“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society.. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” – Ted Kaczynski
In this article, we’re going to look at the relationship that America has with drugs, as well as go into detail about DMSG’s views on drug use in America and the corrupting secularization of faith in the final days of capitalism. Similar to how Czarist Russia created a state monopoly on alcohol, in order to produce cheap spirits that could dull the discontent of its population while taxing them on their misery, modern America relies on drugs to ensure its own stability. Over 1 in 4 Americans are prescribed drugs for mental health, while many more use alcohol, cannabis, and other narcotics to treat issues that capitalism creates. While 6% of Americans are alcoholics, 16% of Americans regularly smoke marijuana, and when we combine these two numbers with the amount of Americans on prescription drugs for mental health purposes, almost half of America need to use substances to cope with reality. While the previous groups may overlap quite a bit, the point is that a very large number of Americans need drugs to function in an intolerable society. In a culture where single motherhood, poverty wages, unaffordable healthcare, racial tensions, and precarious job security permeate almost every worker’s life, it isn’t surprising that this is what people turn to when their realities seem so bleak.
In times before the West mastered chemically-induced coping, we used religion instead and in modern America, it’s simply evolved into something more material. As Karl Marx famously said, “religion is the opium of the masses,” and in modern capitalism, we’ve seen faith evolve to help people of all creeds and backgrounds cope better than ever before. These new faith-based opiums are best exemplified by the Prosperity Gospel and the 44% of Americans who believe that they’ll be billionaires one day, people who uphold capitalism and justify its deprivations because they’ll rise above it – one day. Similar to how events like the rapture in older theological texts talked about Christians being saved from a cruel world, the money cults of today espouse the inevitability of hard work and persistence leading to an individual’s capitalist rapture. For these people, success is inevitable because they “deserve” boundless riches. For both the drug users and the Mammon worshipers, an escape from objective reality and the restraints imposed upon them is desired.
Who wouldn’t want to smoke a joint when you get home from a dead-end career that offers no healthcare or retirement, before you blow most of your income on rent, taxes, and student loans? Who wouldn’t want to drink when all of the available media content that you use to relax in your urban tenement demonizes you based on your skin color? Who wouldn’t want to become a billionaire when riches seem like the only way out of experiencing chronic problems as a worker inside a cruel system? Who wouldn’t want to pray for riches when your family can’t afford the bare necessities to get by? American society requires that most of its citizens modify their internal states in order to make do with their miserable situations and DMSG doesn’t blame people for desperately exploring these routes because it’s understandable. When you talk to a stoner about the consequences of smoking marijuana, you can see in their angry but determined “arguments” that they are defending a psychological addiction they require to function. When you talk to a Mammon worshiper with no career prospects about the advantages of socialism for them, you can see in their eyes a wide-eyed panicking at the suggestion that success is not destined for them in a system where most people, including them, live in misery.
The problem with everyone modifying their internal states to satisfy the desires of society is that we wind up living in a dumber and more delusional society. The problem with the population being too dulled to care due to substance abuse or indulging in megalomaniacal wealth fantasies that enable them to see themselves as the outliers and exceptions is that the problems in society are never willingly even recognized, let alone solved. A society that solves its problems by encouraging its population to addle or delude itself is doomed to fail, as these problems continue to amount until the economics of the system break down. What is interesting about prescription drug use is that when we look at its early applications, we even see back then that usually just severely disordered individuals that suffered from things like schizophrenia were treated. As society’s problems have continued to mount for the working class, we’ve only seen diagnoses skyrocket in recent years for illnesses like autism, bipolar disorder, and ADHD, without wondering why these symptoms manifest in the first place.
When people are exposed to environmental pollutants on a consistent basis, grow up outside stable homes, grow up without parental figures, and have no real connections to their community, how are they supposed to develop into normal human beings? A quote by Ram Dass helps sum this up: “When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent…you sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.” People are just products of their environment, with a large sprinkling of genetic predispositions thrown into the mix. The environments that most children are brought up in today are entirely detrimental to their wellbeing and as problems like single motherhood and poverty wages continue to become only more prevalent and severe, we’re only going to see more troubled people.
Using Ram Dass’s forest metaphor, it isn’t economical to straighten out every bent tree in a normal forest with girders. Some of the faults we just have to accept, because the conditions that these trees arose in were never suitable for normal development. In modern society, it isn’t economical to create a social and economic landscape that creates as many deformed trees as we have today; where at least half the forest is misshapen and dysfunctional. While many of you may only think about economic guarantees, I am particularly attracted to socialism due to the transformative potential it can have for people that grow up within such a system. While many like to pretend that a post-scarcity economic climate would bring about a utopia, I think we could achieve such conditions far before our industrial base ever advanced that far. Imagine an entire generation of children raised in stable homes by their biological parents, not medicated into academic success or abused by parents stressed about their own finances, with access to quality educations, nutrition, and sports programs. Imagine several generations born successively into such material conditions, with the emotional scars of previous generations becoming fainter and fainter over time. We can create a better society, occupied by better people, but it requires we address the problems that come from not cultivating people properly.
The family is the atomic structure in every society and when we focus on creating material and social conditions that give rise to well-functioning families and flexible institutions, a great deal is done to resolve the internal states in people. A problem with progressivism is that it fails to acknowledge that we are just animals living in a space-age society, and if the environments that we evolved in aren’t replicated to some extent in terms of family structures and social conditions, we’re naturally going to be discontent no matter how “successful” we become by this society’s standards. Progress is not having zero children, living in a pod, and eating the bugs; that’s just a perversely voluntary extinction masquerading as modernity. In order to correct our collective’s internal states, we need to correct society, redesign its institutions, and if we need to do it by force, so be it. As material and social conditions continue to only get more intolerable, the costs paid to sustain this system and dull or delude people’s’ internal states only continue to mount. Modern America openly wages a war against the proletarians’ internal state, trying to stifle discontent at its most immaterial stages. The capitalists create new concepts, surgical procedures, and drugs to encompass and immaterially resolve all the different problems all these deformed individuals experience., while our soulless neoliberal governments usually chalk any resistance to these concepts and strategies up to our society’s conservatives not being open-minded enough. All the while, the population continues to degenerate and require more and more of these distractions from material reality in order to function. The American government has worked in tandem with drug cartels in the past in order to distribute drugs, while our narcotics consumption has led to the collapse of multiple Central American countries in the decades since our “War on Drugs” began. American troops deployed in Afghanistan ignored and even patrolled poppy fields, as opioid production continued to surge under their occupation’s rule to the point that now 90% of opium is harvested in Afghanistan. For all intents and purposes, it seems that in the erosion of traditional faith, capitalism has found itself turning to literally opium, among many other drugs, as well as snake oil cures in the form of concepts like transgenderism, in order to sedate the masses.
Author’s note: it should be said that when these calamities happen under capitalism, from the opioid crisis to the collapse of Central American countries to the explosion in transgender surgeries to the boom in the sales of prescriptive medicine, this isn’t an intentional plan by the bourgeois forces in control. More often than not, the deficiencies in material and social conditions lead to a demand for these products and services, which creates an industry for them that pays mouthpieces to justify the actions. Purdue Pharma considering whether to invest in Suboxone, in order to profit off of their opioid addicts’ rehabilitation programs, is not a malicious act but a purely capitalist take on how to further profit off of a disaster. The market here in capitalism is your enemy, with its supporters happily justifying every injustice and moment of misery you experience. Evil is natural in this world and justice is up to just us to implement.
