Steve Sailer suggests that booze works wonders:
Perhaps alcohol enables one individual to display a wider range of personalities than can be achieved through solely genetic means, thus allowing personalities to evolve farther in directions suitable for making a living, while still allowing people to display different traits in the evening.
Nietzsche and Marx, by contrast, both despised Europe’s culture of alcohol as the ‘other opium of the masses’. To be sure, people who love drinking large amounts of booze all the time seem both physically and socially maladapted — even when their tolerance or nobility is robust enough to prevent them from public debasement of the teenage-Londoner variety. Internal and external to its experience, drunkenness is both happy and sad. Who wistfully remarked on the bougeois professional, who decently got drunk at home? Sometimes drinking in the privacy of one’s apartment is a release; sometimes it’s a prison; sometimes, you don’t know which until it’s too late. Sometimes of course it starts out as one only to become the other — and not because you popped open that second bottle. There’s no big reveal at the end of this post; I do remain skeptical that naturalistic approaches can get us one either. I will say booze at its best, in my experience, does the opposite of what Steve suggests — narrowing one’s range of sometimes fragmented ‘personalities’ or moods, and smoothing them into a coherent, comfortable whole. What do you think?
(Thru John Carney )
