Facing the Sun
(Don't wear sunscreen.)
The saintly Iron Age war-lord, King David, described the sun in the following way in the nineteenth psalm:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork…In them he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
and there is nothing hid from its heat.
This sun is a symbol of divine glory, metaphor for God’s word, and ultimately his Son, the Eternal Word.
Recently, I have been tracing another sun-metaphor, not from the Bible, but from Shakespeare, who has his Macbeth, after losing his soul, his friends, his wife because of his ambition, says, ‘I begin to be weary of the sun…’
The sun, here, represents life and being, because, it is in fact the source of life and being on our planet. Positioned at the perfect distance from us, this burning sphere is the source of the energy which drives all life.
Becoming weary of the sun is a fitting epigraph for our times, thus, in a series of essays I explored how modern technocrats, often influenced by ancient ideas like Kabbalah and Tikkun Olam, reject nature in favour of a defiant form of modern technology and centralized planning, including insane ideas such as dimming the sun to save us from global warming.
(Ask yourself, honestly, does it feel any hotter now than when you were a child? It is almost as though global warming is as distant from our everyday lives as mass deaths from covid were…)
To my mind, it is no coincidence that these same health and safety czars have persuaded vast swathes of people that the sun is literally bad for them, a kind of cosmic enemy from which you must hide.
For years, I have instinctively railed against this great fear, against the obsessive hiding, the obsessive slathering of an objectionable cream onto countless bodies around the world.
What is in that cream? What are all those mysterious ingredients seeping into your body? Nobody seemed to care in the face of our great foe, the sun. We must be safe!
Think for a moment of the claim that trace amounts of sunscreen in the oceans causes decay of living coral reefs, yet we ply the stuff directly onto one of our most critical organs, our skin.
But what is the truth about this great panic, which was, in many ways, a pre-cursor to the great panic about the virus which causes the common cold? Why in our age of sunscreen and sun-avoidance have melanoma rates not gone down?
The pseudonymous ‘Midwestern Doctor’ has taken a hard look at what we really know about sunscreen.
He makes the following two arguments:
Avoiding the sun, on average, doubles one’s chances of death and leads to a myriad of other cancers.
(For all of the below points, he provides links to studies, examples of evidence in the essay itself.)
Sunlight drives bio-rhythms such as the circadian rhythm (which governs sleep and hormonal cycles), and without we face mood and circulation disorders. Think here of a plant that has no access to sunlight.
Exposure to sunlight, particularly morning sunlight, improves other systems’ functioning, without which human beings can face impaired fertility, increased aggression and susceptibility to cancers and chronic conditions like arthritis. Studies have shown that increased exposure to sunlight leads to massive decline in the incidence of breast cancer for women and prostrate cancer for men.
Furthermore, a 20-year study in Southern Sweden showed that non-smokers who avoided the sun had the same risk of dying as smokers who embraced the sun.
The same goes for infectious disease. Sun-bathing was proven to be the best treatment during the Spanish flu (when doctors were not overdosing their patients on insane amounts of aspirin and other experimental drugs).
Sunscreen does indeed prevent some types of skin cancer, but not the lethal ones.
How many times have you heard of an acquaintance getting a melanoma on a part of the body thats gets no sun? Or an acquaintance getting a melanoma who is never in the sun without layers of sunscreen?
This has something to do with the different types of skin cancer. The most common type is basal cell carcinoma, which represents 80% of all skin cancers. BCC is definitely caused by the sun. However, it has effectively a 0% fatality rate.
Then you have squamous cell carcinoma. SCC, unlike BCC, can metastasize, if it is not removed timeously. But because less than 10% SCC cancers metastasize within two years, they are mostly removed before serious cancer is caused. Survival rate is above 95%.
The third type which is the most dangerous is the infamous melanoma. Melanomas make up around 1% of all skin cancers. These are the black and brown marks that turn assymetrical and increase in size, indicating their danger. Depending on how soon it is treated, survival rate can range from 35% to 99%. But there are aggressive cases that lead to higher death rates.
But this is the important thing to know about melanomas. The most common type of skin cancer, BCC, is over 80% of the time found on parts of the body exposed to the sun, particularly the face. The reverse is true of melanomas. The vast majority, 78%, occur in areas that receive barely any sunlight.
In other words, the skin cancers which kill you are not related to sun exposure!
There is more evidence for this. Studies have shown that outdoor workers get melanomas at a lower rate than indoor workers.
In addition, there is also strong evidence that sunscreen use has either no preventative effect for melanomas, or, at worst, it possibly increases the risk.
Where does this leave us?
We know instinctively that sunlight is good for us. The sun is the source of life.
Equally, we know instinctively too much sun is bad for us. According to our skin types, we should all have basic awareness of when it is time to get out of the sun, particularly in the middle of the day, which is why many sunny countries have the cultural habit of siesta.
And that is where we should leave it.
If you are prone to benign cancer linked to sunburn, wear a hat or even apply some sunscreen that you trust and is not just some store-bought concoction of which a tiny dilution can bleach the Great Barrier Reef. But be aware that enjoying sunlight is linked to overall health and happiness.
Finally, we must resist this bizarre conspiracy against the sun. Hiding away indoors, from the sun, from a virus, is no way to live, not simply because it is counter-productive to your health, but because it is a kind of anti-life.
This great fear induced by incessant propaganda is a symptom of something quite insidious in modern life - the idea that humanity can, and should, be guided by priestly class of technocrats who can not only repair the world for us, but function as guardian-gods for ourselves and our families.
Like the Sun, like the Son, run the course of your life with joy.
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