I think there's a lot of value in the conclusion there. We emphasize differences between ourselves (upstanding citizen vs. drug addict; religious believer vs. "

I think there's a lot of value in the conclusion there. We emphasize differences between ourselves (upstanding citizen vs. drug addict; religious believer vs. "atheist" or "hedonist", normal person vs. "insane") and moralize about that nonsense when, in fact, we're actually very similar. The original, mid-20th-century superstition was that hedonistic/recreational drug use (which is risky) would take over society and that use had to be criminalized. The reality is that, while almost everyone uses illegal drugs at least once in life, most people make the right choices regardless of law (enforcement is minuscule in the upper-middle and upper class) and, for those who don't, compassionate medical treatment works far better than imprisonment. People may be hedonistic in nature, but they're most often smart about it, so what's wrong with that? I was never addicted to a drug, but I had a long-term trolling habit (hypergraphia) and I will concur with the cage metaphor. The dopamine hits that come with pissing off hundreds of people I'd never met became my own personal drug, and made it difficult to enjoy the rest of life. Addiction eventually becomes the cage, and it gets smaller and tighter over time. The depressing realization that I come away from this with, however, is that modern life is mostly cages and very few parks. Most corporate jobs are cages with night and weekend release, and so is the way we've designed school systems and institutional life in general. We've even conditioned people into believing in supernatural authoritarianism (which is not to invalidate all of religion; I'm just attacking the politicized, authoritarian strain that exists in the US) because they're so imprisoned that the only solution they can envision is a supernatural person that almost certainly does not exist in that form. People are so used to living in cages, and have so many weird addictions (whether to drugs including alcohol, to Internet trolling as I discussed, to authoritarian religion, or to the toxic drama of office politics) that de-caging humanity would require massive social change (including, for an obvious line item, basic income).