So we were casually
chatting about that inherently fascinating topic, recreational drugs.
We had finished proving, just for fun, that drug policies, in this
or any other society, seem like they have no tangible relationship
to reality or common sense. Certainly not in terms of logical cost/benefit
analysis, consistency, fairness, sound philosophical underpinnings
and so on. The laws weren't written because some drugs hurt people
and some drugs help people and so on. Far far fewer people have died
from marijuana than alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, or unbearable
jobs. Failure to get a life may be common among your hard-core weed
fiends, but keeling over dead is not.
So there is
a reason why it seems like policy and custom have no tangible relationship
with reality - and that reason is because they don't. Evolution
designed society this way. Or to be more accurate,
evolution doesn't really give a flying fuck if the things societies
do make any goddamn sense. That's entirely beside the point as far
as it is concerned. This doesn't mean stupid things can't be changed
- but it tells us what we are up against.
To understand
this we have to start at an odd point. Which is that people spend
the vast majority of their lives violently disagreeing with each other.
You may have noticed that human beings seem to come in a wide variety
of temperaments. You have your ranting types and you have your submissive
types. You have your courageous types and your timid types. Your hard-nosed
determined people and your lazy easy-going folks. Your whiners and
your shouters. Your people-pleasers and your people leave me aloners.
Your people who will take a telemarketing job to pay the rent and
your people who sleep on other people's couches because they're not
about to pay their own way for anything. Your dependable, conscientious
people and your madcap party-heartiers. Your sensitive, compassionate
people and your Bill O'Reillys. Your flaming religious hypocrites
and your flaming new-age spiritual hypocrites. The humble and the
arrogant. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hopefully you have noticed
this.
All this difference
in temperament creates violent disagreement as to what should be done
in any given situation. The cautious spouse doesn't want to risk any
money in volatile high-tech stocks, the growth-greedy spouse wants
to bet the farm on a 'hot tip' or the 'sure thing'. The uninhibited
outgoing girlfriend wants to run up on stage when the band plays and
take off her top; her inhibited, embarrassed boyfriend is inhibited
and embarrassed in such a situation. The happy-go-lucky business partner
wants his mate to 'lighten up'; the uptight one wants to worry and
get things done. The boss wants the reports stapled, the employee
huffily mutters under his breath that they would work much better
paper-clipped -duh! One wants to rent an action flick, the other an
independent Sundance movie or something. And on and on and on and
on. Meanwhile, one of us wants to chemically enhance his rave experience
and another of us would rather die than be forced to attend an uninhibited
gathering of people engaging in activities with no known moneymaking
purposes. One of us likes Burning Man and another of us pretty much
hates the desert no matter what the hell you are doing there.
The human species
contains a tremendous divergenge of opinion on how things ought to
be done for best results - and even as to what constitutes a best
result in the first place. Evolution, that wily trickster, did
this on purpose. It did this because human beings are designed to
survive in a very wide variety of environments and conditions. What
works quite well in one environment fails totally in another. For
example, your preference for bundling up in a parka, overcoat, and
long johns is going to cause you tremendous problems in the heat of
the Mojave desert. On the other hand, it will suit you quite well
in Minnesota during the winter. On the other hand, my preference for
wearing as few clothes as possible is exactly the reason I avoid Minnesota
during the winter as though it was the death trap that it is. This
is a trival example, but the underlying point is true - what works
in one situation does not work at all in another. Evolution could
have tried to cram into each individual human an equal adapatability
and preference for every possible circumstance but it ran into space
problems and out of room in the skull, plus it realized that if everybody
has an equal preference for everything, nobody is ever really going
to do anything. (Which coincidentally is more or less what marijuana
does, if properly ingested, one of the things that makes it so pleasant
at times - feeling no great need to do anything.) Back to our story...
So evolution cleverly
decided - okay, fine, rather than try to cram everything into everybody
we'll just split up the varying temperaments among the population,
and that way you have a decent chance of having someone in each given
population who is well adapted to the situation, likes it okay, and
can figure out what the hell to do. It'll all work out, evolution
reasoned to itself, not everybody has to be good at everything, they
can just sort of split up the skills and one person will do one thing
and another will do something else. Evolution was right. It
does all work out.
In a weird way.
Because in any given situation, damn near every single person with
an opinion on it is wrong. You and I are hardly ever right about
anything, and only then by random chance. This is not the end of the
world, you don't have to be right about everything to do reasonably
okay. But if you think you and I are bad, god you should see everybody
else. Not only are they wrong - but they're wrong in a way that
doesn't suit our preferences. The entire world is populated by
massive hordes of Other People who are not only wrong but annoying!!!
This would seem
to explain your drug policy problem right there. Annoying massive
hordes of Other Wrong People have taken over the government and fucked
everything up! This assessment is accurate enough as far as it
goes. But things get worse.
It's supposed
to be this way. Infuriatingly, the government is supposed to be
under the perpetual control of annoying massive hordes of Other Wrong
People. Because it turns out, oddly, that if you mush a clump of
wrong people together into a tight space and average out all their
wrong opinions, you get pretty close to the right opinion. This
can actually be verified with opinions that are numerically measurable.
For example, mush
a clump of people together at a carnival and force them all to guess
the number of jelly beans in a gigantic jar whether they want to or
not. Mush such a clump of 100 people together and you can very easily
get 100 wrong answers. If you average out all their wrong answers,
though, strangely enough, the answer is usually extremely close to
correct. The average answer is a much better reflection of reality
than the guesses of almost all the individuals. You've got your
chronic overestimaters, your chronic underestimaters, your people
who can barely count, those who favor the wild guess, the ones who
try to count the visible jelly beans and make an estimate from that,
those who try to calculate the volume of the jar & the weight
of an individual jelly bean and estimate from that, your experienced
jelly bean guessers and your novices with beginner's luck, the ones
who use intuition, and the ones who won't make any guess at all unless
someone tells them what to say. People who huddle in groups to guess
a group answer, and loners who are convinced everybody else's way
of guessing is stupid. All this variety, and when you average it,
collectively, everybody's right. This is called the wisdom
of crowds. (Yes, there's actually a name for it.)
There is a
saying that two wrongs don't make a right. Actually 450 wrongs
make a right. Or twenty-five wrongs. When you have widespread disagreement
on a topic, and you mush everything together so that nobody is completely
happy and nobody gets their way - you're pretty damn close to do the
right thing. This is how evolution has designed society to work -
chronic discontent for every single individual in it.
If there is a
disagreement about whether or not a country ought to go to war, if
you mush all that disagreement together into a policy that suits nobody
all that well - then you are probably pretty close to the most sensible
decision. Because you have your people who want to go to war even
when it is insanely disadvantageous, and those who are opposed to
all war even when pacificism will get everybody killed, and you have
people who want to do it boldly and aggressively and people who want
to back it up with diplomacy, people who want to charge ahead without
preparing and people who want to prepare everything down to the last
detail, etc., etc. And none of these people are right. So if you can
find the one thing that nobody's all that thrilled with - that's your
average answer and pretty close to correct.
It's when
everybody agrees that we're all in big trouble.....because
you get a big clump of people together all being wrong in the same
way at the same time - oh jesus. Lemmings off a cliff. Example - dot.com
stock bubble. When you've got everybody from Alan Greenspan to grandmothers
in Des Moines agreeing that internet stocks should cost lots and lots
of money because they're going to have explosive growth and make everybody
rich, rich, rich - this is a sure sign that everybody is running off
a cliff together and that you will hear the screaming plunge into
oblivion sooner or later. If everyone in America thinks Scott Petersen
killed Laci Petersen - then he didn't. If everybody's convinced that
low-carb diets are the key to miracle weight loss - then they aren't.
And so on. Widespread agreement violates the law of averages and means
that individuals are falling down in fulfilling their sacred societal
duty to be wrong in their own particular god-given way. This is
shameful and appalling, this kind of dereliction of duty, but we all
fall prey to it from time to time - take a vacation from being ourselves
and our natural tendency toward violent disagreement and we occasionally
get swept up in being agreeable. This is tragic, but it happens.
The other very
bad sign is when you find any particular group sharing a similar opinion
that is very happy. Excessive happiness on anyone's part is a very
bad sign. It means there is a backlash to come. Nobody should be
happy in an optimally functioning society.
Let's take an
example. I was happy during the Clinton administration. This was a
bad sign. It meant that soon there would be a massive backlash and
everything I was happy about, including my personal life, would soon
take a drastic turn for the worse. Everything did take a drastic turn
for the worse, including my personal life. All because I was happy!
I am exaggerating a bit here for effect - oh no wait a minute, I'm
not - but the principle is true. If liberals are happy - not a good
sign. If conservatives are happy - not a good sign. If religious folks
are happy - not a good sign. If secular humanists are happy - not
a good sign. If rich people are happy - bad. If poor people are happy
- bad. Gonna cause big problems later. Because whatever is making
them happy is not the average - or they wouldn't be happy. Now it
is impossible to make everybody unhappy all the time, some happiness
is going to creep in here and there no matter what you, as a government
of Annoying Other Wrong People do, but maximum unhappiness is the
ideal US government strives for - and by and large it does a pretty
good job.
Drug policy in
America actually illustrates all these points - Average Answer,
Maximum Unhappiness, Lemmings Over A Cliff and Some People
Are Too Happy.
But to understand
what's actually driving drug policy, we have to understand a little
more about human lemmings and how it would be possible for everybody
to agree on a wrong answer in the first place. What happened to all
that violent disagreement that was supposed to lead to an Optimum
Society? Huh? Well, what happened to it? Huh? Why aren't there more
fistfights on Capitol Hill about raves, acid, tripping, and the benefits
and disadvantages of Psilocybin mushrooms? What's up with the lack
of fistfights and all this focus on 'terrorism' and 'national security'?
Where are the priorities?
In the interests
of science, we'll address this vital topic next.
The
perils and benefits of widespread agreement...
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