Alcohol

12 10 11 - 18:03

The West has been medicated itself for centuries to dull the pain. Now it's beginning to wear thin:

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call "ambivalent" drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as "integrated" drinking cultures.

{snip}

The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic "placebos" - we shed our inhibitions. - BBC

Cross-reference with this:

But a series of detailed brain scans has now revealed that alcohol doesn't cause us to behave badly, it just stops us from caring about embarrassing ourselves.

Professor Bruce Bartholow, who led the study, said: 'When we make mistakes, activity in a part of the brain responsible for monitoring behaviour increases.

'This sends an alarm signal to other parts of the brain indicating that something went wrong.

'Our study shows that alcohol doesn't reduce your awareness of mistakes - it reduces how much you care about making those mistakes.' - Daily Mail

In a dying culture, the one thing you cannot say is anything approximating reality.

So you stifle it.

When you drink, what comes out is not a warmer you, but the part of you that you bottle up.

To keep it socially acceptable, we channel this into degenerate but minor acts.

These are more acceptable than screaming "This is the new Rome and it's imploding fast because each of you fat fucks is too narcissistic to think of the consequences of your actions" at mall crowds.

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