I decided to read this after reading The Toymakers, in which Gulliver’s Travels gets more than a passing mention.
I used to think that Gulliver’s Travels was a children’s book, but how wrong i was. Maybe that’s the way the establishment wants everyone to think about it, but it really isn’t for children. It’s an incredible critique/satire of the society at the time, but unfortunately it is just as relevant today as it was back then. It’s a shame that society took no notice of what Swift had to say and simply condemned this book to a child’s bookshelf as fantasy nonsense.
For example… hypertension, and its complications, is one of the human race’s biggest killers globally, and it is simply caused by consuming sodium chloride (salt). Swift knew back when he wrote this book that salt was a luxury of no use to humans and that you soon adjust to not using it and realise that you actually don’t need it. Yet here we are today stuffing our faces with this debilitating substance that our bodies simply don’t need making ourselves sicker than ever:
I was at first at a great loss for salt, but custom soon reconciled me to the want of it; and I am confident that the frequent use of salt among us is an effect of luxury, and was first introduced only as a provocative to drink, except where it is necessary for preserving flesh in long voyages, or in places remote from great markets; for we observe no animal to be fond of it but man, and as to myself, when I left this country, it was a great while before I could endure the taste of it in anything that I ate.
So if you are one of those people who thought that this was a children’s book, then go and read The Toymakers and then read Gulliver’s Travels, you may just get a different view of it.
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