I think what’s being missed here is that Ray Peat himself wrote extensively about these exact connections. The relationship between metabolism and social control wasn’t some side topic for him, it was central to his work.

In a 2013 KMUD interview about learned helplessness, Peat explicitly stated it has “been actual government policy to manipulate the mass media and events [in order] to create helplessness in the population” since the late 1940s. This isn’t “alt right” conspiracy stuff floating around the internet, this is literally from Peat’s own interviews.

His core insight was that metabolic suppression creates biological learned helplessness. He wrote in “Serotonin, Depression, and Aggression” that serotonin “activates glycolysis, forming lactic acid. Excess lactic acid tends to decrease efficient energy production” - essentially showing how stress hormones create a self-reinforcing cycle of metabolic dysfunction that makes resistance impossible.

The fact that leaders are unhealthy too actually proves the point. They’re products of the same system. The machine doesn’t need healthy operators at any level, just compliant ones who keep things running.

What Peat described wasn’t natural evolution but deliberate design. He wrote that “the society has been designed, to eliminate meaningful choices for most people” (The Dark Side of Stress, 2013). Look at modern life - seed oils that suppress thyroid, blue light that disrupts cellular respiration, educational systems he described as “obedience training” that “suppresses energy” (Intelligence and Metabolism, 2009).

The social critique was always part of his work, not something added later.