"All human life, we may say, consists solely of these two activities: (1) bringing one’s activities into harmony with conscience, or (2) hiding from oneself the indications of conscience in order to be able to continue to live as before."
Note that he has defined all of life as two points about "one" and "oneself". This is why I and I assume many others roll their eyes.
Because Tolstoy, and most essays about alcohol, don't even mention what I think is the point of alcohol. It's a drug that makes it easier to socialize, and socializing is very, very good for people. So good that I will risk it, even though alcohol is bad in many ways: bad for physical and mental health, risky for abuse, etc.
If you are anti alcohol, that is reasonable, but it seems no one will ever admit what it's really for.
This is important, because alcohol is unhealthy and if you want to discourage it, give people other low effort ways to connect.
That's one big reason, but the other is numbing bad feelings, which I think is a more interesting field, especially since it often blurs into the social bit.
Indeed, for the social aspect, everyone is already fully aware it's not needed, and that they can have fun socialization without it, because of their childhoods.
I think the biggest reason alcohol is used is, to put it bluntly, how painful life is.
As the child grows into an adult, and realizes the real nature of life and the world, baseline pain increases. And it's hard to be social when you're worried about things or down about things.
But alcohol is a cheap, readily available blunt instrument against this pain. No matter how bad you feel, if you down a litre of booze, that pain will definitely, and quickly, stop.
>Indeed, for the social aspect, everyone is already fully aware it's not needed, and that they can have fun socializations without it, because of their childhoods.
Sure... you can also learn everything a Stanford class teaches online. You can find alternatives for the networking aspects, etc. Still... universities tend to be how people do this. You can bodybuild without a gym. Indomitable willpower & a DIY ethic are admirable, but "hacks" are still the way 90% of people get the job done.
I think you are downplaying how hard it is to be social, in various contexts. Alcohol can be used to dull pain. This definitely does occur frequently, especially once substance abuse is the pattern.
This does not negate the earlier comment about lubricating social interactions. That's generally the starting point for alcohol use. Flirting in high school. Being socially adventurous in college. Getting intimate with coworkers.
Substance mediated mind alteration is not new. It's not just escapism or "opium for the masses." There are many real reasons people use mind altering substances. Escapism & "opium for the masses," is, however, usually the mode when/once we're talking about addiction.
If you look at why alcoholics drink, and why high schoolers drink.... the reasons are just different.
> Indeed, for the social aspect, everyone is already fully aware it's not needed, and that they can have fun socialization without it, because of their childhoods.
Huh. I don't think I would have seen OP's point about people being strangely dismissive to the idea of alcohol as a social lubricant until you provided an example.
Saying alcohol is not needed for socializing is like saying everybody is fully aware that alcoholis not needed to numb bad feelings because they were happy when they were children.
It's not just pain, it’s thoughts too (which can also be related of course). I’m someone who will overthink which leads to worries that don’t need to exist and bring no benefit. This is why it helps me socialise, I’m far more likely to talk myself out of it because of the perceived “risk”. Rate limiting my thoughts lets me just act.
> But alcohol is a cheap, readily available blunt instrument against this pain. No matter how bad you feel, if you down a litre of booze, that pain will definitely, and quickly, stop.
Never happened to me. I'm not a drinker but I have of course consumed alcohol. Life is as painful as usual with or without alcohol in my body. If any, life is more miserably with alcohol because I look more pathetic than usual (classic drunk face), my voice is not clear, my mouth smells like shit, and I walk funny (if I can walk at all).
That's one important reason, but there's another one that is even more neglected: it just... tastes good (for those of us who like it, of course).
For example, as a 90 kg man, for me drinking a single 33cl bottle of beer has pretty much the same effect as drinking water, i.e., I don't feel anything at all (note that I don't drive, in that context it would probably still be relevant). So when I have a single beer with dinner, there is zero intention of socializing, stupefying myself or whatever. I just like the taste (and don't order alcohol-free beer, which is healthier, because I hate its taste).
Similarly, having a red wine with a strong sheep milk cheese is an amazing experience, just because the tastes combine so well and enhance each other.
If there were alcohol-free versions of the beverages that tasted the same, I'd probably use them most of the time (except in some social contexts). There is no such thing, though.
I think culture toward drinking is the determining factor. In my culture we are brought up around wine, heavy spirits, and beer. There is no such thing as comming of age by drinking yourself stupid as in UK, US or Australia for example. Intoxication is considered VERY bad form (embarassing). Usually when people feel they are becoming intoxicated they will excuse themselves and go home.
I agree with this totally. For me, the strongest manifestation is cognac. A good cognac is just fantastic. The main thing is the tail, that just goes on and on in different stages of taste and sensation. I'd drink it all day if I could. But if I did... er... that would not be good.
Absolutely agree with the taste aspect. I (male) went 0% when my gf went off of birth control and kept it that way throughout pregnancy until now (baby's 9 months) and I certainly miss some of the tastes (beers, wines, liqueur). My luck is that I enjoy drinking Heineken 0.0 and most of the 0.3%/0.5% IPA's they sell now (at least here, Netherlands). As for 0% alternatives for wines and liqueur, they haven't come close to me yet to enjoy them.
For me, there's nothing 'principal' about it btw, it just works, for now. The upside is of course no negative effects (ie hangover) and much less threshold to open one, even on the rare occasion we have a warm meal during lunch time (I work from home).
In australia the 4 pines alcohol free* tastes so realistic (and good) that it is hard to tell the difference other than the lack of sting from the alcohol. It is good stuff. But there are many bad alcohol free beers.
Alcohol by itself is tasteless though. And alcohol-free beer is getting better at very high speed. Keep trying it every now and then, you'll be surprised.
I am not sure about good taste of alcohol. I can agree about some wines and brandys (although they are universally better to smell than to taste), but beer? Bitter liquid, enriched with CO2. Do you remember first time you tasted beer, probably at the age of 5-7 from the bottle of your father? I can't see anyone liking non-alcoholic beer outside social context.
I love the wide variety of tastes you can get. Beers are getting there, but there is no alcohol free wine or spirit that comes close to the flavour carrying profile of decent drinks.
I make quite a lot of cocktails and have some quite decent alcohol free ones in my repertoire, but compared to the alcoholic ones there are a very poor imitation.
Increasingly, there are! Where I live (Switzerland) there is a roaring trade in non alcoholic or very low alcohol drinks. I admit none are yet as tasty to me as a good IPA, but the market clearly wants what you do. If my beer of choice was more toward lager I might even be happier.
It tastes good because a) you like the carbonation (try drinking sparkling water), and b) your brain wants the alcohol, so it makes beers or anything resembling it taste good.
> don't order alcohol-free beer, which is healthier, because I hate its taste
Bavaria brand non-alcoholic beer, pomegranate flavor. If you can find it, it's delicious. The regular flavor tastes more like beer but also tastes great.
Great points and whereas many may begin drinking to aid in some way with social interactions there are many that drink for what I think is closer to the second part/activity of the quote, to hide, forget, ignore, avoid, etc., and often increase their consumption while isolating themselves. For the alcoholic, it's more about what Tolstoy was saying than about social lubrication
Well, no. Alcoholism can start regardless of the reason you start drinking. There are plenty of "social lubricant" drinkers who became alcoholics because of the pernicious GABA regulation cycle.
You might start drinking to have a better social life, but eventually you drink to cure the hangover, to cure the shakes, to cure the anxiety that alcohol withdrawal gives you. Then it's just a cyclical pattern of poisoning yourself to cure the effects of the last poisoning.
When your addiction becomes physical, it doesn't matter why you started drinking in the first place. Now the only reason you drink is to function.
I was as social as one could be while drunk and am as solitary as a hermit now that I'm sober. I miss the social life at times, but really, as Tolstoy remarks, it was just an escape from my true nature which I hadn't yet figured out. And what a mess that was.
So yes, its a social thing, but is it good? It's something. There are other ways.
This comment really resonates with me. As someone who doesn't drink anymore, I've found how much of a hermit I am and how much I'm okay with that and how it's my true self. I really have few friends, and the ones I do I actually do activities with. My wife is the same way.
When text messaging started to take off in the 90s, adults didn't get it. Typing on a keypad sucks, and the phone already has a great communication app. It's called the phone, and if you call someone you can hear each other talk.
What they didn't understand is that "I think you're cute. Wanna go on a date?" is much easier in text. That's why kids always passed notes in class.
These things lubricate high friction social interactions... the kinds of things that people agonize over, regret, etc. You're right, this is alcohol's primary purpose. Most people stay here.
I mean first off, only a vocal minority of adults didn't get it; this is usually the case with advancements like this.
The same generation you're talking about was also the generation that would write letters and keep diaries, in addition to phone calls. The generations before that didn't have phones would write letters or telegrams. TL;DR, text based communication wasn't a novel concept, but what changed was that it was short and instantaneous.
But is unconscious socialization the same as conscious socialization? IMO all socialization is not equal. If you're "engaging" with people who are intoxicated themselves, while you are intoxicated, does that truly yield the same benefits as a genuine, no-barrier interaction? In my experience, no.
> It's a drug that makes it easier to socialize, and socializing is very, very good for people.
Except (some) people take in more alcohol than is necessary to accomplish that result. He's talking about stupefying, and refers to more than just alcohol:
> What is the explanation of the fact that people use things that stupefy them: vodka, wine, beer, hashish, opium, tobacco, and other things less common: ether, morphia, fly-agaric, etc.?
Does taking hashish and opium allow for easier socializing?
Further:
> The cause of the world-wide consumption of hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco, lies not in the taste, nor in any pleasure, recreation, or mirth they afford, but simply in man’s need to hide from himself the demands of conscience.
I think the response to this from Tolstoy's perspective is that by imbibing a drug which makes socializing easier, you're doing (1) or (2). E.g. your inner voice is telling you that you should be social, you're failing at it, so you drink to fulfill the demand of that voice, which is (1). Or maybe you drink to escape trauma which sounds a lot like (2).
The point is really that all existence is filtered through the lens of the mind. This is related to the idea of solipsism, to which I think Tolstoy subscribed to some degree. I haven't studied any of that stuff since college though, maybe a philosophy PhD is lurking around HN...
I think that is intended by Tolstoy. He gives the following extreme example
> A drunken man is ashamed of none of these things, and therefore if a man wishes to do something his conscience condemns he stupefies himself.
Stupefies is a negative term because he is against alcohol but socialising is easier because of exact same reason. It removes the filter and we could do things which we are "ashamed" of, even if there is nothing to be ashamed of. e.g. I am ashamed of talking to stranger or discussing details of my life when sober.
Maybe as a corollary. But the answer is really simple when you start out. It makes you feel good. Some of these answers feel like people are allergic to straightforward answers.
I think of it more as ‘quieting’ the mind - the internal monologue - this does help with socialising, and numbing bad feelings, but it’s still useful when neither of those things are relevant I.e. winding down after a full-on day.
I socialise (and have bad thoughts) in the mornings too, but I dont want a drink then
> "All human life, we may say, consists solely of these two activities: (1) bringing one’s activities into harmony with conscience, or (2) hiding from oneself the indications of conscience in order to be able to continue to live as before."
I mean, you know what people also use to "hide from oneself the indications of conscience"? Reading long novels, like the ones Tolstoy wrote.
Alcohol doesn't exist for socializing, though it does make socializing easier. Correlation does not equal causation.
No, alcohol exists for a very simple reason: Clean and sanitary beverage.
Lest we forget, alcohol is alcohol. It is by its very nature sanitary and safe to drink, which is why humanity has long consumed it. Safe and clean drinking water in abundance is a fairly modern phenomenon, and it's still only available in a small part of the world at large.
Given that, alcohol satisfies both aforementioned activities.
Producing and consuming alcohol is harmonious with conscience, that is the desire to "do right" both for yourself and your peers, because beverages that are safe to drink is critically important to yourself and everyone.
It is also denying the brutal reality of the world we live in, that is to say we hide from our desire to "do right" because producing and consuming alcohol is easier than ensuring clean and safe drinking water while achieving the same practical goal.
Alcohol obviously has its problems, but they are far better than ones incurred from drinking foul water.
> No, alcohol exists for a very simple reason: Clean and sanitary beverage.
That’s why distillation was developed: to separate alcohol from water via evaporation and condensation and get a super-clean and super-sanitary beverage - with as little water as possible.
To say that alcohol distills down to being able to socialize doesn’t fit. Socializing is not hard. Are you at a party? Approach people you don’t know the way you want to be approached. Wear a sincere smile, give some distance, give your name, ask them who they know at the party, respond with who you know. Most likely you will know the same people so chat about that. Say where you live then ask them where they live. Listen to their response. Ask them what they like about where they live. Ask what you should see if you visit their neighborhood. Ask what they think of the music. Listen to their response. Thank them for sharing their opinion. Be self deprecating. Let them talk and you add the odd comment. Alcohol is not required for that. All that’s required is to be sincerely interested in people.
Responses like this are a great indicator of never having had troubles socializing. Some hints of what might go wrong for people more pathetic than you could ever imagine existing:
* Not having the chance to go to a party. (i.e. never being invited, or being in government-mandated house arrest for years to accomodate for other people who might die of a certain disease. Or both.)
* Having the chance to go to a party, but still refusing because of the dread going to a party induces. (Possibly related to trauma caused by previously going to a party, see below. (Or any trauma caused by other humans, really.))
* Actually going to a party, but not having the communication skills to naturally start a conversation with some random person.
* Starting a conversation nevertheless, only to come to the same conclusion (also traumatizing yourself in the process after you get ignored).
* As an extension: trying to join a conversation, but being ignored by all participants for being uninteresting, annoying, weird, or simply ugly. (Or all of the former.)
* Sitting/standing alone for most of the party because of the aforementioned problems, then after a few occasions deciding that surely this wasn't worth the time and never going to a party again.
Alcohol may or may not help with these problems. (It doesn't for me, so in the end I just gave up.)
> To say that alcohol distills down to being able to socialize doesn’t fit. Socializing is not hard. Are you at a party? Approach people you don’t know the way you want to be approached. Wear a sincere smile, give some distance, give your name, ask them who they know at the party, respond with who you know.
YMMV. If you have real social anxiety, the above is just about impossible. People who haven't experienced it just don't know. It's extremely difficult to understand if you haven't been there. Normal shyness is a different animal. It's sort of like depression. Although people may think you should just snap out of it, you can't.
And alcohol definitely can help. Believe me, I know. My life was pretty much dominated by social anxiety in my college years and 20's. Gradually it's gotten much better. I never drank a lot, but in those social situations where my self-consciousness made it pretty much impossible to do as you suggest, having some alcohol really made a positive difference. (This was long ago, I'm 67 now.)
I don't recommend using it that way if you also have any other characteristics that could turn you into an alcoholic, because it's possible you'll stop using it and it will start using you. It's dangerous. It can destroy your life. But for me, in specific situations when I needed some help in order to be less self-conscious and more out there, it did help. (Therapy pretty much didn't, for me, but in recent years, meditation does.)
I think it's better to say a social lubricant for getting sex. Walking up and chatting is not the same as loosening people up for potential hook ups (unless you're really gorgeous to begin with)
I happen to work for a company that has banned alcohol for religious reasons. I would not say the company is particularly social, on the contrary. However, as an alcoholic[0] maybe I am blinded or excluded from the social nirvana of my non-alcoholic colleagues.
edit: [0] I learned that irony not really works on a forum. I occasionally drink, but I am get up early enough to bring my kids to school.
Good point - why is that? How do they acheive it and what are the tradeoffs? An American example that comes to mind is the Mormons. Are they playing a lot of Mafia in the middle east? Hookah bars? Mosques?
Drinking slows down my brain and reduces the number of threads running in parallel. Sometimes very useful to enable normal-passing interaction in social environments. Or just to be able to focus. Lots of people with ADHD drink to achieve a more single threaded experience.
Edit to add: I don't meant to encourage drinking as a tool for managing ADHD. It works but it's a blunt and dangerous tool. If you're at that point, you'll absolutely love the results you get from the healthier strategies: Understanding yourself; developing a suite of tools that don't involve a slippery slope; and curating your social and physical environment carefully.
This is a very common theme in neuro-divergent communities. Used occasionally it can be great, but if you become dependent on it, it is trouble.
In that sense it reminds me of Alan Watts writings on LSD. Get the message and then go away and work on it, don't get fixated on getting the message. As a transient thing some drugs are neat, but to become dependent on them is a dangerous thing.
Interesting analogy. I feel like I talk and think faster when I'm drunk but am also more focused and can hold less in my mind. I'm wondering if it's because I'm switching into single threaded mode instead of multi-threaded mode, and that single thread is actually faster, but more limited.
Interesting. Ever tried coding when drunk? So far, we’ve got programming languages named after caffeinating drinks, but none named after alcoholic ones.
>Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
Untreated or late diagnosed ADHD people are ridiculously overrepresented in drug & alcohol recovery programs. It's honestly chilling and it prevents me from taking this in the probably more lighthearted spirit that was intended.
It wasn't meant to be lighthearted at all. It was just meant to be honest. I've been to the depths of the things, and I wish I knew how to help others not go there.
Adhd is a particular personality configuration, mostly being high in Big Five trait Openness and low in Conscientiousness. High openness is correlated with impulsivity
This rings true. I went to a reasonably well known engineering school, so...some selection for ADHD folks. As someone diagnosed with ADHD young, it was frightening to see how many of my fellows were 1) clearly struggling with ADHD, and 2) were destructively self-medicating with alcohol (or worse). And it hasn't stopped. Decades later there's still those folks who are hammered at every social function and a good percentage of them I think "yeah...self medicating the noise in their head". I certainly understand the appeal (I'm no tea-totaller), but long-term, booze is a work-around, not a solution.
Tolstoy was an aristocrat and most people commenting here are functionally in the same position; that is, largely able to choose which substances they consume - or choose not to consume them at all.
This is not the case for the vast majority of alcohol use throughout history. Historically, for lower class professions like farmers or factory workers, drinking was just something you did. It was something your father did, and his father did, etc. It was an inherited cultural trait, not a decision that an individual ruminated over.
Adding to that were exploitative practices against these workers by the providers of alcohol, in a way not dissimilar to the recent opioid crisis.
Peasants in Russia (and in Poland-Lithuania before it got conquered) were effectively slaves. They had to do free work, couldn't leave without permission of the landlord. Landlords were also acting as judges.
Landlords had monopoly on producing and selling alcohol, and they extracted as much additional income from that as they could. Which meant each of them had an inn which he rented out to someone. The inn was buying landlord's alcohol and encouraging or forcing peasants to buy it.
It was a common trick to have "all you can drink" passes for farmers. There were even attempts to force peasants to buy if they didn't wanted to - by introducing quotas and they had to pay for the whole amount even if they drank less.
When it comes to Slavic countries before 20th century - think American South before civil war, just both slaves and slave owners are white.
What you're describing is serfdom, and it was in some aspects similar to slavery, but still distinct. Serfs could not be sold to another landlord, they had obligations towards the landlord, but were not a simple commodity.
Serfdom was also widely present in Europe, not unique to Slavic countries at all.
Wow, this is a hugely reductionist and patronizing take. You really think there weren’t lower class people choosing not to drink, or to drink less?
I’m hoping you might simply be biased by the fact that most of what we know about history, and even in more recent times most of what gets mindshare, comes from the upper class.
For one, many religious movements across the world preached against alcohol use - and while you can argue in some cases the doctrine was set by the upper classes, that doesn’t hold as much water when looking at the many popular Protestant movements which were pretty grassroots. Temperance in the US was hugely driven by middle and working class women, not just elites. And alcohol use was highly controlled by such elitist movements as Leninist Russia.
The temperance movement was limited to a fairly small percentage of Christians and only began in the 19th century.
> Throughout the first 1,800 years of Church history, Christians generally consumed alcoholic beverages as a common part of everyday life and used "the fruit of the vine" in their central rite—the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. They held that both the Bible and Christian tradition taught that alcohol is a gift from God that makes life more joyous, but that over-indulgence leading to drunkenness is sinful.
Samuel Johnson had a more pithy quote on the same subject.
"I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. "There were several gentlemen there," said she, "and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking." She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals—"I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves." "I wonder, Madam," replied the Doctor, "that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
He was more enthusiastic about drugs for the poor:
'What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."'
If you're a habitual drinker - try not drinking for a month to see if the habit just stops. I stopped to do an experiment on my sleep and biomarkers and haven't found the urge to continue (still drink socially but I used to have a whiskey after dinner pretty reliably). For me it was pretty clearly just to destress and have something to sip on in front of TV. I switched to a non-caffeinated tea+honey+lemon which might event help with sleep rather than disturb it.
Kinda basic psychology but it's helpful to just put the bottles away in an a cabinet - if I don't see them I don't even think, "oh - I could go for a drink". The difference is expending the willpower to not drink vs not to even think to drink.
I find it really interesting that until ten minutes ago, historically speaking, there was an implicit assumption that there exists a moral dimension to drug and alcohol consumption. I mean, referring to such substances as "stupifiers" really drives the point home - Tolstoy says these are things you consume when you wish to act in a way you know is morally questionable, or after the act to dull your conscience.
The overwhelming shift in the social sciences from the political to the personal, and the related shift from the moral to the psychological over the course of the twentieth century, has led us to the point where we are no longer able to even conjure up language necessary to condemn excessive drug and alcohol consumption in terms of moral failure without sounding like a religious lunatic.
It makes one wonder what Tolstoy would have to say about harm reduction.
Everyone warns you about alcohol, but I have only had positive experiences, and in fact, wish I started drinking sooner in life. When I was going through a period of general anxiety and loneliness, I used to drink alone every weekend. It was a lot of fun and led to some of my best decisions, such as applying for a new job. Nowadays, I'm in a more stable place and only drink socially.
I feel like my mind is by default "extra sober", and drinking helps bring it to a normal level of sobriety.
There is so many behaviors and substances that somewhat increase cancer that we need some kind of scale to define what actually matters.
Personally a theoretical increase of 0.001% is kinda moot, even 1 or 2% would be something I'd see as a small risk given the sheer enjoyment I'd get out of alcohol (for instance, in comparison, moving to a greener city would probably decrease my overall cancer risk by much more)
I find the description of alcohol as something that "stupefies" rather reductive. People are often louder, more expressive and more interesting when they've had a drink. The opposite of catatonic. Now it's true that overdosing on alcohol is poisonous but most people don't drink to the point of stupification regularly.
I am interested in why Tolstoy feels the need to be so reductive. Sounds to me like he might also be "hiding from himself what he doesn't wish to see". Which is a human activity so I don't begrudge him his own chosen blind spots, I just think it's interesting and I'm wondering if he is being fully honest with himself about why he hates alcohol so much.
Tolstoy argues that it is the conscience in particular that is stupefied; he may also have been influenced by behavior he observed. I have anecdotal experience of Russians drinking themselves beyond garrulity into stupor, although I'm certain it can happen in any culture where alcohol is available.
> Sounds to me like he might also be "hiding from himself what he doesn't wish to see".
He tells exactly this. You and him are looking from different sets of axioms, so you come to a different language, but it is just outside appearance.
Tolstoy uses axioms like Freud's: human is an animal inside and human needs to work hard to subside his/her animal nature and to become a Human. So human is inherently bad, but it may become good if tried hard enough.
From other hand you start from different premises (I allow myself a little guessing here, sorry): human is inherently good, but may become bad due to bad experiences. So if one feels the need to become good, they need to dig inside themselves, find out what happens, accept it, and learn how to live with it. Humanistic psychology like that.
But the funny thing, that it doesn't matter much where you begin to think what it means to be a human, the most complicating thing is a communication between people using different sets of axioms about human nature.
Neither set of axioms requires one to be extremely reductive about something like alcohol. Does Tolstoy admit to being reductive (“he tells exactly this”)?
I think in this case it isn’t the axioms but the “style” of philosophical discourse that requires the reader to take the message with a big grain of salt. Like when a YouTuber says, “In the next ten minutes, I’m going to lay out the exact formula for how to write a perfect screenplay,” it’s not literally true. Tolstoy’s musings are a little deeper than your average YouTuber, on par with a good one, similarly overblown and oversimplified, and more moralizing.
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"All human life, we may say, consists solely of these two activities: (1) bringing one’s activities into harmony with conscience, or (2) hiding from oneself the indications of conscience in order to be able to continue to live as before."
Note that he has defined all of life as two points about "one" and "oneself". This is why I and I assume many others roll their eyes.
Because Tolstoy, and most essays about alcohol, don't even mention what I think is the point of alcohol. It's a drug that makes it easier to socialize, and socializing is very, very good for people. So good that I will risk it, even though alcohol is bad in many ways: bad for physical and mental health, risky for abuse, etc.
If you are anti alcohol, that is reasonable, but it seems no one will ever admit what it's really for.
This is important, because alcohol is unhealthy and if you want to discourage it, give people other low effort ways to connect.
Indeed, for the social aspect, everyone is already fully aware it's not needed, and that they can have fun socialization without it, because of their childhoods.
I think the biggest reason alcohol is used is, to put it bluntly, how painful life is.
As the child grows into an adult, and realizes the real nature of life and the world, baseline pain increases. And it's hard to be social when you're worried about things or down about things.
But alcohol is a cheap, readily available blunt instrument against this pain. No matter how bad you feel, if you down a litre of booze, that pain will definitely, and quickly, stop.
Sure... you can also learn everything a Stanford class teaches online. You can find alternatives for the networking aspects, etc. Still... universities tend to be how people do this. You can bodybuild without a gym. Indomitable willpower & a DIY ethic are admirable, but "hacks" are still the way 90% of people get the job done.
I think you are downplaying how hard it is to be social, in various contexts. Alcohol can be used to dull pain. This definitely does occur frequently, especially once substance abuse is the pattern.
This does not negate the earlier comment about lubricating social interactions. That's generally the starting point for alcohol use. Flirting in high school. Being socially adventurous in college. Getting intimate with coworkers.
Substance mediated mind alteration is not new. It's not just escapism or "opium for the masses." There are many real reasons people use mind altering substances. Escapism & "opium for the masses," is, however, usually the mode when/once we're talking about addiction.
If you look at why alcoholics drink, and why high schoolers drink.... the reasons are just different.
Still enjoy a beer a bit too much. When I'm super happy and then have a beer it just adds to it.
It also can help me relax if I'm working to much. One can argue it's not needed, but at times nice.
Huh. I don't think I would have seen OP's point about people being strangely dismissive to the idea of alcohol as a social lubricant until you provided an example.
Saying alcohol is not needed for socializing is like saying everybody is fully aware that alcoholis not needed to numb bad feelings because they were happy when they were children.
Never happened to me. I'm not a drinker but I have of course consumed alcohol. Life is as painful as usual with or without alcohol in my body. If any, life is more miserably with alcohol because I look more pathetic than usual (classic drunk face), my voice is not clear, my mouth smells like shit, and I walk funny (if I can walk at all).
Not sure about other drugs, though (never tried).
For example, as a 90 kg man, for me drinking a single 33cl bottle of beer has pretty much the same effect as drinking water, i.e., I don't feel anything at all (note that I don't drive, in that context it would probably still be relevant). So when I have a single beer with dinner, there is zero intention of socializing, stupefying myself or whatever. I just like the taste (and don't order alcohol-free beer, which is healthier, because I hate its taste).
Similarly, having a red wine with a strong sheep milk cheese is an amazing experience, just because the tastes combine so well and enhance each other.
If there were alcohol-free versions of the beverages that tasted the same, I'd probably use them most of the time (except in some social contexts). There is no such thing, though.
For me, there's nothing 'principal' about it btw, it just works, for now. The upside is of course no negative effects (ie hangover) and much less threshold to open one, even on the rare occasion we have a warm meal during lunch time (I work from home).
* usually means < 0.5%
I make quite a lot of cocktails and have some quite decent alcohol free ones in my repertoire, but compared to the alcoholic ones there are a very poor imitation.
> don't order alcohol-free beer, which is healthier, because I hate its taste
What kind of beer though? 33cl is nothing but we still have to compare apples to apples.
Mystery of Beer vs something like Budweiser is a no-no.
These are desirable on their own, but they are also very useful specifically for socializing.
Well, no. Alcoholism can start regardless of the reason you start drinking. There are plenty of "social lubricant" drinkers who became alcoholics because of the pernicious GABA regulation cycle.
You might start drinking to have a better social life, but eventually you drink to cure the hangover, to cure the shakes, to cure the anxiety that alcohol withdrawal gives you. Then it's just a cyclical pattern of poisoning yourself to cure the effects of the last poisoning.
When your addiction becomes physical, it doesn't matter why you started drinking in the first place. Now the only reason you drink is to function.
So yes, its a social thing, but is it good? It's something. There are other ways.
Being drunk and consuming alcohol is not the same thing. I like to drink a couple of beers but not more than that.
What they didn't understand is that "I think you're cute. Wanna go on a date?" is much easier in text. That's why kids always passed notes in class.
These things lubricate high friction social interactions... the kinds of things that people agonize over, regret, etc. You're right, this is alcohol's primary purpose. Most people stay here.
The same generation you're talking about was also the generation that would write letters and keep diaries, in addition to phone calls. The generations before that didn't have phones would write letters or telegrams. TL;DR, text based communication wasn't a novel concept, but what changed was that it was short and instantaneous.
Isn't this justification you bring your activities into harmony with conscience?
But is unconscious socialization the same as conscious socialization? IMO all socialization is not equal. If you're "engaging" with people who are intoxicated themselves, while you are intoxicated, does that truly yield the same benefits as a genuine, no-barrier interaction? In my experience, no.
No one is “unconscious” after one or two glasses of wine lol
Except (some) people take in more alcohol than is necessary to accomplish that result. He's talking about stupefying, and refers to more than just alcohol:
> What is the explanation of the fact that people use things that stupefy them: vodka, wine, beer, hashish, opium, tobacco, and other things less common: ether, morphia, fly-agaric, etc.?
Does taking hashish and opium allow for easier socializing?
Further:
> The cause of the world-wide consumption of hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco, lies not in the taste, nor in any pleasure, recreation, or mirth they afford, but simply in man’s need to hide from himself the demands of conscience.
The point is really that all existence is filtered through the lens of the mind. This is related to the idea of solipsism, to which I think Tolstoy subscribed to some degree. I haven't studied any of that stuff since college though, maybe a philosophy PhD is lurking around HN...
> A drunken man is ashamed of none of these things, and therefore if a man wishes to do something his conscience condemns he stupefies himself.
Stupefies is a negative term because he is against alcohol but socialising is easier because of exact same reason. It removes the filter and we could do things which we are "ashamed" of, even if there is nothing to be ashamed of. e.g. I am ashamed of talking to stranger or discussing details of my life when sober.
I mean, you know what people also use to "hide from oneself the indications of conscience"? Reading long novels, like the ones Tolstoy wrote.
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No, alcohol exists for a very simple reason: Clean and sanitary beverage.
Lest we forget, alcohol is alcohol. It is by its very nature sanitary and safe to drink, which is why humanity has long consumed it. Safe and clean drinking water in abundance is a fairly modern phenomenon, and it's still only available in a small part of the world at large.
Given that, alcohol satisfies both aforementioned activities.
Producing and consuming alcohol is harmonious with conscience, that is the desire to "do right" both for yourself and your peers, because beverages that are safe to drink is critically important to yourself and everyone.
It is also denying the brutal reality of the world we live in, that is to say we hide from our desire to "do right" because producing and consuming alcohol is easier than ensuring clean and safe drinking water while achieving the same practical goal.
Alcohol obviously has its problems, but they are far better than ones incurred from drinking foul water.
That’s why distillation was developed: to separate alcohol from water via evaporation and condensation and get a super-clean and super-sanitary beverage - with as little water as possible.
* Not having the chance to go to a party. (i.e. never being invited, or being in government-mandated house arrest for years to accomodate for other people who might die of a certain disease. Or both.)
* Having the chance to go to a party, but still refusing because of the dread going to a party induces. (Possibly related to trauma caused by previously going to a party, see below. (Or any trauma caused by other humans, really.))
* Actually going to a party, but not having the communication skills to naturally start a conversation with some random person.
* Starting a conversation nevertheless, only to come to the same conclusion (also traumatizing yourself in the process after you get ignored).
* As an extension: trying to join a conversation, but being ignored by all participants for being uninteresting, annoying, weird, or simply ugly. (Or all of the former.)
* Sitting/standing alone for most of the party because of the aforementioned problems, then after a few occasions deciding that surely this wasn't worth the time and never going to a party again.
Alcohol may or may not help with these problems. (It doesn't for me, so in the end I just gave up.)
YMMV. If you have real social anxiety, the above is just about impossible. People who haven't experienced it just don't know. It's extremely difficult to understand if you haven't been there. Normal shyness is a different animal. It's sort of like depression. Although people may think you should just snap out of it, you can't.
And alcohol definitely can help. Believe me, I know. My life was pretty much dominated by social anxiety in my college years and 20's. Gradually it's gotten much better. I never drank a lot, but in those social situations where my self-consciousness made it pretty much impossible to do as you suggest, having some alcohol really made a positive difference. (This was long ago, I'm 67 now.)
I don't recommend using it that way if you also have any other characteristics that could turn you into an alcoholic, because it's possible you'll stop using it and it will start using you. It's dangerous. It can destroy your life. But for me, in specific situations when I needed some help in order to be less self-conscious and more out there, it did help. (Therapy pretty much didn't, for me, but in recent years, meditation does.)
lol.
>Are you at a party? Approach people you don’t know
LOL.
My man, if only you had a shred of an idea of how things really are for many people.
edit: [0] I learned that irony not really works on a forum. I occasionally drink, but I am get up early enough to bring my kids to school.
I would know.
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Edit to add: I don't meant to encourage drinking as a tool for managing ADHD. It works but it's a blunt and dangerous tool. If you're at that point, you'll absolutely love the results you get from the healthier strategies: Understanding yourself; developing a suite of tools that don't involve a slippery slope; and curating your social and physical environment carefully.
In that sense it reminds me of Alan Watts writings on LSD. Get the message and then go away and work on it, don't get fixated on getting the message. As a transient thing some drugs are neat, but to become dependent on them is a dangerous thing.
It's possible that's what we're after when we drink: stop the flow of ideas. That's one meaning of "stupefy".
>Alcohol has played a central role in the creative lives of some of the most famous authors of the last few centuries. Lewis Hyde notes in his essay Alcohol and Poetry that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics, namely William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/booze-as-muse-write...
No, drinking drowns your creativity.
Oh wait, that isn't fun at all.
ADHD is real and untreated it can (and often does) destroy lives.
(Also: People with untreated ADHD have 3x the gen-pop rate of car accidents!)
Can you expand on this. Do you think think engineering schools select for ADHD? Just curious, haven't heard this before.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/806499/threading-vs-para...
This is not the case for the vast majority of alcohol use throughout history. Historically, for lower class professions like farmers or factory workers, drinking was just something you did. It was something your father did, and his father did, etc. It was an inherited cultural trait, not a decision that an individual ruminated over.
Adding to that were exploitative practices against these workers by the providers of alcohol, in a way not dissimilar to the recent opioid crisis.
Landlords had monopoly on producing and selling alcohol, and they extracted as much additional income from that as they could. Which meant each of them had an inn which he rented out to someone. The inn was buying landlord's alcohol and encouraging or forcing peasants to buy it.
It was a common trick to have "all you can drink" passes for farmers. There were even attempts to force peasants to buy if they didn't wanted to - by introducing quotas and they had to pay for the whole amount even if they drank less.
When it comes to Slavic countries before 20th century - think American South before civil war, just both slaves and slave owners are white.
Serfdom was also widely present in Europe, not unique to Slavic countries at all.
I’m hoping you might simply be biased by the fact that most of what we know about history, and even in more recent times most of what gets mindshare, comes from the upper class.
For one, many religious movements across the world preached against alcohol use - and while you can argue in some cases the doctrine was set by the upper classes, that doesn’t hold as much water when looking at the many popular Protestant movements which were pretty grassroots. Temperance in the US was hugely driven by middle and working class women, not just elites. And alcohol use was highly controlled by such elitist movements as Leninist Russia.
> Throughout the first 1,800 years of Church history, Christians generally consumed alcoholic beverages as a common part of everyday life and used "the fruit of the vine" in their central rite—the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. They held that both the Bible and Christian tradition taught that alcohol is a gift from God that makes life more joyous, but that over-indulgence leading to drunkenness is sinful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_alcohol
"I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. "There were several gentlemen there," said she, "and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking." She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals—"I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves." "I wonder, Madam," replied the Doctor, "that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson
'What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."'
Kinda basic psychology but it's helpful to just put the bottles away in an a cabinet - if I don't see them I don't even think, "oh - I could go for a drink". The difference is expending the willpower to not drink vs not to even think to drink.
The overwhelming shift in the social sciences from the political to the personal, and the related shift from the moral to the psychological over the course of the twentieth century, has led us to the point where we are no longer able to even conjure up language necessary to condemn excessive drug and alcohol consumption in terms of moral failure without sounding like a religious lunatic.
It makes one wonder what Tolstoy would have to say about harm reduction.
I feel like my mind is by default "extra sober", and drinking helps bring it to a normal level of sobriety.
But the sun, like alcohol, isn't so bad in moderation
Personally a theoretical increase of 0.001% is kinda moot, even 1 or 2% would be something I'd see as a small risk given the sheer enjoyment I'd get out of alcohol (for instance, in comparison, moving to a greener city would probably decrease my overall cancer risk by much more)
I am interested in why Tolstoy feels the need to be so reductive. Sounds to me like he might also be "hiding from himself what he doesn't wish to see". Which is a human activity so I don't begrudge him his own chosen blind spots, I just think it's interesting and I'm wondering if he is being fully honest with himself about why he hates alcohol so much.
He tells exactly this. You and him are looking from different sets of axioms, so you come to a different language, but it is just outside appearance.
Tolstoy uses axioms like Freud's: human is an animal inside and human needs to work hard to subside his/her animal nature and to become a Human. So human is inherently bad, but it may become good if tried hard enough.
From other hand you start from different premises (I allow myself a little guessing here, sorry): human is inherently good, but may become bad due to bad experiences. So if one feels the need to become good, they need to dig inside themselves, find out what happens, accept it, and learn how to live with it. Humanistic psychology like that.
But the funny thing, that it doesn't matter much where you begin to think what it means to be a human, the most complicating thing is a communication between people using different sets of axioms about human nature.
I think in this case it isn’t the axioms but the “style” of philosophical discourse that requires the reader to take the message with a big grain of salt. Like when a YouTuber says, “In the next ten minutes, I’m going to lay out the exact formula for how to write a perfect screenplay,” it’s not literally true. Tolstoy’s musings are a little deeper than your average YouTuber, on par with a good one, similarly overblown and oversimplified, and more moralizing.