Alcohol is a fucking sickness. It’s a disease. It’s not that I don’t drink, or occasionally get drunk. But this whole fascination with going out and getting plastered is obscene. I was led on to this path of thought by Locke referring to diminished responsibility, not punishing the sober man for the drunk man’s actions (though in his defence, he later retracts this). But to not punish them? Why the fuck not? After all, the sober man got drunk in the first place, and is therefore responsible for all the drunk man does. Being drunk is not an excuse for cheating on someone, for example, though it may be an explanation. I know what I can get like when I’m drunk, some of the things I do. Solution? I don’t get drunk. Some gambles are not worth taking. So why excuse some fucker for killing his wife because he was drunk? By Locke’s extension, he was the same person, with the same consciousness – he remembers doing it. Even if he doesn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that he chose to get drunk in the first place, and therefore is responsible for his own actions.
I’m not being puritanical here, I’m being logical. If you know you will do, or might do, bad things when you’re drunk (which you wouldn’t do when sober), then don’t get drunk. If you do get drunk, in the knowledge that you might do said things, then you’re entirely at fault, and should be tried as if you were never drunk in the first place, and held fully responsible. It is patently ridiculous to say that we should not blame the sober man for the drunk mans actions.
Madness I’m less sure about – for it is probably beyond one’s control. But temporary insanity is just bollocks. Someone who’s genuinely mad should stay locked up – temporary insanity is just another way of saying I couldn’t help myself, which is a fucking nonsense statement. The whole idea of will-power is bogus – people do what they want to do. They make value judgements, weigh up the pros and cons, and come to a decision, which they invariably follow. I know it sounds quite Platonian, but people don’t do things they know aren’t best: they’ll think but not really believe that the best course of action is actually the best, and hence will do the one they actually think is best, regardless of whether it is or not, or whether society dictates that it’s the best (or at least, regardless excepting the need to conform to society’s expectations in the original value assessment).
I gave up smoking with a click of my fingers – went from at least 5 cigarettes a day to 4 cigars a year. Why? Because I knew, and properly believed, that it was the right thing to do. When people do the wrong thing (we’re all guilty of it, no one is perfect), it’s because, at some level, deep or shallow, they are deluding themselves into genuine belief that it’s actually the right thing, or at least the best thing for them. If you have an essay deadline and don’t do the essay because you’d rather do something else, it’s because you think that that’s the best course of action for you, for whatever reason, be it that you’ll get an extension, or say you were ill, or rush it off the morning before, or even just get away with not doing it.
So when people talk about willpower, or lacking it, or say “I couldn’t bring myself to do such and such”, what they’re actually saying is “I took what I considered the best course of action for me, but I’m too chickenshit to admit it, for whatever reason, because society, or some relevant subsection of it, condemns that course of action”. When something is in your power to do, within your control, and you want to do it, then you fucking well do it. I should qualify here that I’m using a sort of cumulative or summative definition of want– in the case of two or more conflicting desires, while you might theoretically desire each of them, the thing or action you desire the most is the one you really want, in the end. In mathematical terms, you have a centre point, a zero, and either side you have desires that equate to positive (wanting to do x) or negative (not wanting to do x), and whether you want to do something or not depends on whether the final sum of those desires is positive or negative. So if you say, “I want to quit smoking”, what you really mean is “I want to quit smoking more than I want to keep smoking”. If you don’t mean that, then you ought to say “A part of me wants to quit smoking”, because that implies that the whole of you does not, and that the part of you has been overwhelmed by the whole of your consciousness. So we should say ‘I want’ only when that is the overriding truth – don’t even get me started on people defining language! So, people that want to quit and don’t are either lazy or deluded: lazy in not being arsed to fight their bodies (which is a legitimate difficulty in coming off nicotine), or deluded in thinking that, actually, they’re somehow immune, that smoking isn’t going to damage them, that it’s still the best course of action for them to take, which it arguably is – better to live well and die young than live poorly and die old.
So if you want to quit, you quit. And if you want to murder, you murder. But take it on the chin, like a fucking man. Don’t hide behind temporary insanity, or alcohol, or whatever other diminished responsibility bullshit they come up with. If you got caught, you fucking well deserve everything that’s coming to you (which is not to say that those clever or lucky enough to get away with it don’t, necessarily, but rather that they have successfully played a system that requires suspicion or proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.) People are far too quick to pass the buck sometimes, because they forget that explanations are not excuses. ‘I was drunk’ might answer the question why, but it doesn’t absolve you of the consequences.
One of the worst things is that people get drunk precisely to give themselves an excuse to get with so and so, or to tell you something, or because they want to forget about their lives. Forget about their lives? Why not spend the time and energy (and money) wasted on alcohol on actually changing your life to be something you can enjoy without a 10 unit minimum? Is it so fucking hard to be honest with yourself? I already admitted there are a few things I’d do drunk but not sober, but they are few and far between. By and large I don’t change much when I get drunk, but that’s because I don’t see the point in repressing most of the things people do normally, but don’t when pissed. So I’m the King of the Overshare, so what? If you don’t care about me, why are you talking to me? Fuck off and talk to someone else! If society says it’s not acceptable or normal for me to sing in public, or to admit to my 3 years of forced celibacy, or to write songs for people, then society can go fuck itself.
And that includes not getting wankered. Does it make people uncomfortable that there are people who are at ease enough with themselves to be truthful and uninhibited (seeing as ‘losing inhibitions’ is the phrase so often associated with alcohol) without the aid of social lubricant? Because it seems to me there is a certain sort of stigma against people that don’t drink, or that don’t get drunk. If I get drunk, it tends to be accidental, by which I mean I don’t go out with the intention of getting drunk, and haven’t since I was about 15, but rather I get drunk as a by-product of actually enjoying the alcohol I’m drinking, hence my preference for booze that actually tastes good rather than the cheapest or strongest swill available. But if I do get drunk, and I do something idiotic, I’m not going to blame my stupidity on the alcohol, though it might explain my actions to some degree. But that action was always within me, some dark animus that we smother for the good, be that collective or individual good.
And sure, the problem here is the line. The arbitrary line (as most lines are, it seems). How much of ourselves can we be truthful about, or ought we to reveal? Even accepting that some of the inhibitions many people generally live under and escape through alcohol might be permissible, which ones? Obviously I’m not advocating total honesty, free from tact: there’s honest, and there’s just plain rude. Nor am I advising an absolute instinctive hedonism, total surrender to all our urges. Clearly there is such a thing as too far – murder, rape, etc. – just as there are things which, where alcohol is concerned, are generally permissible, if a little odd – singing in public, hugging a lot, shacking up with someone and the like. But the middle ground, ranging from adultery to cartwheeling naked across your lawn, is treacherous waters. If there’s something it’s actually acceptable to do when drunk, but not when sober, why is that the case? Ought there to be anything which falls under that category, or are we simply again permitting for certain acts performed under diminished responsibility?
Let’s take an example we’ve probably all come across: if we say that it’s ok to tell your same-sex best friend you love them (in a non-romantic way) when you’re drunk, but not when sober, is there a reason for that difference? Is it a British thing, a repression of the emotions we work so diligently to disguise, to maintain that reservedness that characterised an empire? I doubt it somehow – it seems, from experience, more universal than that. Is it, to return to the subject of the fear of difference, merely a reaction to that degree of honesty with oneself and the world, a frankness which makes people uncomfortable? Perhaps, but then is it really that such an action is acceptable when drunk, or is it merely more acceptable (and, perhaps, contingent on the drunkenness of the receiver of said compliment)? If it is a fear of honesty, surely we are just relegating such an outburst yet again to the realm of the excusable, rather than the acceptable. Is it possible, then, that my original explanation was correct, that such actions are actually, in some form or other, no more right (or less wrong) when sober than when drunk, but it is just that alcohol is required for some (or even most) people to open themselves up to a certain level of uninhibitedness, hence the phrase Dutch courage?
I don’t really have any definite answers, just a desire to ask the right questions. I do know, however, that until someone gives me a better explanation, I shall have to continue to look on deliberate drunkenness as a form of cowardice, a recourse to alcohol to provide both the opportunity and the excuse for actions considered otherwise too risky. To anyone reliant on the crutch of alcohol, I have only these words: carpe diem, and strap on a pair.
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