So blogsister Daphne took her turn challenging my weird assertions about the laws that are supposed to stop us from puffing away at The Plant. Because, like Mr. Mackie, I say Marijawawna is bad, mmmkay? And suddenly, like the morning after, I had a thought about this I hadn’t thought before.

You know why there is such a deep split about this?

See, what we have here, is a law designed to keep us from becoming a bunch of drooling idiots…

STOP WRITING, please. I said “designed to.” Jeez you people, let me finish a point, you don’t have to keep debating that instantly, every time it comes up. Anyway. The laws against marijuana are supposed to keep us from becoming stupid. And folks like Daphne and I end up slightly disagreeing about it, although our values are pretty much the same, and we’re both somewhat ambivalent about how we’ve come down on the issue because we’ve both confronted the same dilemma and we’ve both entertained the same conflict within us. A law that’s supposed to keep people from being stupid.

Speaking for myself, I do believe you have a right to be an idiot. You might say I have exercised this right on an occasion or two, although that’s a subject for discussion some other time. As I said in the comments, the argument advanced by those who say the criminalization of Marijuana violates a sacred right to be an idiot, is pretty much the most persuasive one I’ve encountered. I’m similarly conflicted on the motorcycle-helmet laws, and the cell phone laws.

I think everyone who shares my general value system, is similarly conflicted. I am more than ready to resolve the conflict out of a sense of personal fatigue…which may be the beginning of an enormous mistake, I admit. But I am. The question is this. Am I fatigued more from having too many laws on the books; or am I fatigued more from seeing people act more, and more, and more like idiots with each passing year?

And you know why the Marijuana question divides us so?

Because it’s the only law — or one of a very, very exclusive selection of laws — that is supposed to stop us from becoming idiots. Think about it. Most of our laws that are built to manipulate us socially, on a state level as well as federal, are designed to stop us from becoming too smart. Or wealthy, or productive, or inspiring to others.

After a bit more thinking I came up with one, and only one, cousin to drug possession/consumption/distribution/sale laws: No Child Left Behind. The same people who argue about drug laws, tend to argue about NCLB — in part because Ted Kennedy helped write it. And there are some who say NCLB is designed to keep our kids stupid, not make ’em smart…others say it has had the stupidifying effect, whether intentional or not. Those splintered factions aside, though, the dynamics are the same and the dividing effect is the same. The people like us look at this nanny-state law that arguably may have the intent, or the result, of slowing or stopping our slide into an Idiocracy nation. And we have think, What’s a bigger crisis? People becoming too stupid, or people living under too many stupid laws?

I suggest that while this is a worthy question, it is also a distraction. A far worthier question would be: Why is this situation the exception rather than the rule? Laws that stop you from defending your family, should they require defending, with a handgun. Bailouts for incompetent, failing businesses. Antitrust laws. Progressive taxes. Teachers’ unions, and the spineless school officials that pander to them, conspiring to teach kids about sensitivity at the expense of readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic. Why does it seem to be in our societal makeup to create more and more bureaucracies and laws that have the design, and the intent, of turning us into a nation of helpless imbeciles?

Update: Small-tee tim, the godless heathen, submits a comment that is supposed to disagree with me but bears many of the same sentiments. In a helpful effort to get people to lighten up just a little bit more, he also provides a link to Tammy Bruce’s pages…maybe y’all have seen this clip already.

Blogger friend Buck, along with many other folks I don’t respect quite as much, says Terrace Five should’ve been eliminated from the taxonomy of progressive levels of liberal anti-intellectualism and nastiness:

Morgan: We’re pretty much on the same page, now that you’ve submitted your clarifications. I pretty well know where you’re coming from anyway, based on past “discussions.” You’re entirely correct that drugs are another manifestation of The Culture Wars, and we can agree to disagree on that point. That said… I’d delete Item Five in your taxonomy were I you. It is NOT true in all cases, but I suppose that’s life, eh? There are always exceptions that prove the rule… but in this case I think the exceptions cut the OTHER way.

I can tell this is a good idea, because I already seriously mulled over it. The legalize-drugs brigade, contrary to my crude summary, is anything but atomic. There are several sub-factions within it, and although subdividing within an ideology may or may not be productive, you just can’t have it going on without someone thinking about something.

However, the “should we legalize drugs” argument never fails to arouse great passion on both sides. For reasons that, I’m convinced, are wholly lacking in merit. It seems on the pro-legalize side, the emotion spews forth from a wellspring of feeling that a number of our current problems would disappear overnight if only the magic legalization were to take place. These troubles are associated with the criminal element; or, rather, with the criminal element being associated with a transaction that would be taking place regularly anyway, be it legal or not.

There is some truth in this. But the notion that the problems would disappear, over a longer term or more instantaneous one, is entirely unsupported.

As I’ve said before, I see government-sanctioned, or government-sponsored, or government-permitted drug use as on the same level of government-managed lotteries. And the lotteries, in my world, rank high on the list of insidious evils. I blame the state-commissioned lotteries for the acceleration in Steve Allen’s Dumbth over the last quarter century.

The contradiction that weighs us down in these modern times, is that the prevailing mindset, lingering so long under the surface, and now bobbing up to the top in this Year of Obama, is that nothing is really worth anything. And yet, somehow, everything is worth yet another explosive expression of anger. Those greedy corporations. Those narrow-minded conservatives. Those irritating white males. Those dangerous gun nuts. Those, those, those, those, those. It is the anger of people who are passionate about freedom, without understanding what it really is.

This is why I would vote to keep marijuana illegal, if only someone would come asking for me to cast a vote. Marijuana makes people think like liberals. Suddenly, freedom is Orwellian. Freedom is freedom to smoke dope — and has little other meaning. If it’s legal to smoke dope, but you must do so in a shitty apartment surrounded with barbed wire, that you cannot leave, day or night, and surveillance cameras record your ever move even when you’re taking a dump…well then, you are “free” because you are allowed to get high.

Some other guy being allowed to raise his sons into real men, to fire a rifle in his backyard, to start a business and keep the profits, to use deadly force to defend his wife from being violated, to bellow at her to please get him a beer without being sent to sensitivity training — he isn’t “free” if the whacky terbacky isn’t lawful in his country, or in his part of it. Freedom, suddenly, is trashing your brain. Just as, in the case of the lotteries, “ambition” suddenly means a hope of matching up those six numbers. That and nothing more.

Those who care about nuthin’-but-legalization, I have confessed, are not that commonplace. Here and there, there are people who care passionately and wax lyrically about the soon-to-arrive magic legalization instant, and yet can form a number of well-thought-out positions on a variety of other issues. However, those who can run off the mouth about it, losing track of the importance of other, unrelated things — this is not quite so exclusive a club. And although I cannot prove it, it is my belief that this is errant thinking. My belief is that, if we were to legalize pot, or legalize drugs overall, things would not get better. I do not believe they would become catastrophic…but I do not believe things would stay the same, either. I think things would become slightly worse, the way things generally get worse nowadays. We’d lose something that is hard to notice, and just a few among us would notice the population is becoming overall dumbed-down yet some more. For this, we would be called kooks.

In other words, I think it would have exactly the same effect as the lotteries. The shift is a subtle one. In 1980, you said “I want to take my family on a nice vacation, so I’m going to work just a little bit harder.” By 2000, you said “I want to take my family on a nice vacation, so I hope those numbers line up.” See the little game? Work is regarded differently, and so life is regarded differently. That’s what would happen with drug legalization. We’d all start to look at life a little bit differently. That is the whole point actually using marijuana, is it not? To make you look at life a little bit differently? To make certain efforts look futile, that normally seem worthwhile when your mind is functioning the way it is supposed to?

The unholy triangle with which we are grappling, is between modern liberalism, drugs that take away the “Give-A-Fuck” instinct like marijuana…and…nihilism. New sidebar addition Self Evident Truths (hat tip, Gerard) expounds on the nihilist/liberal connection:

Here is the key to understanding modern liberals and their connection with nihilism. Modern liberalism bases ideals and programs on “a chaos of the instincts or passions.” Such ideals can only drift from one extreme to another as instincts and passions change over time. Hence, modern liberal politics is a politics of feeling, of self, of instinct, of passions with no understanding of the underlying roots of its own behavior, let alone of the nihilism which drives it.

The lack of understanding stems from liberal nihilism infiltrating into the university system. Once adopted, the university system rejected old values in favor of the new valueless system. In an amplifying feedback loop, the next generation of students came out of the universities not realizing that they lacked anything at all in their education. They didn’t even know enough to ask questions about what they might have missed.

There is a consequence to the adoption or acceptance of nihilism with no regard to US founding principles, morals, or religious constraints. Human nature always has a desire to some kind of foundation, some anchor from which to interpret life. By rejecting the foundational principles of the United States – Christianity, moral living, self-evident truths – the nihilist finds other ideologies to take their place – ideologies based on “a chaos of instincts and passions.”

One of the best known historians of religions, Mircea Eliade, had this to say in his seminal book, The Sacred and the Profane:

Nonreligious man has been formed by opposing his predecessor, by attempting to “empty” himself of all religion and all trans-human meaning. He recognizes himself in proportion as he “frees” and “purifies” himself from the “superstitions” of his ancestors….He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he is himself the product of his past (p. 204).

Those who give up religion, morals and foundational principles cannot free themselves from past principles because they are the products of the past and past experiences. Those who consider themselves “liberated” from the past can only respond to it, since without the past, they have absolutely no frame of reference.

Eliade gives this example of the attempt Marxists made to reject past values. Nihilists who buy into Marxism, Socialism, or Communism should note their dependance on Marx’s substitute religion:

We need only to refer to the mythological structure of communism and its eschatological content. Marx takes over and continues one of the great eschatological myths of the Asiatico-Mediterranean world – the redeeming role of the Just (the “chosen,” the “anointed,” the “innocent,” the “messenger”; in our day, the proletariat), whose sufferings are destined to change the ontological status of the world….Marx enriched this venerable myth by a whole Judaeo-Christian messianic ideology (p. 206).

What does this mean in real world terms? If we take, for example, a look at President Obama and his socially and fiscally liberal policies, we can see that most of his policies lack any definable reference to the foundational principles of the US. Instead, they adopt a Marxist version of a messianic ideology – the desire to create a pipe-dream world absolutely free from human problems. The government itself, just as Marxist doctrine taught, becomes the savior figure of the modern world. Obama becomes its chief prophet.

Those who have not adopted nihilism can immediately see the problems inherent in this system. The ideology leads from a false premise to a false conclusion. Government cannot be salvation, since, by its very nature, is composed of people who do not transcend the problems of the modern day.

Nihilists presume to a knowledge of reality, yet it is knowledge based on a faulty system and a false premise. As Bloom states:

However profound that knowledge may be, theirs is only one interpretation; and that we have only been told as much as [the nihilist founders] thought we needed to know. It is an urgent business for one who seeks self-awareness to think through the meaning of the intellectual dependency that has led us to such an impasse (p. 156).

Without understanding the nihilistic impulse, without understanding the philosophical roots of nihilism, without self-awareness of the lack of knowledge of other systems, the modern liberal has no chance of breaking free from the boundaries set for them by ideologues of the past.

And modern liberals will be at the mercy of today’s ideologues.

This, I fear, is what is to become more popular if legalization takes place. This is what concerns me when I call it a cultural issue. I still say it is immoral and contrary to the philosophies of the American experiment, for people in my location to dictate that people somewhere else should keep it illegal. On that subject, I’m more libertarian — let ’em get stoned outta their gourd, if that’s what they want to do. But on my own patch of ground, I’m voting no.

The departure from reality people undertake, with marijuana, liberalism and nihilism, is quite profound. Two central themes seem to pop up from out of nowhere. The notion that nothing’s-worth-anything is a central pillar of the nihilism, of course. But then there are all these human rights. A human right to a job, to a house, to food, to a car, to the gas to put in it. Suddenly we’re all Han Solo; hokey religions are no substitute for a blaster at your side, kid. Nobody put us here. Nobody’s determining the outcome of cosmic events. But our skin becomes thinner, and all kinds of different forms of neglect, become violations of our human rights. Human rights. Nobody put us here, but humans have all these rights that other animals don’t have.

That isn’t true of all people who smoke marijuana…bit it is true of most. And this shit stays in your system for a long time. Alcohol, on the other hand, is gone by the next morning. If it isn’t, then there will be a painful reminder to you to show some restraint next time. I keep hearing that marijuana and alcohol are on the same level, or should be. Sorry, I’m just not seeing it. Both can be abused. But with alcohol the abuse comes from excessive use. With marijuana the abuse comes from entering an entire thought culture that surrounds the drug. And the potential is there from the very first puff.

We have far too much dumbth already. We have far too much nihilism, with things the way they are. We don’t need more. And, the idea that there are lots of people who can’t talk about anything besides legalization once the subject comes up…not only remains a sensible recognition on my part, but a proven one. Proven by the very people who want to argue with me about it. I’ve written very few things that have attracted that much comment. And I’ve written nothing, I daresay, that’s attracted that much comment upon such a tiny, tiny subsection within it.

Update: Thanks to blogger friend Gerard, and his superior Google Image Search skills, for the image.

That’s the name of a new way to raise your kid. Cassy calls it just-plain-lazy parenting. Looks like just another way to mass-produce liberals without realizing it, to me.

In the consensual living model, father doesn’t know best. Neither does mom. Instead, parents and children are equal partners in family life, according to the principles laid out at consensual-living.com.

Founded in 2006 by a group of families in North Carolina, consensual living is gaining ground in alternative parenting communities and online, including a Yahoo group with about 900 members.
:
Lindsay Hollett of Nanaimo, B.C., says that she began to snap less with her husband, Craig, and her 18-month-old daughter, Kahlan, after she adopted the consensual-living mindset about a year ago.

Her days became more relaxed when she focused more on Kahlan’s needs, she says. If she had a doctor’s appointment but her daughter was feeling grumpy, for example, Ms. Hollett would not force Kahlan to wait with her to see the doctor. Instead, Ms. Hollett might cancel the appointment or arrange alternative child care, she says.

Listening to her child’s feelings doesn’t mean that every last thing is negotiable, such as being strapped in a car seat, she says. But if they have to go somewhere, she adds, “I’ll do everything I can to make the car-seat ride more comfortable.”

For now, Ms. Hollett says, the onus is on her to be a role model for consensual living principles such as empathy and mutual respect for her daughter. As Kahlan grows older, though, “it won’t just be me empathizing with her.”

Understanding a child’s developmental stage is a crucial aspect of parenting, according to Alyson Schafer, a Toronto-based psychotherapist and author of Breaking the Good Mom Myth and the recently released Honey, I Wrecked the Kids.

But, she adds, children must be taught to respect a higher authority, such as social expectations. Cancelling an appointment because of a child’s mood sends the wrong message, Ms. Schafer says. “It’s a parent’s job to socialize a child.”

I was going to enter a comment to the effect that Cassy was being way too premature in her judgment, that I disagreed with her emphatically. It was April 1, after all. But I quickly figured out that I wouldn’t be fooling anyone.

I’d have a great deal more affection and sympathy for this newest method of child-spoilage if it was pure anarchy. As it is…what the hell? Mom and Dad don’t know best, but you have to “respect a higher authority, such as social expectations”?

Isn’t that a rather simplified version of — you don’t know right from wrong, but you need to depend on complete strangers to tell you what it is? From where does all this wisdom known as “social expectations” arrive? From people, right? Who raised those people? Didn’t they have mothers and fathers…who also didn’t know best? So from what terrace does this wonderful knowledge of do-this-don’t-do-that trickle down? Do we just single out whoever among us has the most wonderful hopey-changey gift of gab, and elect that guy President?

Can I be blunt here? Waitaminnit…it’s my blog…of course I can. This universe doesn’t give two shits about your “feelings” or your “needs” — not at any instant in time, not at any moment from cradle-to-grave. It doesn’t care. Hierarchies of human authority, they care. But only in one direction.

When it comes time to get real work done, you have to get your plowing done in the springtime or you can’t plant. You have to get your irrigating done in the summer or nothing will grow, and you have to get your harvesting done in the fall or your product will rot. That’s true of all levels of technology. The compiler doesn’t care if you find the error messages to be discouraging.

It seems to me the real danger of a parenting method like this, is that it will work a portion of the time. It will work when your child is raised to become an adult who is only fit to engage a subset of the experiences that life has to offer. You would have to send such a young adult to college; a good one. You would have to do this, because the life for which you’ve prepared them would be one in which they get to give the orders — using authority they may have, but didn’t really earn with any genuine experience — and then the orders would be carried out by better men than they. Real grown-ups who were raised under a mindset that work, where it exists, is non-sentient, and uncaring about the worker’s emotional state. Guys who can fire guns, sharpen knives and tie knots.

The military has a saying for situations like this: “If you want to know how the war should be going, ask the General; if you want to know how it really is going, ask a Private.” Except that’s different. You have to do a lot of things, grapple with some situations that aren’t under your control, to achieve a pre-defined outcome, to become a General.

Tracy Miller Quinn, owner and operator of a laudable blog in her own right, and mother of two, objects to childless Cassy’s condemnation of the consensual-living model. This leads to a lively and occasionally entertaining exchange. Well, I’m the father of one, who will be turning twelve this summer…so my experience falls short of Quinn’s in some ways, and exceeds hers in others. I think she’s demonstrated here how a point can deliver some merit while remaining devoid of applicability. If Cassy really doesn’t know what she’s talking about (and I’ve been reading her for awhile; trust me, she does), then, in this situation, she’s the stopped clock that happens to be right.

Kids, at the age under discussion, are amazing things. Their brains do not work the same way our adult brains do. They have been designed, and constructed, to do most of their thinking with the orbito-frontal cortex, in a way we can’t match. To do their thinking with the word “no.” This is how they stay alive, when they don’t yet understand the more complicated and involved cause-and-effect thinking, and haven’t yet accumulated the experience necessary to break down abstract ideas according to those terms.

It is…to coin a phrase…an intelligent design. A complex design. A design that incorporates an organism, a maturing process for the organism, and — parents. This consensual parenting, from what I’ve been able to learn about it, is the abjuration of a crucial learning process that must necessarily be achieved in full somewhere around age five, so that the child is ready to build on this knowledge of “no” and absorb more complex lessons later on. If they don’t lay this critical foundation, they can’t be prepared for what’s built on top.

And then what would have to happen is we get more of what we’ve already got, up to our eyeballs: People who aren’t fit to take on real work. Non-sentient work. Work that doesn’t give a flying fig how happy or sad they are at the time they’re expected to take it on. People who are supremely aware of their own emotions, but uncaring about those of others. Because they didn’t learn about that when they were supposed to: At ages one-and-a-half, to five. There never was a need to develop such a skill, at that critical bracket. They would then have to be coddled, their emotions pandered-to, from womb to tomb.

They would be crippled. Severely. If you took a hammer to their kneecaps and put them in a wheelchair for life, you wouldn’t be limiting their prospects nearly as much. Sorry if that comes off as a shocker…but that’s not an exaggeration at all.

Best case scenario is, they will then somehow end up in command of others, who can do the work that has to be done — so they can take the credit for it.

Save up that college fund if you raise your kids this way. Save, hope, and pray. Your kids would have to achieve authority without demonstrating they’re worthy of it, and then cross paths with a prospective employer maintaining high standards for hiring just the right people. But enforcing them only occasionally.

Of course, who am I kidding. American business is being re-defined as I write this…so maybe I’m just another old curmudgeon reciting boring old stories from his rocking chair about the way the world used to work.

Reported, and angstified-over, at Feministing.

Oxygen TV did a poll asking women ages 18 to 34 if they’d rather win a Nobel Peace Prize or America’s Next Top Model. Twenty five percent more respondents said they’d rather win ANTM.

I can explain it. It’s got to do with the nature of women. Women, it turns out, are people…and people, on a nose-for-nose basis, aren’t that wild about accomplishing things right now.

Mr. Rowe can fill you in on what’s been going on lately. Fast-forward to about 16:00 or 17:00…the part where he says he’s got about two and a half minutes left…where he talks about the war we’ve been declaring on work.

Don’t worry. About a third of women would prefer to accomplish something. And to that, of course, you have to add the women who want to accomplish things, but don’t see any real prestige in Nobel any longer. It’s bound to be a sizable chunk. Women can be pretty smart…so I’m told.

But doing stuff that will help other people — as opposed to having other people pay lots of attention to you. Whether you’re polling young women, old women, young men or old men. This just isn’t the right generation in which you should ask questions like those. Helping people. Building things that help people. Setting up systems that help people, creating things that might help people. That involves predicting effect based on cause.

Lots of responsibility involved in that. People aren’t feeling up to it. It’s far easier just to vote for “hope” and “change.”