/similar_quotes/1133

Showing 2 similar quotes for quote #1133 from Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

150

The strongest argument for the legalization of any drug is that society has been able to survive the legalization of alcohol. If we can tolerate the legal use of alcohol, what drug cannot be absorbed in the structure of society? We can almost see toleration of alcohol as the distinguishing feature of Western culture. This tolerance is related not only to a dominator approach to sexual politics but also to, for example, a reliance on sugar and red meat, which are complementary to an alcohol lifestyle. In spite of natural food fads and a rise in dietary awareness, the typical American adult diet continues to be one of sugar, meat, and alcohol. This 'burn out diet' is neither healthy nor ecologically sound; it promotes heart disease, abuse of the land, and toxic addiction and intoxication. It exemplifies, in short, everything that is wrong with us, everything that we have been left with as a result of an unhindered millennium of practicing the tenets of dominator culture. We have achieved the triumphs of the dominator style‑triumphs of high technology and scientific method‑largely through a suppression of the more untidy, emotional, and 'merely felt' aspects of our existence. Alcohol has always been there when we needed to call upon it to propel us further down this same path. Alcohol helps nerve a man for battle, helps nerve men and women for love, and keeps an authentic perspective on self and world forever at bay. It is unsettling to realize that the delicately maintained web of diplomatic agreements and treaties standing between us and nuclear Armageddon was fabricated in the atmosphere of misguided sentimentality and blustering bravado that is typical of alcoholic personalities everywhere.

149

And what of the psychology of alcoholism and alcohol use? Is there a gestalt of alcohol, and if there is, then what are its characteristics? I have implied that alcohol is the dominator drug par excellence. Alcohol has the effect of being libidinally stimulating at moderate doses at the same time that the ego feels empowered and social boundaries are felt to lose some of their restraining power. Often these feelings are accompanied by a sense of verbal facility ordinarily out of reach. The difficulty with all of this is that research findings suggest these fleeting effects are usually followed by a narrowing of awareness, a diminishing of ability to respond to social cues, and an infantile regression into loss of sexual performance, loss of general motor control, and consequent loss of self‑esteem. Moderation in drinking seems the obvious course. Yet alcoholism is a major and unremitting problem throughout global society. I believe that the alcohol abuse syndrome is symptomatic of the state of disequilibrium and tension existing between men and women and between the individual and society. Alcoholism is a condition of ego obsession and inability to resist the drive toward immediate gratification. The social domain in which the repression of women and the feminine is most graphically and brutally realized is that of the drunken episode or lifestyle. The darkest expressions of the terror and the anxiety engendered by severance from the maternal matrix have traditionally been acted out there. Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions.