I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do, however, regard organizations as social organisms, living things that, like humans, have a conscious process, and a subconscious drive to survive, which, when successful, morphs into a drive to thrive. The individual components of a thriving organization tend to make many decisions and take many actions which result in the strengthening of that social organism. Do you, for instance, think about breathing?
Perhaps the most salient metaphor for this ‘subconscious political will’ is team sports, most notably football of the American variety.
The average idiot sees a company, a polity, or a military formation as a top down expression of one person’s autocratic will. The entire reason for the sham presidential elections every four years is the reinforcement of this peasant mentality to see the great lord in his great house as the fount of all things good and ill. In its current form, one might actually equate the second term of a modern president to the ancient practice of assigning a scapegoat to take the blame for a community’s misfortune.
To better understand the living nature of social organisms the football team makes for a nice example, for it is such an organism, if only intended as a diversion for the brutish masses so that they might not come to understand the activities of their masters for what they are. The football team further makes an ideal example for a thriving and striving social organism because its workings are grossly apparent. Where much of the running of a baseball team is done by obscured men crouching gnome like in their dens, the football coaching staff is almost entirely visible, as are the support staff and the various squads of players at rest and play, all visible simultaneously.
Any look at a football team—on the field and on the sideline—will reveal a complex multifaceted social organism focused on a number of very obvious tasks. The game will reveal the head coach as merely one of perhaps a hundred moving parts in a machine whose every gear seems to have the opportunity for–at least temporarily—autonomous action. And, like the law of unintended consequences cited by libertarian thinkers when discussing social engineering, one can never predict the exact outcome of a football play.
Keeping in mind the inertia and unpredictable consequences of the actions of social organisms, let’s enumerate the basic equation whereby the illicit drug economy has become the social driver in the postmodern world.
1. Rich politicians take working class and middle class money to pay poor women to avoid marriage and spawn armies of feral youths, thereby guaranteeing cultural decay, rendering the population ripe for stage 3.
2. That welfare money gushes up the economic latter to superrich corporations by many and diverse ways; traveling from middle, to poor, to rich like a boomerang of inequity.
3. The purposeless poor, idle rich, despondent working class, and shrinking middle class turn to drugs to deaden the pain of this inauthentic existence. As I write most Americans are either legally or illegally medicated against pain, stress, depression, anxiety, or—my favorite—addiction!
4. The rich politicians criminalize drugs, accelerating the suction of money from the ghetto to the penthouse and simultaneously the growth of the state at the expense of the middle class and working class.
5. The resulting Narco State, built on the sham drug war and the booming drug trade, wages continuous external war and warns of a coming internal war against terrorists.
6. The Narco State is, by means I do not fully understand, here, apparently to stay, and so long as it fails to win the drug war that it wages, will continue to thrive.
7. Just as victory in the internal drug war would emasculate the Narco State, victory over, or peace with, the external Islamist forces could expose the drug war for the sham it is—so the Manhattan versus Mecca proxy war most not be fought to a conclusion or abandoned.
Interesting. Especially since this year is the 100th anniversary of government efforts to suppress drug abuse. The Harrison Act restricting the sale of opiates and cocaine was passed on 17 December, 1914. Before that you could buy all the opiates and cocaine you wanted at your local "drug store" or even order them through the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. The Harrison Act was soon followed by the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act prohibiting the sale of intoxicating alcoholic beverages in 1919 and other laws restricting the sale of marijuana and other drugs. The original legislation to prohibit substance abuse was initially supported more by the political Left, the Progressives and the Socialists, than by the political Right. The Progressives saw that drug and alcohol intoxication and addiction induced people to commit crimes, cause accidents and abuse or abandon their families. So the Progressives saw substance abuse as a social ill that only the power of government could vanquish. Well 100 years later drug and alcohol addiction are still with us. So is drug related crime. Made even worse since addiction and trafficking are now effectively subsidized by the welfare state. The prohibition on alcohol was seen as a failure since at least one third of Americans refused to comply with the law. Many of us who continued to support the prohibition of narcotics, even marijuana, did so on the conviction that if such drugs were to be legalized addiction to them would cause a large segment of the American population to become stupid, lazy and generally unemployable. Well that horse is out of the barn already, isn't it? Plus since robots may replace a good share of the workforce within 20 years, those workers who make themselves ineligible for employment may not be needed anyway. Further with the country so deeply in debt, government at every level is continually looking for new sources of tax revenue to finance all the benefits and pensions they promised everyone. As a result many states legalized most forms of gambling, even though gambling addiction can be as ruinous a vice as drug or alcohol addiction. Clearly legalizing marijuana, as Washington and Colorado have done already, is next on the agenda for most of the country. On top of everything else the overzealous enforcement of the drug laws is becoming as dangerous and expensive a nuisance as the drugs themselves, what with "swatting", excessive use of no-knock warrants, asset forfeitures and so forth. Thus it may be time for the Government to end the war on drugs;declare victory and send the troops home. The tax revenue gained from the legal sale of marijuana and other narcotics will likely become as addictive as the drugs themselves.
JB, having you for a reader is like having a second brain sitting at an editorial desk.
Thanks for the additional information.
Not being a drug user or a puritan the subject has often seemed somewhat ethereal to me and I rejected the idea that self-medication of the legal and illegal varieties might be a driving force until very recently.
“One of the most persuasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.”
-Dr. Thomas Sowell
“What the Leftist does or tries to do is to stop people doing what they want to do and make them do things that they don't want to do. They are not alone in that but that underlies all that they do and say. What changes they want and why they want them I consider in detail elsewhere. So conservatives tend to allow the natural world to continue on its way while Leftists forge an inherently unstable world that can be held together only by coercion. Leftism is quintessentially authoritarian.”
“The naïve scholar who searches for a consistent Leftist program will not find it. What there is consists only in the negation of the present.”
-John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) Brisbane, Australia, Dissecting Leftism BlogSpot.
James I think you'll find in your investigation that the Narco state, as you call it, is largely a Leftist Progressive social engineering project, one that the Leftists have been able to successfully blame on right-wing "law and order" types. Laws only work if most of the people in the country support them, so it may be that the Narco state is being maintained as a false flag operation to keep minorities and young people pissed off at being hassled by "The Man" for what they consider to be a victimless lifestyle crime and as a consequence always looking to "The Woman" for deliverance from an unjust society. The ultimate goal being to place The Woman in the seat of power and keep her there. Of course you and I know who "The Man" works for now, but most other people haven't made that connection yet so to them The Man is their oppressor and The Woman is their liberator. It's often hard to make sense of Leftist policies since the Leftists themselves frequently contradict, undermine and sabotage their own policies. Sort of like the con-men in the 1968 Mel Brooks movie "The Producers". Plus when things go south the Lefties usually manage to shift the blame, with the help of their fellow travelers in the Media, and divert attention to the next issue on their agenda. Leaving the mess to be cleaned up by others naturally.
Thanks Jeremy.
I used to enjoy listening to Thomas Sowell on the radio and his columns used to be permitted in the Baltimore Sun.
That Australian guy is spot on.
I suppose my characterization of this liberal FUBAR fest as a 'narco state' is just the renaming of a social illness according to its defining symptom.
I found this psychologist on Ted Talks—home of many a lefty—and have not been able to pull him up again. He claimed that primitives are clinically depressed less than 1% of the time despite having a nasty life, the silent generation 10% depression by 60, and the millenials have a 25% depression rate at 25, which he claims will amount to a 100% clinically depressed society by the time they reach 60. He said that the obvious cause was modernity. But perhaps, if he is correct, the cause is a certain brand of modernity, an unnatural order that everyone's subconscious rejects?
In my view what liberalism has wrought encourages self-medication and the war on drugs is like plugging the only vent in the powder keg.
I hope I'm around to see it blow.
"The Twelfth Rule [of tactics]: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right-we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals 1971, Tactics, p. 130.
Good point James. This feeling of dislocation among so many people today, that they no longer feel they understand what their place is in the universe, IS causing a lot of anxiety and depression in our society, isn't it? AND rampant "self-medication" as well, as you say. The American people want for little materially; food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and so forth are all available to anyone who needs it from one source or another. However, since we all take these material benefits for granted none of it means anything to us. We aren't grateful for its uninterrupted availability to us. Those things are all human rights guaranteed to us by the government after all. Maybe people need a new perspective to rediscover their "spirituality", like being cold, wet, tired and hungry for extended periods of time. Wouldn't that make for a great new version of "Naked and Afraid"? Take the whole population of a city like Baltimore and drop them in Afghanistan with nothing but flip-flops and a loin-cloth or night-shirt. Then tell them all to have at it, build a new society. Like my maternal Grandfather was wont to tell me, "You want something to cry about? I'll GIVE you something to cry about!"