An Inspired and Complete Meditation on Alchohol, and it's Place in American Youth Culture

Let me start out with two notes before I begin.

--->First of all, if you are a nihilist or want to tak nihilist tones with my argument I have one thing to say to you; kill yourself. I'm absolutely serious, if life means so little to you that you mean to waste yours away disrespecting the glorious thing that you're experiencing than you need to be gone, it is extraordinarily inconsiderate to push your way of life on others and influence others who may actually value this beautiful experience we call life. So "if we're gonna die anyway, why not have fun with it" go die now, or learn to do so as a human being and accept the limits of being a human being in this particular reality, because the ways in which you do it are most certainly not in the best interest of our people.

--->Secondly: I will be stressing the concept of humanity and the human being here and I would ask you to look past the typical linguistic identity of humanity and being a human being and jump into my conception of it. A simple explanation of my human being is a being that is able to consciously recognize itself, its thoughts, and its emtions and feelings and analyze them and appreciate them in ways that we know no other life form on this planet can. We are able to appreciate much of this through the convention of language, but it can be a burden on our complicated minds, and we must remain aware of how deeply language penetrates our conscious AND sub-conscious while dealing with issues like these.

--->Lastly before I begin, I welcome any refutation (what true philosopher wouldn't), but warn thatI ardently support my thesis and am confident in the depth of thought that I have dedicated to this subject in particular, a depth that may not be apparent in a blog post entry length piece of writing. Furthermore if you cannot deny my logic or refute it with success I hope that you will have the presence of mind to stop any participation that you have in the consumption of alchohol and warn your friends about the way they are living their lives, instead of continuing to fold under social pressure rather than prosper under the light of maturity and reason and intellectual individuality.


We all work off of one general assumption by which we seem to live our lives, or at least we think we do. From Aristotle to Derrida it is agreed that the ultimate good that is at all relevent to mankind is the good that appeals to his mind and to his senses and emotions. So it is needless to say that we seek to do as human beings, is it not? Well as a philosopher in modern times unfortunatly it is, as I am aware of many facets of the effects of language on psycology and the human mind; we all want to live our lives as "happy" and "satisfyed" HUMAN BEINGS, because that is what we are, we are human beings.

So for arguments sake, let us say that the human body is self sufficient, or that we live with the exact nutrients which the human body needs to flourish exactly as it naturaly was 'intended' to - we eat exactly what we need and drink exactly what we need to drink in order that our bodies are in "prefect" condition, or as perfect a condition as a human body can be in. This is a safeguard for annoying comments like saying that eating pancakes makes you feel different than eating eggs; that is irrelivent, we eat them for their taste, not the way they make us 'feel'. Furthermore we cann all agree, I'm sure, that alchohol consumption is not a matter of taste, other things taste better, ad if you have an aqcuired taste, some things might be more important. Either way, if I had it my way I would be perfectly self-sufficent and I'd want to run as a humans body should run - wouldn't we all?

Now, to get back to our main discussion; if we are not to seek "happiness" while being a human being, then what are we to seek it as? In being drunk and consuming alchohol, under the ideal assumptions we've laid out, we are doing something that is removing us from our humanity, we are becoming something that is not human in the basest sense of the word. Now, of course we are still physically the species of homosapiens homosapiens when we are inebriated, but this is not how we seek to live our lives and now how we intend to live as happy and satisfyed; if for no other reason because we'd die in hours if we remained that intoxicated.

My point here is that we seek to be happy as a sober form of human being, ideally one which is operating on the exact nutrients it needs, in which case we can worry more about our mental and emotional states, which are the things we must be concerned with if we are concerned with our own hapiness. In short, it does not follow that we want to be happy as human beings, but proceed to turn ourselves into things that are not in essence human.

Along with the inability to see how hypocritical they are being, young people today are also unaaware of the psycological effect that these actities have, which are largely imprinted in the sub-conscious:

The blatant problem here is the outrageous disrespect that "getting drunk" pays to humanity. In some way, some how, we came to be what we are, and it is undeniable that being human is an incredible experience (THE incredible experience, possibly), and when people drink and in a way try to escape what it is to be human they disrespect what it is to be human; they are saying that the human experience isn't good enough, that being human is not an amazing enough feeling, that they are bored and hate it; to these people I say the same thing as I do the nihilists, if you do not enjoy being human, fuck off and leave the people who realize how amazing it is to be LIVING alone. This leads into a very large cultural notion in commercial american culture coined by Umberto Ecco called Hyper-reality. Ecco has his own meanings for this, but to me it speaks to humanites obsession, as of late in recent history, to try to transcned what it is to be human; get drunker, have bigger parties, have sex like Venus and Anchises, have bigger tits, have a bigger penis, be happier than a human. Hyper-happiness? How can we be any happier than the limits of a human being to be happy? Can a human being be happier than is possible for a human being? This borders on metaphysics and a lot of other things in linguistics, but I'll give a dimmed down version for the sake of length; no, because if one were to become that blissfully happy he must in turn cease to be human and become something else, which we will not, we will remain human.

Behavior like this - disrespecting life - is typical of democratic societies in culture, the thought patterns lead to nihilism, and they just want to have fun while they're here and don't give a shit about the integrity of the human experience, so again if you are in that group, you know what I say.

Moreover, for those not familiar with Ecco and hyper-realities (those who were never in ACS mostly), I will briefly explain American commercial culture. It goes sort of like this:

Somewhere a genuine thought is had, it could be an excellent intellectual thought, it could be just a more artisticly expressive idea; these ideas get advertised, clothes, music, physical artwork, it's like regualr culture. But now here comes capitalism. With the free market companies now see that this kids pants are popular among youths and this hair dew will sell and this and that, and soon enough they become commercial and cultural market schemes that youths buy into as genuine culture. This goes for all fasion, every item of clothing you wear, every piece of jewelry is a product of greed and the people involved in commercial companies ignorant lust for in-human possessions. This is called commodity fetishism. It sucks a lot. So now that there is an established set of "cool" "trendy" companies (i.e. abercrombie and fitch, bebe, seven, etc) the market realized that there is a ceratain socially akward group of children who will want to rebel against these companies because the kids who are associated with them are mean and socially bully them - already we see here a close association between humanity and market identity in the eyes of children. So the market comes up with a counter culture, and sells it as such. Dickies, Vans, Hot Topic; they aren't there because they understand that a natural and intelligent human tendency is to be really fat and wear maekup and baggy pants, they're there because they exploited the idea of a counter culture, and they want money. And the kids eat that shit up. Even people who think that they are steering clear of these niche cultures fall into mid-niches and such, theres a market for every kind of kid, they work on it non stop because they want the moeny and they want the power, They've effectively destroyed any sense of culture and individual identity and replaced it with market identity where people become extremely associated with what sections of culture they ascribe themselves to to the point where they become inseparable and the marketized culture becomes part of that persons humanity, and eventually replaces it.

Here is where the hyper reality comes into play. Once these trends are worn out, then what? The people up top don't have creative minds, they just have minds for money. They go out and they see what the youth has turned their culture into, and step it up a notch. Girls like wearing littler bikinis? We'll make see through ones and ones that are even littler than is yet socially acceptable, but it will be. Kids like hard rock and make-up? We'll blow limp bizkit and korn up. Kid's like to get drunk, we'll aim our alchohol ads to them, and make movies like dude wheres my car - they'll be so proud of how shitfaced they were last night! and they'll just keep getting more shitfaced because everyone else will think it's cool, and because they'll never save the universe the next day. The market feeds off of the culture they've created and hypes it up a notch, makes it a little more hard, a little more riske, a little more drunk, and kids follow, they just can't see it.

So here we can see, well if the ideas new tou probably can't and you think it's crap but hopefully you will get over yourself and come around, that in this essence the sociality that drinking may be ascribed to is not genuine human sociality, it is market-dictated sociality, the money dictates where and how you socialize and what drink you hold while you're doing it. Furthermore socializing while drunk cannot be seen as legitimate socializing because by the sheer nature of drinking you are becoming a different person (a different thing from a human being) than you actually are and it ceases to be you that is sociallizing it becomes a fragment of the human being that you are socializing.

I can only conclude concicely: don't fucking drink, there is no intelligent reason to, as you can see. This goes for drugs as well. If you do not want to be human or are not satisfyed with it go die, and leave the living to the people who appreciate simply being human.