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Notes -
On a pothead and notions of personal freedom.
What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.
I'm asking for a friend, so to speak. A few months after my (in retrospect, overly frantic) escape from Russia, most of my friends have deigned to abandon skepticism and reading «respectable sources» and followed suit. We've stopped in different places. The other day, I've talked to a guy who's happily stuck in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I've known him for 10 years, talking less and less as time went by. He used to develop sensitive software for state corps; unassuming, vulgarly hedonistic, from a simple family, but reasonably smart and curious and kind. Too open-minded, perhaps, and... neurodivergent enough to have atypical reactions to chemicals – took a full milligram of LSD to get him to trip balls once. It seemed like he was tripping half the time – that is, when not playing PC and console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby, listening to my bullshit or to music. More or less a normal modern manchild... That said, he had always struck me as distinctly American in spirit. Maybe it's about his BMI being like 38 and my prejudices – but, charitably, it's because he was too cheerful, and conspicuously non-suicidal considering his lot in life. Well, helped him get girls at least.
I digress. So, he's in Bishkek, I've written to him before the New Year. And the only thing he's interested in talking about is weed. Hash. Wax. Blunts. All the nomenclature. How hard it hits and how easy it is to get and how tolerant the local cops are of potheads. He's not even able to perfunctorily ask me about my situation or maintain a coherent dialogue. He doesn't notice the war any more. Hey dude, just come here, dis shit rules! They say in the summer it'll blow your mind! Do you even smoke? Ah, only DMT? Wha, you don't? You gotta try what they got here! Huh, talk about anything else you say? Uh... food's awesome too...
The tragedy is, this guy still works as a software engineer. But that's all he is now. He's a fat engineer who smokes pot and consumes food, and he can only talk about pot, food and a bit of engineering. His whole personality has been reduced to those three efficiently saturated domains: earning resources to convert into cheap utilons while modifying the state of consciousness to get more utilons and care as little as possible about anything else. It's a distilled, barebones functional version of his original, simplistic but not unloveable character. All the nuance that made him less than perfectly reducible to a one-track NPC just got pruned away.
Frankly, it's an almost demonic regression, the killing of soul, I guess in the same manner that the stipulated bug-peddling WEF NWO lords would like us all to undergo. I've known quite a few casual users and outright drug addicts, mostly stim types, but I haven't seen anything else destroy a human so thoroughly yet surreptitiously, with so little smoke to set off fire alarms (ahem). And yet, growing up, I've been inundated with messaging about «legalize» (легалайз), the noble fight of Rastafarians, the insanity of the war on drugs, with weed the Redeemer of all substances, the least harmful, Sacred Victim of brutish abuse. Now that I think back to it, a few of my pot-and-psychedelics openminded acquaintances display milder versions of this shift. How the hell did libs arrive at the idea that pot is harmless?
But it is. It doesn't cause significant bodily harm, and it doesn't compel, doesn't build anything like the crude physiological dependency loop of opiates. It only makes one a bit different, for a few hours. Alters emotion, cognition, perception, information consumption patterns, sense of reward from stimuli. Imposes a predictable vector of value drift. Allows exercising freedom in self-determination, really. Didn't Leary say it's a sacred right? Can a transhumanist take issue with that?
Like with freedom of speech that, according to many progressive arguers, is the matter of state censorship covered by First Amendment and not an ethical principle concerning the propagation of truths, one can think about the right to self-determination in legalese. Free choices are uncompelled choices; what else can there be!
I dare think my curious and open-minded friend 10 years ago would've been terrified of his current form, and perhaps would have asked for help to steer him off that path. He was failed by the society and the community, in that he was not provided a robust framework to anticipate this outcome, take it seriously, and build a behavioral scaffolding to compensate for his leanings. All he knew of religion is that it's a cringe grandma thing; all he wanted from tradition was insight porn for trips; all he asked from people around was good vibes and tolerance. He, like me, like all of us, was neatly cut off from ages past.
Of course, a keen reader has already noticed that the progressive view does recognize this problem, albeit for a different failure mode. Progs fret about right-wing extremists, and propose deradicalization. While their opponents believe that the natural tendency is for men to degenerate just as rocks roll downhill, progs worry that, if left to their own devices, men will drift towards fascism, the ur-illiberal doctrine, and so should be provided with a framework for steering back to mainstream (or, hopefully, being nudged into their camp). People's media feeds, their habits and states of mind, and perhaps even the popularity of substances modulating those, should be subtly influenced to that end. It is not coercion: it's just, say, providing an opportunity. Both camps claim to stand for the freedom of individual («in his or her pursuit of happiness», some add), and have philosophical treatises defending their notions of individuality and freedom – more religiously inspired and deontological on the right, more bluntly biodeterministic and utilitarian on the left.
I don't think it's neatly symmetric, though. In the end, conservatives act and talk as if a big part of the individual's genuine essence is embedded in the collective – or more to the point, family, lineage, community, parish, tribe, up to the entire nation, religion, the people or civilization. This essence is fragile, nurtured by the work of many generations and, effectively, seeks to be instantiated in a body, and has that right; so it can demand having an incomplete, raw individual be molded to accept it – in ways sanctioned by the tradition, by hook or by crook, with honest persuasion, sly conditioning or plain coercion. It is not denied (except by ways of complex theological argument, I guess) that this is a reduction in liberty, but it is equally not claimed that liberty of a raw individual is the point. «Spare the rod and spoil the child». The point is that children grow up all right.
Liberals disdain the notion of supra-individual spirits or essences, either as nonsense or as apologia of parasitism and mutilation; humans are whole by birthright, and their freely made choices are theirs, no ifs and buts; sans coercion, deception and a few edge cases perhaps, they cannot be meaningfully moved off their organic path, and should be allowed to figure it out in mutual respect.
And Progressives come part of the way back to the starting point: they propose guardian spirits of sort, ones that should be implemented by organizations and protect unwitting plebs from contagious evil ideas, accidentally powerful yet worthless memes; or perhaps, alter plebs to make them immune. But those spirits are said to exist only to make real liberalism possible.
Progressives have their wisdom – as any reactionary who's noticed he's reinventing bits of Derrida or Foucault may attest. My personal belief, in these terms, is admittedly close to the progressive one (rejoice, Hlynka) – with a humble twist informed by my notion of Death. I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices. Humans can be goaded, conditioned and coerced today if that allows them to be freer tomorrow, help them not mode-collapse into degenerate flanderized versions of themselves, not die a little. In this sense, the ethos of «legalize» was illegitimate, and the prudish ethos of contempt for deadbeat junkies is valid and, ultimately, liberating.
It's an egoistic point of view, of course. Were the latter more powerful, maybe I'd still have had one more friend.
What's yours?
What precisely do you even want out of your friend? I am certainly not the right person to say this and you've had the experience more intimately than I ever will but dude, seriously, your friend has abandoned his homeland, way of life and the majority of his friends and family. He is coping with something large. Even if you are able to weather it this it is the type of thing that breaks people. Even strong people.
What is his actual failing here? That he wants a little escapism not even a year after becoming a refugee while still supporting himself with work? What cogent thing is your lost friend supposed to be saying about the war? If what you say about his pre-war habits is accurate then I find it incredibly strange that you think the main change here is the weed. Is this the right time to be writing off friends?
People get used to the war quickly – even Ukrainians sort of do, and we're perfectly unharmed in comparison. You overestimate how it feels after so many months.
That was at the beginning of our friendship. Why do you think we were gradually losing contact?
7-8 years ago he was a reasonably cool interlocutor who could surprise me, or help out in need. 5, 6 years ago I would, albeit reluctantly, invite him to a party with people whose opinion matters to me. 2-3 years later, that'd have been embarrassing, and we barely ever talked because he was unable/unwilling to maintain a long-context dialogue and already getting into the current form – but when prodded, he'd still output a spontaneous humanlike reaction, on a restricted range of other favored topics, like girls or some PC holywar or music. When war started, he was shocked of course – worried about his future earning potential, the risk of draft and access to weed in a fully fascist state (no kidding; I thought he was). Now he's the happiest he's ever been, there's just no interest in anything other than drugs – and the picture has clicked into place, retroactively.
It's, mutatis mutandis, the same picture as here. I recall there was a good interview with an articulate heroin addict linked on /r/slatestarcodex but can't find it.
No, I don't think he's lost anything he cared about when leaving. Wait, he did: there's an online drug store of some repute, and they're only selling in Moscow. (Ask me how I know about it. Well, you've probably guessed).
You're free to not believe me of course.
If Russia becomes true fascist state, do not expect it to gain Japanese/Singaporean efficiency overnight, something that looks like Iran is more probable.
It looks that your friend had nothing to worry about.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40397727
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-old-irans-revolution-drug-policies-and-global-drug-markets/
......
maybe this?
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l23le2/when_getting_high_is_a_hobby_not_a_habit_review/?depth=20
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