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I dunno man, drugs are fun and enlightening and all but they aren't /that/ magical. the war on drugs has only been going on for some decades, societies have bee

• nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > drugs ... aren't /that/ magical. You're right. I'm just kinda mixing up some Bill Hicks and some Erik Fromm in a mash. Truth is, we learned it in the 60s, that chemical enlightenment road just loops back to Dodge. But I'm kicking up stones to see where they land, because of the cloying contradiction that remains at the heart of our lives. People want to feel good. They want good mental health. Free from anxiety and self-loathing. I think it was Frank Zappa who said good mental health is the most urgent need of our times, and that everything else would fall into place (politics, economy) if we can just stop being collectively mad. And Zappa hated drugs IIRC. Like Fromm, I think he's right though. It starts at the bottom, not with individual happiness, but simply with individual wellness. Wellness being freedom from the enormous circus of corporate and technological misery we're all immersed in, which feeds on trauma and insecurity. The idea, that other people's wellness could be a threat, is clearly out there. I mean, someone just equated all the horrors and human failings of modernity with a specific religious faith in a cheap potshot at my philosophy. It doesn't get much more reactionary (and bigoted) than that. There's more than a few psychoanalysts who have said that valuing wellness of mind in society that is fuelled by madness is quite a radical position.