I may not have learned much about serenity in alcohol and drug recovery but I did learn the quickest route to every emergency room in town. One woman I carried into the ER in my arms had taken a bottle of miscellaneous drugs.
The doctor told me that if I had gotten there half an hour later, she would have died. But what would have killed her was nt any of the illegal drugs. It was the Tylenol.
I knew a guy personally who killed himself with an aspirin overdose.
Back to basics:
If any dug that makes you feel good could kill you that easily, it would be strictly on prescription. But aspirin isn’t and Tylenol isn’t.
Why not?
Since I did grad work in Public Choice, it never occurred to me to ask anybody this. Drugs that make you fell good are a payoff. Medicine, as an institution, must control all payoffs.
Once again, this will be looked upon by most people as some sort of major scandal. If you understand public choice it is simply logic. Insitutions like the medical profession must evolve, like any other living being.
A Public Choice professor would not understand this because Public Choice has evolved. It now looks like any other filed of economics, with endless equation and its nose in “the literature.” I left it when it was an extension of common sense.
Every institution becomes wordist, that is, it becomes based more and more, not on reality, but on its own words. As an institution evolves and becomes stronger, its own survival takes the place of its original purpose. To bitch about that makes as much sense as groaning about the fact that evolution forces us to use the outhouse. It is an embarrassing fact, but it is also nature in action.
Medicine as an institution evolves to take over the payoff. The church evolved to make men accept all the pain so that the chruch got all the payoffs. The only thing tha stopped the church’s total control of all payoffs was competing institutions like kingship. In fact, for allt he talk about “the first republic” in Iceland or San Marino, kingship is everybit as alien an institution, a Middle Eastern institution, as is the church itself.
One of the first things an evolving instituion must get rid of is seious history.
I remember reading about a famous saint inthe Middle Ages who wiped outhis whole family by threatening them with Hell unles they gave up the world and became sterile in the church’s service. He particularly talked about the STINK of Hell. He was a saint because his family disappeared and everything they had went to the church.
I can say this with such brutal frankness because, to me, this is nothing extraordinary. ALL institutions begin to operate this way. ALL institutions end up operating entirely this way. It is only a few mortal men who return institutions temporarily to morality. The the institutions goes back to what its evolution makes it do.
This is, of course, the exact opposite of the story we hear. The institution is perfect, it is only mortal men who mess it up.
#1 by Pain on 10/12/2006 - 12:22 am
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“He was a saint because his family disappeared and everything they had went to the church.”
I have said before that I am not Roman Catholic, but that is silly nonsense. This is embarrassing.
#2 by Alan B. on 10/12/2006 - 1:10 am
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The church is a business, they sell a commodity called faith and redemption, the followers donate to the church, many give thousands each year, most likly in the belief that more zeros equal heavenly brownie points, the church would hardly frown upon that. When faced with competition even the church will compromise a few of its tenents for the almighty buck, thats business. The medical industry is no different. They can sell asprin over the counter because the people demand it, hey if they fail to read the directions it not their fault, either way some one will sell it to them. Now goverment could intervien but why, they profit from the payouts and the sales taxes, its a business, what better racket, the disease and the cure all wraped up as one. So what does all this mean.
Big business demands cheap labor, the professor priesthood demands multicultrialism(mongrelism) and the welfare state demands new parisites who vote, they all win at this game and we lose. Lets keep putting the word out to what exactly their up to, these three outfits face little competition.
#3 by Trager Smith on 10/12/2006 - 12:02 pm
Oh, sure, everything can turn into verbiage (NOT fine white powder, as you used to say). I am not sure how it could be otherwise. Once primates developed the ability to form new concepts, they were bound to come up with ones that corresponded to nothing in the external world. The *Racial* difference is that one small group in the remote northwest corner of the vast Eurasian landmass had a critical number of folks who insisted on checking ideas against the facts. It only took a critical mass of such determined objectivists to change the world, but this does not mean that there were very many of them. It is quite apparent to me every day that such thinkers are very few. Just vastly more numerous in the White race.
#4 by Alan B. on 10/13/2006 - 12:36 am
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Did anybody else witness PC (Pretty Creepy) tolerance in action at Columbia University, it was on the news. The gracious hosts at Columbia invited two members of the Minutement to speak to the gathered brain farts, sorry, students. Once they approached the mike a group of well trained Group think victims stormed the stage and the lecture was called off. Once on stage the brain washed brain farts chanted a few words, raceism etc, usually tripe that qualifies one for a diploma from the cultral gulag.