//www.youtube.com/watch?v=-97wUI7hF58
Mouthy Buddha is back with an inner dialogue about state authoritarianism vs. permissiveness, spurred by a podcast with the young Far-Right publisher, Greg Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of Counter-Currents Publishing and North American New Right. (Kids today!)
Johnson is of the opinion that the state should ban all manner of intoxicants and p0rn, etc. for the greater good of humanity, which gets Mouthy ruminating with his incredible audiovisual flare on the obesity epidemic, the rise of drunk driving fatalities, liver disease, heroin overdoses, diabetes and the epidemic of p0rnography dependence…
Johnson says that legally permitting such behaviors is bad for society because it enables individuals to make life-altering mistakes that they would otherwise be prevented from making; that permissiveness leads to degeneracy, because humans, left to their own devices are irrational, prone to bad habits, prone to obesity, to hedonistic drug use or drug addiction and a host of other negative behaviors that not only harm individuals but harm society at large.
Mouthy reveals that he is a recovering drug addict who has now been sober for 18 months. He lives in Texas, where street drugs are illegal. This deterrent put him in jail seven times. He’s been arrested for multiple possessions of narcotics, resisting arrest, DUI and public intoxication.
Since he was 17, he’s tried six times with the help of six different treatment centers to get sober.
For the most part, all the drugs he did were conveniently and legally prescribed to him by a psychiatrist who gave him whatever he wanted, which was Xanax, Soma and Adderall. When his prescriptions ran out, he would easily find them on the street, which is how he got into trouble with the law.
Time and again, the deterrence from the State of Texas did nothing to prevent him from buying drugs on the street, despite the horrifying prospect of withdrawing from Xanax in an 8’x8′ windowless jail cell with no mattress and just one steel bench next to a toilet, the visuals of which are thoroughly dreadful.
In every relapse, he lost his job, he lost the trust of his beloved family, he pawned off his most prized possessions until he was out of drugs and money and was totally screwed.
Still, Mouthy would like to ask Johnson if it might not be more rewarding or even “spiritual” to be given the opportunity to fail, so that the opportunity to succeed can occur by one’s own volition? He wonders if we remove addictive things from society, do we also remove the spiritual growth afforded when we choose not to use? Mouthy wonders whether authoritarian societies that remove such choices may create weaker people, even if many will simply obtain banned items through black markets. This is as true of buying Fentanyl in the US as it is of buying alcohol in Iran (where, ironically, it is much easier to buy a pound of opioids than brand alcohol).
Ultimately, he says, banning behaviors does not ban the desire to do those things and that we each have to come to grips with our lower nature in our own way.
“The vices that are around us are a symptom of a much bigger problem we need to address as humans. The need to escape is the issue, not the items we use to escape. It’s my job to develop a life I don’t need to escape from. That can be very hard but it’s possible…Give me temptation, served up on a silver platter and give me the right to say ‘No.'”
