This is a story about the opium of the people...
God is dead. We killed him with our science and our medicine. We killed god when the healing power of doctors trumped the ridiculously unsuccessful power of prayer and divine miracle. We killed god when Thomas Edison invented the electric lightbulb and let there be light. We killed god when the Manhattan Project unleashed the energy bound up in the atomic nucleus, creating bombs powerful enough to destroy the world. We killed god when popes, bishops, vicars, priests, nuns, monks, rabbis, mullahs and other spokespeople for organised religion, were proven beyond all reasonable doubt, by the scientific method, to be snake-oil salesmen; charlatans; frauds... just like witch doctors, mystics, faith healers and anybody else who claims they can perform magic or speak to nonexistent entities.
With life stripped back to pure truth; pure reason, a life of suffering and decay seems rather pointless. There is joy in procreation: watching your own flesh and blood offspring fumble their way through a harsh and uncaring world. The bonding hormone - oxytocin - and vicarious enjoyment of your kids' childhood makes parenthood neurologically rewarding enough for you not to just fuck off as soon as the screaming incontinent midgets have been ejected painfully from your vaginas.
Life has been built to not give you much joy. You can fuck, but you'll need a rest in-between copulations, and over time your interest in sex with a single partner will wane, as life prompts you to go and fuck somebody new, who you may be a better fertility match with. We weren't designed to have so much sex with so few partners, and produce so few children. The French have a name for the post-orgasm feeling a man has: la petit mort. Lit: the little death. Every time you cum and you don't make a baby, you die a little.
In a world of push-up bras, gymnasiums, good diet, flattering garments and mostly indoor jobs, women look amazing for far longer than they would under less favourable conditions. We have a culture of strip bars, escorts, pornography and film, television & print media bombarding us with images of the world's most attractive women. Ordinary women have responded by making ever raunchier choices of clothing and make-up, as well as complying with men's desire for casual sex and promiscuity. The ease of finding a 'hook up' on a mobile phone app - which doesn't carry the stigma of paying for sex - has meant that many men are quite content to not have a monogamous relationship, further exacerbating the problem, as women struggle to find the 'nice guys' who are looking for a something serious, but must use sex to bait the hook.
When you've had your fill of contraception-protected sex, skydiving, water-skiing, deep-sea diving, hang gliding, windsurfing, motorcycle racing and everything else that gives you a little hit of something that tickles your brain 'naturally' where are you going to go from there?
We live in a world where you can have an instant face-to-face conversation with your pick of 3.2 billion people, as if they were there in the same room as you, without either of you leaving your house. We live in a world where you can get into a pressurised aluminium tube and 17 hours later you will be on the other side of the planet, where day and night are swapped around, as well as summer and winter. We live in a world where news and information is distributed globally at the speed of light. We live in a world where many of us have access to vehicles that can carry us almost anywhere we choose to go, on a whim, at speeds that are far greater than we were ever evolved to travel at. How are our bodies and brains supposed to cope with this modern world? There are so many unnatural stimuli, can you really say that anybody is truly living a natural life?
When you start asking around, it turns out that we can't really cope with the modern world, without modern innovations. We need tranquillisers to calm our nerves, after the overstimulation of the city lights that never switch off; the sirens; the car horns; the traffic; the congestion; the crowds; the towering phallic structures of concrete, steel and glass. We need stimulants to be able to concentrate and overcome the exhaustion of the daily assault on our senses, and the steadily rising demand for our attention at all times of the day: there is always something electronic somewhere, bleeping at us for our attention. We need things to intoxicate ourselves, to escape the madness of the world and briefly be set free. We need things to numb the pain and insulate us from the growing discomfort and inescapable truth of our inevitable decrepitude and death, which is followed by black nothingness. There is no afterlife. There is no heaven and hell. This life is all there is, and then it's over, forever.
Some mentally ill people have this thing called religion, which is where they find comfort in imaginary friends and they really believe the stories in the children's books they read, to be true stories. These mentally ill people suffer from delusions, where they believe that talking to nonexistent sky monsters will change the outcome of events. These mentally ill people suffer from terrible superstitions that make them act extremely weirdly, like not eating certain things, saying certain things, and they do really boring stuff like going and sitting in buildings with other people who suffer from the same mental illness, and performing rituals based on delusional beliefs. However, this madness somehow seems to ease the suffering of a few of the mentally ill people a little bit. When there is a death in the family, for no reason other than the random chaotic unpredictable nature of the universe, the mentally ill people have their delusions to fall back on, so they can mistakenly believe that there was some reason behind an otherwise totally meaningless event, which actually helps them not feel so afraid and alone in harsh and uncaring universe that's out to kill them in an infinite number of ways.
The universe quite literally does not give any fucks who you are.
Entropy will destroy your body, to the point that every single atom will be scattered throughout the universe and even those atoms will decay. It will be as if you never even existed. Entropy will tear down everything you ever built, in the blink of an eye. Entropy is an unstoppable force, that will take everything you think is ordered and understood and under control, and it will show you just how puny and pathetic you are in the face of its relentless power to smash everything up and reintroduce the chaos and disorder that reigns supreme in a universe of unimaginable magnitude.
In a way, I'm jealous of the religious. They must be so blissfully ignorant. They were too stupid or they were denied enough education to allow them to become able to question the obvious lies that they were told, setting them up for a life where they can ignorantly reject things that are plainly obvious to anybody with an inquiring mind. To believe that there is value in the study of ancient scrolls or parchment, instead of the discovery of new knowledge and the ability to make rational leaps of understanding, by joining up the dots and applying logic... much better to live with faith in gods and magic, than to know your unhappy fate in the world.
And so, with the spread of education, perhaps we have seen the spread of misery, anxiety, stress and the need for some salvation of our souls that would have otherwise have been provided by something spiritual. Instead of turning to our priests, bishops, vicars and the like, we turn to our doctors to heal us. Our doctors dish out the goodies, in the form of antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillisers, uppers & downers and chill-you-outers.
Can you imagine what would happen to the world if we woke up and there was no tea, coffee, betel leaf, areca nut, khat, coca leaf, opium poppy, hemp, tobacco and every other source of a tiny naturally occurring amount of bitter plant alkaloids that humans love so much, because they tickle our brains, just a teeny little bit.
You would have thought that if smoking one cigarette is nice, then smoking 100 at once would be incredibly nice. You would have thought that if one cup of coffee is nice, then drinking 2 litres of pure espresso would be amazing. In actual fact, you will find that humans have somehow evolved a dislike of too much of a good thing. Everything that's nice, is only nice in moderation.
Life functions perfectly well like this, until the sum of all these things tips you over the edge. Living in the centre of a huge city, with the International Space Station and a zillion satellites orbiting overhead, jets roaring across the sky, helicopters swooping down on you, tower blocks hemming you in on all sides, cutting off your view of the horizon, mobbed by a sea of people, with choking traffic fumes and the deafening roar of internal combustion engines, as trucks, cars and motorbikes zoom along all around you. You're bombarded with light from a million incandescent bulbs, fluorescent tubes and LEDs, as well as the other electromagnetic radiation from televisions, mobile phones, power cables, WiFi routers, bluetooth devices, walkie-talkies, microwave ovens and power transformers.
An ever-increasing number of us cannot function in a godless man-made world without being drugged-up. Alcohol aside, antidepressants are the number one choice for the masses to become better adjusted to a hostile universe. There's nothing wrong with those people needing those medications. There's nothing immoral about taking those medications. There's no shame in being sensitive and susceptible to the madness that surrounds us.
Slowly, we build up cocktails of medications that salve a particular ache or pain in our souls. Each medication has its side effects, so we add other medications to compensate for the other ones, until we rattle like a tube of smarties.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories like 'chemtrails' and other madness like that, but I sure as shit know that modern living has elements that the human body and mind just can't adjust to: the sum-total of the unnatural is beginning to overwhelm us. Our very sleep cycles are being changed - for the worse - by our addiction to social media, smartphones and communications apps like email and text chat. We used to joke about crackberry when we got our BlackBerry mobile email devices, at the turn of the new millennium. It seemed like a Brave New World but perhaps all that glitters is not gold.
Shiny shiny new tech.
I used to get so excited about new tehnological toys, but now I'm excited - relieved - to tear off the foil wrapper that protects the little pills in my daily ration of soma. I feel immediate psychosomatic relief when I swallow the little capsules, lozenges and pills, that contain magic ingredients to salve my aching soul.
Where would we be without these breadcrumbs that lead us deep into a dark forest? A dark forest that we would never enter, if we weren't chasing these tiny rewards... these little crumbs... these pathetic minuscule tickles that we can feel in our brain. We surely would never work these jobs, without our morning coffee and our cups of tea, our gin & tonic and our glass of red wine. We would surely never want our genitals to be torn apart by an alien bursting out of our groin, except for the tiny hit of pleasure from a brief exchange of bodily fluids in a sticky tryst of sweat, bad breath and a tangle of limbs and hair.
I've seen the future and it comes in pill form. A pill to feel loved. A pill to have the most amazing orgasm of your life. A pill to feel all wrapped up safe in cotton wool, without a care in the world. A pill to forget about your hunger and your thirst. A pill to be awake and a pill to be asleep. A pill to help you think and another pill to help you not think.
A pill for every ill; and yet none that quite hit the spot.
Tags: #drugs
