaces calculation. Fear, grandiosity, paranoia. And it erupts as violent policy.
This is not mere speculation. The visible changes in Putin's face before and after the Ukraine invasion, the pallor of Kim Jong-un during particular periods of provocation — a leader's body is the prologue to their policies. When the body deteriorates, the mind follows; and a leader whose mind has deteriorated chooses war.
We must also look squarely at ideology and religion. Ideological conviction and religious fanaticism closely resemble psychopathological symptoms in their own right. They paralyze reality-testing, block critical thought, and enforce collective uniformity. A leader sealed inside a fortress of abstraction loses all bodily sense of reality and judges the world by ideological logic alone. This is precisely why leaders must maintain physical vitality — and why cognitive distortion driven by ideology and religion must be vigilantly resisted.
Part II: The People — Adrift in a Sea of Abstraction
This is not a problem confined to leaders. Ordinary citizens of modern societies are increasingly drowning in abstraction. Social media delivers stimulation around the clock while numbing the body's sense of reality. The world inside the smartphone feels vivid and immediate, but the actual body sits motionless in a chair all day.
When I entered university, I was struck by a scene I have never forgotten. Many students who had come from cities could barely perform the simplest physical tasks. They had sacrificed their youth to exam preparation — and yet they were academically unremarkable. They had exhausted their finest years and lost their bodies in the bargain. This is the tragedy of Korea's examination-driven education.
A brain conditioned by test preparation sees the world the way it writes exam answers: prescribed responses, authoritative validation, binary judgment. What should have been learned on the playground — balance, resilience through failure, the embodied sense of connection with others — was never acquired. When the elites produced by this system reach positions of power, we already know what happens.
The pathology of ideology and religion is even more acute at the level of ordinary people. Religious communities in which all members share the same distorted worldview are textbook examples of collective psychopathology. Closed hierarchies, the prohibition of dissent, the deification of leaders — this structure systematically distorts cognition. The illness is not in the individual; the system manufactures it. Politically extreme ideological communities operate by the same mechanism: the certainty that only one's own camp is right shuts down reality-testing and legitimizes hostility and hatred as psychopathological norm.
Part III: Recreational Sports — The Road Back to the Body
The solution is not complicated. We must return to the body.
I have heard that in Hoengseong County, Gangwon Province, health authorities are providing financial incentives to elderly residents who walk regularly. This is more than a public health policy. It is an approach that is correct both in behavioral economics and in neuroscience. Direct rewards for movement change human behavior far more effectively than moral appeals.
This policy must be expanded. Meaningful incentives — approaching the level of basic income — should be offered for participation in recreational sports, and access to public athletic facilities must be dramatically improved. Take ice skating as an example: Korea is severely underserved compared to Japan. Skating is not simply cardiovascular exercise. It requires constant balance adjustment, delivers immediate feedback — fall the moment your attention lapses — and engages the entire brain in continuous connection with physical reality. Within its rhythm and flow, it induces a state of absorption akin to meditation.
As the Duke of Wellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. True leadership and mental toughness are forged not at desks but on playing fields. Korea's educational reform must begin here: genuine physical education, freed from the university entrance system — education through the body, teaching balance, resilience, and coexistence.
Ideological bias and religious fanaticism can also be calmed through recreational sports. On the playing field, it is the body that speaks, not ideology. The experience of sweating, falling, and rising again dismantles the fortress of abstraction. Communities built around shared physical activity create bonds of human solidarity that transcend ideological division. This is why recreational sports can serve as an instrument of social healing that goes far beyond ordinary health policy.
Conclusion: A Civilization That Loses Its Body Loses Its Mind
Approaching sixty, I continue to skate, shoot, and lift weights with regularity. I do so because I fear mental deterioration. The act of using the body is not merely health maintenance — it is the act of anchoring oneself to reality and defending oneself against the excess of abstraction.
When vital alertness disappears from the eyes of world leaders, wars begin. When movement disappears from the bodies of ordinary people, collective madness grows. Ideology and religion are prisons of abstraction built by human beings who have lost their bodily sense of reality. Recreational sports are the simplest and most fundamental key to opening the doors of those prisons.
A civilization that loses its body loses its mind. And a civilization that loses its mind destroys itself.
Lee Hyeong-chun | Geopolitical & Philosophical Columnist
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