JAMES CRUMLEY
JAMES CRUMLEY
If someone doesn't want to drink or get drunk, so be it: don't lord it over them like they haven't performed some rite of passage, and it's especially disrespectful towards people who have had bad experiences with alcohol.
Do you think people would not benefit from this heuristic, correctly applied? Or are you against the quote because of wider social implications?
I.e. do you the the quote is incorrect in a pragmatic sense, or just morally wrong?
It reinforces the idea that drinking is 'normal' and 'fun'. It suggests that people who do not drink must have reasons not to do such an "obviously good" (scare quotes) thing.
Those aren't good things. But I don't think it says much horrible about what a 'real man' is. Ignoring alcohol, it says don't be too righteous, and people who don't trust themselves aren't trustworthy. And those two messages, I kinda like.
Whilst I don't like the message "people who don't drink are too righteous". I do like really the message "People who are (too) righteous are bad".
Rather I would like to trust that truthfulness must gradually come to be valued, developed and followingly more easily recognised as a core function of humanity, simply because it is VITAL for the continued evolution and improvement (and potentially survival) of our culture.
Tangent: if we BS ourselves by fostering a culture that believes group sentiments simply because it is popular it may well prove fatal on a civilisation level. This problem is pretty much embodied by the current replication crisis in the sciences where publishing to further ones career comes before validating that what is published is actually, verifiably, true. The latter step is extremely hard and as an individual one may not see much gain from adhering to truth whereas as a society we are critically dependent on it for things to not, literally, fall apart.
Sylvia Plath
Personally I think self-control is what makes a person trustworthy.