Claim: A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Stra

Claim: A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. What about the moderns who are depressed or melancholy over the obvious external events they witness or are aware of: endless small wars with the threat of nuclear annihilation always in the background, continued degradation of one's surroundings under the pressures of global warming and resource extraction, widespread poverty and societal conflict, to name some of the prominent ones? Maybe this is claim merely a marketing claim pushed by pharmaceutical manufacturers and others who don't really want any change in the status quo, because addressing the root causes of these problems would require some fundamental changes in said status quo? Apparently the idea is that the division between 'secular/rational' and 'spiritual/religious' simply didn't exist in the 'pre-modern world' - but rational scientific inquiry is hardly modern, see the ancient Greeks and also the rational studies of Chinese and Mayan astronmers, the works of Indian and Arabic mathematicians - are they 'post modern'? So then, getting drunk on alcohol or ingesting some other drug is supposed to dissolve the boundaries between rational and irrational and 'let the human soul out of its steel cage'... Well, okay. Probably not necessary to ingest powerful psychedelics to have this experience, but to each their own, and I'm generally in favor of decriminalization of all drugs, as long as people are aware of the various risks involved, and the side effects (it is kind of hard to learn anything difficult or challenging when you're drunk and high, for example).