Alcohol As Scourge

Ayahuasca Community
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

No other drug has had such a prolonged detrimental effect on human beings. The struggle to produce, control, and tax alcohol and to absorb its social consequences is a significant part of the story of the evolution of the mercantile empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alcohol and slavery often went hand in hand across the economic landscape. In many cases alcohol literally was slavery as the triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and rum an other practices of European civilization spread over the earth, subjugating other cultures. Sugar and the alcohol that could be made from it became a European obsession that severely distorted the demographics of tropical regions. For example, in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, colonial policy paid women to produce as many children as possible, in order to provide workers for the labor-intensive cultivation of sugar. The modern legacy of this policy is that Java, formerly the center of the Dutch East Indies, is today the most overpopulated large island in the world. Most of the sugar ended up as distilled alcohol, and what was not exported to Europe was consumed by the local population. A “besotted underclass” was a permanent fixture of mercantile society whether in the home countries or colonies.

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 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 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.

Paragraph of Terence McKenna’s book “Food of the Gods — The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

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Samādhi is state of meditative consciousness. In samādhi the mind becomes still. It is a state of being totally aware of the present moment. Samadhi.today is a network of people and websites all across the world that help you stay on the path towards the samādhi state.

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Samadhi.today

Samādhi is state of meditative consciousness. In samādhi the mind becomes still. It is a state of being totally aware of the present moment. Samadhi.today is a network of people and websites all across the world that help you stay on the path towards the samādhi state.

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