It is what happens when a society’s primary values are entertainment and pleasure rooted in materialism.
April
12, 2017
Opioids and 'the Good Life'
By Tim Jones
Lately
there’s been a great deal of media coverage of the opioid crisis that is going
on in the country. It is commonly referred to as a "'disease' along
with alcoholism and drug abuse. This seems to be an egregious
example of political correctness that disguises the real problem in the
fog of a euphemism. Cancer is a disease, addiction is a spiritual problem. It
is what happens when a
society’s primary values are entertainment and
pleasure rooted in materialism. And it represents the culmination of what
secularism and liberalism have accomplished in their efforts to tear down
all restraints to one’s conscience by destroying Christianity and biblical
morality.
Conservatives
believe that pain, suffering and the inherent ‘badness’ within every individual
has always existed and that it will be so as long as humans walk the
earth. If this weren’t the case, God would have no need to send his only
begotten son to be crucified and resurrected. Secularism and liberalism (they
are basically interchangeable ideologies) try to rid the inherent ‘badness’ in
all of us and the associated guilt of doing bad things by assuaging one’s
conscience. So far, these ideologies have been extremely successful not just in
marginalizing Christian morality by getting society to accept the recreational
use of drugs that long ago began with marijuana. (This is also the case with
both abortion)
Everyday
people are bombarded on television and online with advertisements promoting the
‘good life’ whether it’s a shiny new car, a sunny day on the beach or on a
cruise liner somewhere in the Caribbean, or partying watching the Super Bowl
while imbibing lite beer and scarfing down chips. The messages are always
clear: life is meant to be fun! And no pain or suffering allowed because it's
everyone's right to be happy and free of all pain and suffering. Work has come
to mean drudgery where people live for weekends, another message that is
constantly promoted via ‘feelgood’ news stories and ads promoting
"the good life" in a thousand different version.
From Totalitarian Temptations in
Free Societies by
Ryszard Legutko:
“In today’s world entertainment is not just a pastime or a
style, but a substance that permeates everything: schools and universities,
upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It has
become dear to the hearts of students, professors entrepreneurs, journalists,
engineers, scientists, writers, even priests.”
Legutko
goes on to say:
“The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles
what Pascal long ago called divertissement, that is, an activity -- as he wrote
in Thoughts -- that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills
this existence with false content… By escaping the questions of the ultimate
meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get
used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured
by its attractions.”
One
can easily see how so many Americans who may have had a medical issue that
required a painkiller prescription or the unemployed who are bored and
alienated, succumb to the nonstop messages that life is meant to be fun and
entertaining while the eradication of pain and suffering is the latest human
right, then get hooked on the various forms of opioids because they don't want
to be left behind and miss out on "the good life."
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn,
in his 1978 tour de
force graduation address at Harvard, "A World Split Apart," described
clearly what was happening regarding the triumph of materialism over spiritualism
that’s lead to the spiritual poverty of secular humanism:
Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and
material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory
the achievement of happiness -- in the morally inferior sense of the word which
has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one
psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still
more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many
Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal
such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without
opening a way to free spiritual development.
Humanism
without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition… If humanism were
right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to
die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a
more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It
cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then
cheerfully get the most of them.
It’s
easy to see how so many who are not achieving happiness leads to a ‘fear of
missing out’, or to use the colloquial acronym, FOMO. So what to do when
one is missing out on the happiness and pleasure that society tells them they
should be experiencing it: create it artificially through opioid consumption,
the ultimate 'feel good' experience.
Christopher
Caldwell, national editor for the Weekly
Standard, recently posted an article on FirstThings, “American Carnage: The New Landscape of
Opioid Addiction,” where he goes into superb detail on how its
origin and its underlying reasons led to the crisis that it is today. One
of the primary reasons is the acceptance of something that was
once considered socially unacceptable and easily initiated since it's
use is a reflection of secular humanism in general:
“ …a person who would never have become a heroin addict in
the old days of the opioid taboo could now become the equivalent of one, in a
more antiseptic way. But a shocking number of people wound up with a classic
heroin problem anyway. Relaxed taboos and ready supply created a much wider
appetite for opioids.”
“Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings.
It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life
a meaning. It is a ‘perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.’”
The
deeper problem, however, is at once metaphysical and practical, and we’re going
to have a very hard time confronting it. We in the sober world have, for about
half a century, been renouncing our allegiance to anything that forbids or commands.
Perhaps this is why, as this drug epidemic has spread, our efforts have been so
unavailing and we have struggled even to describe it. Addicts, in their own
short-circuited, reductive, and destructive way, are armed with a sense of
purpose. We aren’t. It is not a coincidence that the claims of political
correctness have found their way into the culture of addiction treatment just
now. This sometimes appears to be the only grounds for compulsion that the
nonaddicted part of our culture has left.
According
to this New York Times article, “Inside a Killer Drug Epidemic, A Look At
America's Opioid Crisis,” there were 33,000 lethal casualties in 2015.
That works out to just over 90 per day. It’s about time this addiction and all
other addictions are recognized not as a disease but as a spiritual problem,
one whose genesis is in the spiritual poverty of secularism. If the focus
on a finding a solution remains in curing addiction as a disease, don't expect
the problem to be alleviated any time soon and that it will continue to get
worse for a very long time. You can’t expect to solve a problem when the
problem is baked into the solution.
America’s Super-rich Live 15 Years Longer!
………….. America’s Bludgeoned Middle-Class Dies Young, Addicted and Poor!
AMERICA
THE ADDICTED: 1 in 7 are addicted
CAUTION:
GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S
BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years
of gringo-paid welfare.
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