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What the Opioid Crisis is Really All About
There is a wonderful post by Avner Zarmi that compares the clash between traditional and contemporary culture to a Twilight Zone episode. In that episode, people with beautiful faces were shunned because the average face was horribly misshapen. Worse, those with beautiful faces had to live in a restricted area away from the normal, ugly people.
Zarmi contrasts traditional, religiously observant individuals of our own day with everyone else. He compares these shunned traditionalists to the beautiful faces in the Twilight Zone episode. By contrast, those who go with the flow and live by more casual standards are the normal, ugly people in the Twilight Zone episode.
Per Zarmi, people are less content today than when they lived more traditional lives. Proof of this is increased drug use. Life is too much to bear, despite increased material prosperity, and people demand drugs to hold their own in an upside down world where beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful.
Based on my own experience as a rehab counselor, I can assure you that the increased legalization of marijuana is extremely troublesome. Marijuana use may lead to use of hard drugs and, even when it does not, marijuana itself can easily become addictive.
Brave New World, a book written by Aldous Huxley in 1931, painted a picture of a future where people lived an anesthetized existence perpetuated by consumption of soma, an anti-depressant and hallucinogenic drug. Less than 100 years later, Huxley’s dystopian nightmare has become a desirable reality among increasing numbers of lost souls.
Zarmi calls for a return to “Biblical morality,” which could be interpreted every which way, but I think a good starting point would be observance of the Ten Commandments. If we could only follow them — especially #10, not to envy — our lives would certainly be a lot simpler and less in need of substances to make us feel better.
Published in General
I consider my self a “good” cook. But most of the time I just throw things together and eat for sustenance. And I often think “What! Manna? Again?!”
What would the wandering Jews have done each meal if they’d had a cell phone and a selfie stick? That wouldn’t have lasted long. (Even the term selfie stick, I find offensive. Look. Look at me. I’m eating!)
This guy is over the top. His perspective is that of a rehab counselor. That limits his vision to the so-called compulsive behavior of his his patients. Yet he doesn’t hesitate to project these experiences onto the rest of us. Rehab is a business. The industry has received well deserved criticism for it’s solicitation of people who don’t really need the help offered – at a fancy price. Ben-Eliyahu harbors a bias, and should be judged accordingly.
The Opiod Problem is the popular crisis of the day. Reminds me of Refer Madness back in the day. Politicians can’t pass enough legislation limiting and/or prohibiting physician distribution of these naughty pills. Ben-Eliyahu is quick to join them. No reliable statistics required. Hey, why not? It’s in his best financial and emotional interest to push that agenda.
From there he brings in Aldous Huxley and The Twilight Zone as examples of our screwed up world. Like we didn’t know already. B/t/w, discontent has been around long before Ben started to read us the Ten Commandments. And so have drugs.
As a disclaimer, I’m not saying Ben isn’t sincere, only that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
AutoIncorrect got you there; it’s rather jarring, when trying to follow your argument in a nested/cropped thread. I’m assuming you meant “Reefer Madness”?… It seems YB-E is attempting to *opine* rather than *instruct*, as well.
My work in this field has been for non-profit rehab facilities as a volunteer. I have no dog in this fight, as it were.
I can assure you that this is not about bias. I have seen many marijuana addicts and just about every user of hard drugs started with marijuana.
The legalization of marijuana is a problem but the reasons that people feel compelled to use it — which revolve around lack of a higher purpose in life — are more important. Whatever people here think of Huxley’s book, escaping reality through drugs has no positive upside for society as a whole. Increased availability of marijuana and its potentially negative consequences goes hand in with alcohol consumption, which is on the rise
In the cultural milieu in which we live, there needs to be a revolt against excessive drinking and drug use just as there has been against smoking.
Social pressure is the most effective way to change behavior.
I’m not seeing it; the attacks on smoking center on how it harms others because allergies/second-hand smoke death toll*
That won’t translate easily to drinking (other than drunk driving, where the encroachments on its behalf are already out of hand).
There is a rather large group of priests and nuns would argue that sex is not a need. And there is an even larger group of non-believers who would argue that “needing to believe in something” is not a human need. That this is hard for jihadis and other hyper-religious people to believe is not the fault of those who live a happy life without the self-deception required to “believe in something” even if there is zero evidence supporting it.
Existential therapy asserts that there are 4 givens of existence and that most psychological dysfunction results from the refusal to acknowledge these givens. The givens are: Mortality, isolation, meaninglessness and freedom.
Mortality: You and everyone you know will one day die.
Isolation: No matter how close you may feel to any other individual, ultimately, we are separate creatures.
Meaninglessness: There is no obvious sense or meaning to the universe.
Freedom: You are free to make choices and you are responsible for the outcomes of your choices.
Successful religions provide a way of mitigating or ignoring all of these.
Mortality: You and everyone you know will one day die. But you all will meet again in the sweet by and by.
Isolation: No matter how close you may feel to any other individual, ultimately, we are separate creatures. “Lo, I am with you always” “There is a friend that sticks closer than a brother” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”
Meaninglessness: There is no obvious sense or meaning to the universe. God has a perfect plan for your life. His ways are deeper than our ways. We cannot hope to fathom them, but he has his reasons.
Freedom: You are free to make choices and you are responsible for the outcomes of your choices. Yet we pray to God to have mercy and change the outcome. Some even claim that he sent his Son to pay the price for our sins.
There is an alternative to making up myths to alleviate the anxiety of these givens of existence: Accept them. Just accept them.
There is no perfect, cosmic justice. That’s a myth.
There is no Invisible Comforter. He is a myth.
Things don’t happen for a reason. They just happen.
And yet, we are not mere animals. We have a sense of justice, imperfect though its implementation may be, not because God gave it to us, but because most of us retain an inherent sense of empathy, reinforced by various social norms.
Yes, tomorrow we may die. What of it? If we do not, however, let us plan a few years and decades ahead. I don’t need to believe in God to believe in the wisdom of planning.
It is counterintuitive to think that someone who rejects a myth for lack of supporting evidence is thus more prone to accepting any other unsupported myths merely because he has no allegiance to one that would displace them.
Another way of looking at this is that we have invented and evolved the notion of God until he took the shape of that hole. But if there is, in fact, no God (and let’s face it – there is no dispositive evidence that he actually exists), then what we have is evidence of the hole only.
More evidence that we have shaped God to fit the hole rather than having been created by God to need exactly him is that humans have invented over 10,000 different gods throughout history, and despite any commonality in some (e.g. Jehovah is like Allah), none identically overlaps. This points to the notion that there are different sized holes. How is this?
Perhaps the hole is actually the anxiety we each feel, to different degrees, regarding the displeasing givens of our existence (i.e. death, isolation from loved ones, the struggle to find meaning where no obvious sensible meaning appears, sometimes we mess up our lives with no one to blame but ourselves).
It’s not a matter of filling the void with shtuff so much as recognizing that it will always be there and that is all right (because we really have no alternative).
It is more accurate to say that they started with chocolate. Let’s ban chocolate!
Believe me. Each one of those priests and nuns benefitted from some necessary sex act somewhere at some time. Or else they wouldn’t be around to forsake it themselves. Sex is how we all get here.
Several thoughts come to mind:
There, fixed it for you.
Granted. But feeding myself does not make my children any less hungry. I do not mistake my need for theirs.
Believe what you want to believe. Bless you and enjoy the bliss. I have no wish to rob anyone of comfort or bliss. If it makes you happy, it makes me happy.
Moderator Note:
Redacted, see Code of Conduct. Your feelings about others' CoC compliant beliefs do not merit comparisons with vulgarity that violates it. Please keep the conversation respectful of others' beliefs.I find the affectation about writing a dash in the middle of the word God to be bizarre. You realize that it’s worse for you to see the word God when I write it and to take that word into your brain than for you to pretend that I don’t know what you mean when you type G-d.
It’s a farce. Like most religious affectation it’s a complete farce. No one believes that you don’t really mean God when you write G-d. It’s a joke. It is no different than writing [redacted]. Is there any question about the content and true meaning?
It’s because, as you would admit, there is no concrete evidence for G-d’s existence. G-d is beyond definition, cannot be circumscribed by a word.
Your obsession with G-d eclipses that of the average believer.
Abraham was the first atheist. He was a renegade after breaking his father’s idols. You are in good company.
Actually if you hadn’t eaten, for the last several decades your children wouldn’t be doing nearly as well as they are today.
Sex is a drive that is the result of the command to go forth and multiply (this is true even if you are an evolution-type thinker). And sex was not so much a need to you, but to your children, though you probably experienced the immediate process of the drive at that time instead of them. Sex IS being human in that sense, in the same sense that eating IS being human.
There can be no more beautiful and perfect understanding of sex. You got it just right.
You seem rather adamant in debunking many of @yehoshuabeneliyahu‘s points, so I will attempt to debunk some of yours.
Just because you can find a small group of people who do not succumb to their sexual desires, or an even smaller group that do not have the normal sexual drive, does not in any way negate the fact that the overwhelming majority of human beings have a built-in need for sex. To argue against it would be absurd. There is also a small group of people who do not possess the normal hunger drive either. That doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t get hungry. There are exceptions to pretty much every norm in the animal kingdom.
I agree, of course this is counterintuitive. However it seems to be a real phenomenon. When you look at the people who have left religion behind, they are far more likely to believe in pseudoscientific things such as Astrology, Reincarnation, Ghosts, ESP, the Paranormal, Extraterrestrials, Quack Medicines, Conspiracy Theories, Numerology, Phrenology, Global Warming, and the Musical Talent of Bruce Springstein.
These are my own personal observations of people I have known and read about. I do not have hard data to support this, but I once read an article in “The Skeptical Inquirer Magazine” by a researcher who did a survey in which he tried to find a link between religious believers and pseudo scientific beliefs, figuring that if you belief in one fairy tale, you are more likely to believe in others. To his aggravation, he admitted that he had found the opposite result.
How can you know any of this? There is no evidence. To me, these are conjectures every bit as much as the conjectures you are ascribing to religious believers. To me, a more rational observation would be “I don’t know if there is Meaninglessness, no Cosmic Justice, no Invisible Comforter, or things not happening for a reason, because I am not provided any evidence outside of the material world.”
There is a saying I learned from the aforementioned magazine that says “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Hehe — yes, I can tell you are a much happier, psychologically healthier, better person than the rest of us for “accepting” these presuppositions… Isn’t existentialism fun??
I am only echoing what my psychology professor pointed out to our class: Food is a need. Water is a need. Oxygenated air is a need.
Sex is a desire.
I gotta back you on this one.
I notice that you do not deny that these anxieties exist. Maybe this list bothers you. It no longer bothers me.
It reminds me of my first wife’s sister. She wanted to be a doctor, but she was anxious that she would not get into med school. Lying side by side in bed one night in pitch dark, I asked my wife, what was her sister’s plan if she did not get into med school? And my wife punched me in the nose. She didn’t answer me. She just punched me. I had asked the question no one was allowed to ask. It was a practical question. In point of fact, her sister is not a doctor today. She could not get into med school.
It’s like that when one points out the 4 undeniable givens of existence. For some people, it is just too hard to face – and then they, as you just did, project their anxiety over these givens onto me, who is largely not anxious about this stuff anymore.
The question is whether one has the courage to face the anxieties or one insists on making up fairy tales about them.
There is zero evidence that God exists. And yet, without evidence, some insist on regarding it as fact.
There is relief in just accepting one’s fate – in ceasing the denial. It is kind of hard to believe if one is stuck in the mindset that death is unbearable absent the faith that it is not final because there is life after death. There very well may be life after death, but there is zero evidence of this. To believe in it, without any evidence, is no different than believing in UFOs or elves. There is zero evidence of them either.
So you indict me for merely mentioning the obvious – the thing just about everyone cannot argue away: Namely, that there are things about being alive that are not comfortable to think about. All I’m saying is that these inevitable givens of existence are there. Some of us have the courage to face them.
The irony is that once we face them, their power over us goes away.
I believe in none of these things (especially not Springsteen). But aside from The Boss, I can’t say as any of my atheist friends would fall for any of that claptrap. But then I hang out with Atheist Libertarians.
No, no, no. Don’t try to turn this around. I’m not asserting anything exotic. If there is no evidence for something, we don’t presume it into existence. There may be things that exist for which there is no evidence, but it is impossible to distinguish which are real, but undiscovered, and which are totally made-up horse hockey. If one allows for the possibility that Jehovah is god, one must also allow that Zeus is god. There is no reason to presume one more valid than another. One myth may be more inviting than the other, but both are myths.
Thanks for being here, milkchaser, since your posts frequently make us think about G-d, and for that you deserve to be blessed.
I grant that you do not believe in pseudoscientific things, but don’t you notice that most upper-income liberal Democrats who do not believe in God, believe in their political ideas with a religious fervor, to the point that they go mad when they lose? There is a small group of hardcore atheists who believe in only the physical Universe, but most of the non-believers have filled the vacuum with all sorts of weird nonsense like I mentioned above. Strong religious believers largely ignore that stuff.
Glad you didn’t fall for the cult of Springsteen!
As Percival quoted G.K. Chesterton in a previous comment:
Love it, Steven.