So, people who are well informed about drugs, and have bothered to look over the medical evidence, are perfectly aware that X (MDMH) shouldn’t be a schedule 1 drug.  This is of course no surprise, since our drug scheduling system looks as if it was chosen by throwing darts.

Why is it illegal though?  The brief history is that MDMA was created by a guy called Anton Koellisch, working for the pharmaceutical Merck in 1912.  Apparently they were trying to develop a substance to stop abnormal  bleeding.  MDMA was just an intermediary compound on the route to methylhydrastinine, and Merck wasn’t interested in its properties.

Now, the next part is fascinating.  Apparently recreational drug users first determined the drug was worth taking, around 1970.  This led to a guy called Alexander Shulgin (who would have been around 50 at the time, working (I believe) as a p0st doc at UCSF to play around with it.  Apparently he called it his “low-cal martini”.   He in turn metioned it to a psychotherapist named Leo Zeff.   MDMA is very useful for  enhancing communications, reducing psychological defenses, and increasing the capacity for therapeutic introspection.

In the early 80′s MDMA started to catch on.  All the kids who grew up playing pac-man started hanging around in dark-rooms, listening to repetitive electronic music, and popping pills.  One of those pills was MDMA, and the Reagan-Bush “Say no to drugs”, “Say no to condom  education in schools”, “say no to Foreign aid unless you teach that abstinence is the only way to prevent aids, and forbid teaching about safe-sex” administration decided to say no to young adults having a good time and feeling more empathic to each other.

MDMA is an empathogen.  I don’t know if this is the accepted medical phrasing for what MDMA does, but take it from me, MDMA is an empathogen.  It makes you care more about other people.  This can be negative.  For example, if I have a single sixteen year daughter, I would discourage her from takine X at  a party full of strangers.  I would however encourage her as an adult to take with her partner.  It makes relationships richer and stronger, I promise you.

I have an informal ranking, which I call a drugs “Scary Monster” level.  It’s how much fear a drug evokes in a particular audience or demographic.  X is one of the more maligned drugs out there.  I think the average, over 40 American, and possibly european, sees X as worse than Cocaine, for example, which certainly doesn’t fit its ranking in rational harm rating.  My point here is, beyond being illegal (which it course should not be), it is villified disproportionately to the harm it causes.

For example, when Professor David Nutt, head of Britain’s drug advisory board recommended that ecstasy be downgraded to a class B drug, he tried to explain the relative risk inherent in taking the drug as being equivalent to the risk you take in riding a horse.  The point was to get people to understand that drug harm can be equal to harms in other parts of life.  This is an importnat thing to discuss, since the debate on drugs is typically so emotional and irrational, particularly on the side of the prohibitionists.   He wrote an article titled “Equasy: an overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms”.  Equasy being “Equine Addiciton Syndrome”, which has caused ten deaths, and causes more than 100 road traffic accidents a year.  He goes to explain that many other activities in life (like motorcycling) are much more dangerous than man illicit drugs.

The prohibitionists were up in arms, calling for his resignation.  They can’t attack his science or his reasoning, both of which are flawless.  They instead must make emotional attacks, claiming he is insensitive to the families of victims of drug abuse.  Sigh.  So victims of drug abuse suffer more than victims of horse riding?  Why?  The fundies react very badly to rational discourse on the relative risks of drugs.  Why is that?

I’ve long had the opinion that the problem is simply fundamentalism.  They see drug use as a threat against their culture.   There’s no question that this is the case for the drug policies of the Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations.   I also think this is part of the particularly irrational attitude towards X.  It makes you feel more empathy, and fundamentalists are anti-empathy.

Now I feel affirmed.  Warren Richey writes about the Sotomeyer Hearings that

Republicans Question Need for “Empathy”

Republicans repeatedly criticized President Obama’s stated goal of seeking judges with “empathy” for “people’s hopes and struggles.” They questioned how the concept of empathetic judges could coexist with the well-known portrayal of a blindfolded Lady Justice.

Finally I have proof that  the sector of our culture which represents religious fundamentalism and intolerance is genuinely anti-empathy.  I knew they were of course, as did a great many people.  But now they are going so far as to say it openly, which means I can make this without a burdensome process of proof.  It’s easy, they don’t deny it. We don’t need empathy in the justice system? That’s some fucked up shit right there.

I think the fundies are anti-X in part because they are anti-empathy, and X encourages empathy. Used under the proper conditions it does so in a lasting and meaningful way. Criminalizing it only encourages its use in harmful locations, and decreases its positive use.

If we consider our culture’s evolution, I think there’s a real possiblity that empathogens and psychadelics can play a meaningful role in hunting down and de-clawing harmful social memes. Thinking about it like that, religious intolerance and flexibility, which is so symbolized by the modern Republican party, is like a mind virus.  Lack of empathy in our culture can be treated effectively with MDMA (as part of a directed therapeutic process), and prohibition of MDMA is a defence mechanism of the anti-empathy meme.

When one goes further to consider that addicts and people who do abuse drugs are people with medical conditions, deserving of our empathy and support, it’s clear that entire concept of drug criminalization is a defense mechanism against empathy.

Categories: Drug War, political
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Categories: Drug War
4 Comments »

There is an excellent comment on the jail sentence for the Pirate Bay founders, and the criminal charges against philosophy professor Horcio Potel available here: http://isoc.ph/portal/2009/04/isoc-philippines-statement-on-pirate-bay

Categories: political
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Wow, this is just fantastic. I’m so glad someone cobbled this together. It’s a perfect little piece. Notice how the weaker Schiff’s antagonists positions are, the more they take a ridiculing antagonistic stance. At one point, when Schiff is predicting perfectly what’s going to happen, the commentator says “Okay Peter, I know you want to continue with your expose of Santa Claus”…

Keep this in mind whenever you see an empty suit ridiculing someone’s ideas. Sarcasm and ad hominem attacks are common weapons that they reach for when they don’t have any facts or evidence to back them up.

Categories: political
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In a fantastic demonstration of how much our national attitude to marijuana prohibition has changed in the short time since president Obama was elected, there was a serious discussion regardling the legalization of marijuana on CNBC.

Rob Kampia does a fantastic job in his media appearances.  He always comes across as calm, rational, and well informed.  Unfortunately these debate forums are atrocious when it comes to doing any kind of real analysis of an issue, as the participants simply don’t get enough time to challenge conveniently accepted falsehoods.

So I thought I’d point out the misinformation and disingenuity on the part of Asa Hutchinson which Rob didn’t have the opportunity to specifically address:

“Legalizing will expand use”.  Quoth mister Hutchinson:

The question is whether it should be expanded or legalized, absolutely not.  If you look at harmful drugs, whether it’s tobacco or other hard drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, the objective of society is to reduce the use of harmful drugs.  If you legalize another harmful drug the question is will it expand use and avaiability?  The answer is absolutely yes!  Why would you want to do that?

In this statement, Mr. Hutchinson lumps marijuana, cocain and methamphetamine together. This is a common ploy trying to create the mental association of harm with marijuana, despite the fact that marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine are vastly different from one another with respect to their levels of harm. But mr. Kampia is right to simply ignore this, as it is a red herring.

The real lie is the statement that legalizing a drug will lead to an increase in the use of a drug. Mr Kampia makes a valid comparison to Alcohol prohibition, which the announcer fails to fathom. What Mr. Kampia is saying is prohibition does not reduce cannabis use. Since prohibtion has been put in place, marijuana use in America has increased, not decreased. 30 years of a draconian war on drugs have not helped either. On the other hand, Holland, where marijuana can be legally bought, sold and smoked, has lower cannabis consumption than its neighboring countries, where Marijuana is illegal. Oh, and  Decriminalization has also had a positive influence on Portugal’s drug problem.. In other words, prohibition does no good, only harm.

“The population resists the the legalisation of marijuana”

Thus far in the last 8 years they have not been successful in changing the law. In fact Alaska decriminalized Marijuana, when they saw it became a huge problem they adjusted the law and recriminalized it. And so the population still resists the legalization of marijuana. But it’s a public decision, but whenever you talk about the cost benefit, first of all the figures on enforcement thats applies across the board whether it’s all illegal drugs. If you legalize one drug you’ve still got enforcement coss on the whole vast range of methamphetamine, other uh, illegal drugs.

I think the strategy here is “if you can’t blind them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit”. Put more cynically, in order to defend an indefensible policy, a common tactic is to lie so many times ina given statement, that its challenging for your debate opponent to respond intelligently — they just don’t know where to start.
The anouncer penetrates his bullshit on the cost front. I’d just like to point out: look there’s that anaology to the methamphetamine boogyman. Who cares that legalizing marijuana would free up resources for methamphetmine combat? Who cares that evidence suggests that treatment and counceling would probably do more good at combating methamphetamine use than criminal processes?

His citation of the status of Marijuana in Alaska is equally fascinating. There is no part of what he said that is truthful. As near as I can tell he was referring to this, but do your own research on the subject.
And of course his argument boils down to”look, pot’s illegal, it wouldn’t be illegal in a democracy if people didn’t want it to be illegal! So stop trying to make it legal!”. Baffle with bullshit. It’s such a fucking stupid argument it’s impossible to argue against it. It also completely ignores the fact that many states have decriminalized marijuana, but are suffering under federal policies.

“Prohibition saves lives”

If your motivation is to bring revenue to the government: legalize, regulate. But if your motivation is to reduce the usage, to save teenage lives, to reduce dependence, to strengthen our culture, then the cost is worth it and the revenue should not be a motivation.

Baldface lie, as I’ve pointed out above. I like that Rob Kampia points out the lie in his following line of bullshit about the health consquences of marijuana.

I love it that one of their commentators call marijuana a natural resource.

Categories: political
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I stumbled on this quite by accident on the newsgroups.  Someone, posting as Annie, has been kind enough to translate an interview with Nobel Laureate (economics) Milton Friedman.  The interview was apparently first published in 1992, but I think it is still quite worth reading and referencing.  So I will reproduce the post in it in its entirety here.

Several people have requested that I post a translation of the Spiegel
interview in full:

“The drug war is lost”
Interview with the American Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman on
the legalization of the illicit drug market

Der Spiegel, 14/1992

Spiegel:  The United States puts out 12 billion dollars a year on its
all-out war on drugs, but victory seems farther away than ever.  Why is
that?

Friedman:  Why is it that the socialist government of the Soviet Union
was a disaster, and the GDR just as unsuccessful?

S:  We actually wanted to talk about the American drug-politik…

F:  …that carries all signs of a socialist program.  If a private
program falls apart, brings losses, then there’s lots of people losing
lots of money. Therefore they have a great interest in ending such a
program before it leads to ruin.  However a government, whose program
fails, must neither admit failure nor pay out of its own pocket.

S:  Is the anti-drug program, therefore, always going to escalate?

F:  The reaction to failed government programs is always the same:
People say it must be made only a little bit different, a little bit
bigger, a little bit more expensive.

S:  Since when have we seen this tendency?

F:  The War on Drugs was began with Richard Nixon in 1969.  That project
failed, but was put on the back burner for the next 17 years.  The War
on Drugs was started up again by Ronald Reagan.  He expanded it, especially
in Florida, but he couldn’t win, either.  Then came Mr. Bush, who declared
total war and appointed with much fanfare a drug czar named William Bennet.
S:  Who was in office for only 20 months.

F:  He stepped down after he told the whole world that the measures he
initiated had been a total success.  But that wasn’t the case.  Back in
1972 I predicted the failure of the Nixon Administration’s anti-drug
programs and recommended the legalization of all drugs.  I’ve not had
any indications that I should revise the judgements I’ve made at that
time.

S:  You share these opinions with former Secretary of State George Schultz
and columnist William F. Buckley.  They belong to a small group of
conservatives…

F:  …that group isn’t so small anymore; I’m not a conservative anyway,
never was one.  A conservative is someone who wants to leave things as
they are.  That’s not what I want.  I am a liberal, in the classic
European meaning of the word.

S:  Very well.  As a liberal, you recommend the legalization of drugs.

F:  I am against the prohibition as we have it and plead therefore, that
drugs be dealt with in just the same way alcohol and tobacco are.

S:  Which are legally for sale.

F:  With certain restrictions.  Alcohol can only be bought by persons of
a certain age, not during worship times and some places only from particular
government-run stores.

S:  Are these restrictions too broad for a free-market economist?

F:  It would be better to have the free market do the regulating. It can,
but it should not, be the role of the government to sell hard drugs, any
more than it should be to run a lottery or to promote gambling.

S:  Many states see a good source of income in that.

F:  That’s true unfortunately, but the state shouldn’t have any function
in a free market.  It should stick to a democratic and political direction.

S:  Implicit in the legalization of the drug market would be a change
in the corresponding laws.  Which of them do you expect to change first?

F:  The main problem is to clean out Congress, and then the leave the finer
regulations up to the states themselves.

S:  Who should produce the drugs?

F:  Those who can do it best — the pharmaceuticals industry.

S:  But they would only reluctantly produce products which cause addiction.

F:  What kind of nonsense are you telling me?  A big portion of the
pharmaceuticals on the market are addictive.  There are people who are
addicted to Aspirin, dependent on sleeping pills or won’t get by without
pain relievers.

S:  Where, in a legalized drug market, would the pharmaceuticals industry
obtain the necessary raw materials?

F:  That would be regulated by the free market.

S:  Can you imagine poppy fields in Kansas and Marijuana farms in
California?

F:  Why not?  Marijuana cultivation still goes on despite massive
eradication programs of the Marijuana Cops.  Marijuana plays a key roll in
the U.S. drug politik.  Although not a single case is known of a Marijauan
overdose leading to death, and dozens of scientific studies support
Marijuana as harmless, the War on Grass has been declared.

S:  Has the price of Marijuana gone up according to the laws of the
freemarket?

F:  Yes.  Compared with other drugs, Marijuana got to be considerably
more expensive, and cocaine and and then crack got to be cheaper.
The drug prohibition pushed the consumers from one harmless drug to
a very, very dangerous one.

S:  Would you make a legal distinction between, for example, cocaine
and marijuana in a free-market drug economy?

F:  I would treat they just the same as alcohol and cigareettes.  It’s
no crime to buy Schnaps, but it is to drive drunk.  It would be the same
with drugs.

S:  To use the alcohol market as an example:  Do you see “Light Heroin”
or a “Cocaine for Beginners” in special displays in your drugstores?

F:  Why not, we also have Light Beer and low-alcohol Wine.  For both of
those there’s a public market.  In this discussion, though, there’s one
thing you shouldn’t forget:  the real winner in a legalized drug market
is the consumer.  The legal drugs would be much cleaner, their active
ingredients indicated on the side of the package, the dangers of overdose
given also…

S:  …and the number of addicts will rise steeply, my friend.

F:  There’s not one single empirical study to support that argument.
The opposite is the case.  The cessation of alcohol prohibition led
to no increase of alcohol consumption in the long run.  Actually the
number of alcohol-related deaths fell, because the products were cleaner.
And since Marijuana was legalized in Holland, Marijuana abuse has gone
down, and similar data comes out of Alaska, where for one year now the
possession of Marijuana for personal use hasn’t been punished.

S:  Such arguments seem not to impress the drug warriors.

F:  Admittedly, other arguments are much stronger.  It’s safe to say
that the American inner cities are going down the drain as a result
of the current drug politik:  10,000 surplus deaths in the drug world
every year, the prisons are overflowing, and there’s little time left
for the sentencing of other crimes.  That’s happening apart from the
fact that the number of non-drug related crimes is rising.  Or it’s
It’s almost impossible to name a single positive result of the war
on drugs, and I haven’t even touched on the affects on Peru, Columbia,
and Panama…

S:  …where the Bush Administration has expanded its anti-drug war to.

F:  A completely unjustifiable undertaking.  We’ve destroyed these lands
with our own own soldiers, helicopters, and SWAT teams just because we
couldn’t enforce our own laws at home.

S:  The legalization of the American drug market would have considerable
economic consequences for countries like Columbia and Peru.

F:  Assuredly.  With our politik we’ve left these states to the production
of agricultural products like marijuana and coca, which go against their
long-term interests.  If we were to legalize the consumption of drugs
tomorrow, by tomorrow afternoon the price of Cocaine would drop like a
rock.

S:  And 10,000 people would lose their jobs.

F:  Be careful when you talk about unemployment.  What the farmers in Peru
get for their coca leaves they can’t distinguish from what they’d get under
a legalization.  I would rather have the farmers stay in business so they
can put the raw ingredients up for sale at some reasonable price like our
farmers.  The ones who will lose their jobs will be those who earn massive
profits from the drug trade — the members of the cartels, the smugglers
and the pushers.

S:  Also standing to earn is the state, which would tax legal drugslike it
does alcohol and cigarettes.

F:  Sure.  Though giving the state a new income source is not my intention
when I advocate legalization.

S:  Since the decade-long War on Drugs has brought no visible success, does
it follow that powerful people in and behind the political scene are gaining
money and influence by preventing its success?

F:  There exists every conceivable reason to believe that people who earn
money from the drug market will do everything they can to ensure their
source of income.  This is no example of a conspiracy theory, but the
forseeable relationships of members of a certain branch of industry.  That
pertains to the drug baron no differently than automobile tycoon.

S:  Wouldn’t legalization also bring dismay to the professional prosecutors?

F:  The prosecutor and the prosecuted have a common interest in the
drug war.  Prohibition assures a good livelihood to those who prohibit
the drugs and to those who deliver the drugs.  That also goes for the
prosecutors.  Their estates are being well-furnished, their incomesraised.
Fame and good careers are assured for them.

S:  Now that is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.

F:  Not necessarily.  The ["pits"] of corruption are documentable and
growing.  You can be sure that when there’s a big pot of gold out there,
that there will be people who want to have it and who will put all other
interests aside to get it.

Categories: political
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So, let’s have a look at the NY Times headlines today.  Here are my favorites:

• He Calls for an Ambitious Agenda, With Eye on Deficit.
• In Time of Crisis, Urging Bold Action and Big Ideas.
• The Humanities Must Justify Their Worth
• Citing Cost, States Consider Halting Death Penalty

I always recommend reading the articles of course, but look at what we can get from just the headlines:  The financial crisis dominates, which isn’t suprising.   Our pres. wants to dump a lot of money into kickstarting the economy, which is probably not a bad idea.  On the other hand our fiscal deficit is getting absolutely terrifying.  So we need some creative ideas for cutting spending.  Well, as usual we find we are cutting funding for humanities studies.  No big surprises there.  One that did however catch my eye, and inspired this post, its the   fact that some states are apprently considering halting the death penalty in order to save money.

Well, I think cutting humanities education is a bad idea.  The american populace is already sorely lacking in critical-thinking skills and cultural. social, and historical awareness.  Good democracies require a thinking voting population, and vocational training doesn’t teach critical thinking.  But cutting the death penalty is pretty interesting, since it’s such a debateable practice.   That one caught me by surprise.

What would surprise and delight me however, would be for major policy makers to start talking about ending the war on drugs, and switching to a harm-reduction policy regarding drugs.  The only discussion I’ve seen in the major media here is the article “Latin Americans Decry U.S. Drug War”.  The headline certainly doesn’t say anything new to anyone who has been paying attention.

I have to do some research, and provide some good citations to back up the following claims, but that will have to wait for another post.  The evidence all pretty much points to the same conclusion though:  We can do a better job of preventing and treating drug-dependancies and drug-abuse by spending money on treatment and education, rather than dumping the money into a racist “war on drugs”, which vilifies and destroys other nations, subjegates huge chunks of our population, and creates criminals where there need be none.  Harmless drugs which offer positive social and medical benefits need to be decriminalized entirely, and marketed through legal and controlled channels

To start with, let’s decriminalize marijunna, and restrict its sale to people above the age of 18.  As people grow a little more enlightened we can extend this to magic mushrooms, and later perhaps even lsd, ecstasy, and ketamine.  If we, as a society, want to exercise a little more control over drug abuse, why not the following proposition:  In order to enjoy recreational drugs, you have to get a licence to purchase them, just like you need a licence to drive.  If you engage in antisocial behavior while one drugs (like a drunken and disorderly conduct, or driving while intoxicate for examples), you can have your license suspended.    When you purchase drugs you consumption can be tracked, and if your consumption exceeds certain limiits, you can be sent for evaluation and counseling.  A particularly innovative approach would be to make the legal status of a drug actually depend on the danger levels of the drugs (toxicity, danger of addiction, social harm), and its benefits (medical, psychotherapeutic, recreational and social).   Under such a system, tobacco and alcohol would be more tighly regulated than marijuanna.

Suddenly we’ll have a lot less people in jail, which will reduce our (huge) budget for the “correctional system”.  People who just want to smoke a joint, won’t be labelled criminals.  People will have more respect for the law, since there will be fewer useless, unfair, restrictive, pointless and patently harmful laws on the books.  We can tax the drug consumption, and increase government revenues.  Police budgets can be reduced, or rechannelled into useful activities:  i.e. fighting crimes that are actually harmful.  You know, things like rape, homicide, white collar crime…

On the positive side, at least some mainstream media are reporting on this issue, without the usual bias. On the other hand, Obama’s comments thus far regarding the drug war have not been promising.  Whether this is due to actual indoctrination on Obama’s part, or a sense of pragmatism is unclear, but I suspect it is more the latter.  The guy has a lot of things he has to change, and campaigning against the drug war can be a real political liability.  So let’s try to change that situation!

Tags: financial crisis,war on drugs
Categories: political
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Well, at this point things are getting as bad as I figured they would.  The Lehman brothers are going bankrupt, and Merryl Lynch is being sold to prevent the same from happening to them.  The USD is at 1.1 CHF.  About a year ago I warned my relatives they should put some money in other currencies, since I figured the USD would tank to about even with the CHF when the sub-prime crisis finally hit.  I don’t think anyone listened to me, but at least I tried.    I remember telling Herta I estimated it as about 50% probable that the USD would hit about even with USD sometime in the next two years, and I figured about a 5% chance that it would hit a real crisis, like 0.2 USD to the CHF.

Well, my 50% probably hit right in the middle of the time interval I gave (back in May).  It’s crawled back up to 1.1, but now with the latest wave in the crisis, I’m thinking it’ll go down again.  Selfishly speaking, I hope it tanks quickly over the next week, so my money is worth more when I travel to the States.  And of course, it makes my student loans cheaper.

But the Lehman brothers going under is pretty scary.  This summer I was working for an investment compan in Zug (one floor below the Mark Rich group).  The lead investor was telling us the investment infrastructure was provided by said Lehman brothers.  Already then there was quite a bit of discussion about their troubles in the financial mags.  Someone asked if the company was concerned about the Lehmann brothers troubles.  The lead investor made the comment that “well, if the Lehman brothers go under we have a lot bigger problems than just losing our infrastructure” -> referring to the overall infrastructure collapse that would be caused by such an event.  That will now happen.

On the comforting side, the government is at least stepping in to regulate the collapse, to try and mitigate the repercussions.  Let’s hope it works.   And lets hope we can get the Republicans away from the controls come November.

Categories: political
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I went to a Jewish school grade 1- grade 5. I spent my summer with my ultra-catholic, ultra-traditional German grandparents. My grandfather wore a Hitler-mustache. I’m told he used to say “I had mine first. Let Hitler shave his.” My grandparents were worried I would go to hell because I was going to a Jewish school. These opposing forces in my life left me a sort of perpetual inner conflict.

I recently gave my Swiss girlfriend Maus to read, and it was interesting hearing her perspective on it. Since I went to a Jewish school I grew up learning more about the holocaust than your average American, particularly on impact on the Jewish people and how it pertains to the modern Jewish identity, in particular Israel. Back there, my sister was the only kid I knew who didn’t personally know someone that had survived the holocaust. I think they all had a relatively direct connection to the Holocaust, whether it was a family member, or just a distant friend of the family now living in Israel. We spent a lot of time covering both the historical and emotional aspects thereof.

Now that was always kinda interesting for me, because I had to reconcile that with my German grandparents, who were responsible adults, even property owners, during the war. They were later refugees who had to leave their land in the Sudatenland, and resettle in Bavaria.

Now most Germans suffered as a result of WWII, by the end for certain. So as a result of this, and as a result of the moral implications of supporting the Nazis, it’s pretty hard to find a survivor who will admit to being supportive of Hitler and his policies. Okay, nowadays there aren’t so many survivors alive who were culpable adults during WWII, but back in the seventies there were plenty. I’m certain that if you would have taken a poll in the seventies, you would come to the conclusion that Hitler managed to take over and run Germany with the support of <1% of its population. This of course was not the case.

History shows, of course, that very very few of the German population actively opposed Hitler (I would love reference for this). Certainly not to the point of taking any significant risks. Well, very few of them survived it anyway, and my grandparents certainly did not. At the very least they supported Hitler with their silence and complacency, but they were my omi and opa! They were the next best thing (or maybe even sometimes better) to my parents! So of course I worshiped them. At the same time of course I believed every word they were teaching me at the IL Perez school.

I believe that it is for this reason that I worry so much about history repeating itself, with regard to the evils that feed fascism. Even if we disregard fascism per se, the fear of the harm (physical, psychological, economic and spiritual) that an out-of-control system or institution can perform is terrifying.

I knew my grandparents were sweet, nice, loving people, who almost certainly supported Hitler at some point in his career. This was never explicitly discussed, but I guess the majority of Germans supported Hitler at some point in his career, and I see no reason to believe that my Grandparents were an exception.Now, it’s impossible to get good information about this, because they didn’t have freedom of speech, but I wonder at what point most Germans stopped supporting him? Probably when it started negatively affecting their standard of living.

So I quickly came to the conclusion that anyone was capable of being a good nazi, just following orders. This of course proven by the Millgram experiment, but it’s a heady realization for an eight year old.

All of this is a really long winded buildup to saying that healines like: “Bosses’ power to check email”, and “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”, and “Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in U.S.” really fill me with anxiety.

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I once had an ethics professor who explained Hedonism as being an ethical theory in which the goal was to be as happy as can be (at least I hope that he explained it that way, my mandatory ethics class was a LONG time ago). Contrary to popular opinion, hedonism doesn’t mean abandoning ethics or morality.   Rather it means allowing ethics to come to  result from, or at least harmonize with,  people’s inherent selfishness. For example, people like safety, so they impose laws which punish murder and violent assault. People who enjoy those things will refrain from them because the happiness they gained from the illegal activities would be less than the happiness they would lose from the punishment (e.g. prison). Note the prof didn’t propose this as a system for an ideal world, rather as a framework for thinking about how the world works.

Hedonism has a pretty bad rap in the United States. The word is mostly used pejoratively, which I find ironic. We are after, constitutionally guaranteed the right to pursue happiness (cough). Neo-cons, who are the most anti-hedonist of the lot, are typically social darwinists, and believe firmly in the inherent selfishness of man. They believe deeply that this inherent selfishness can lead to an ideal world. They use this to justify those aspects of a free market which serve their interests. But they think Hedonism is bad. They accomplish this by simply not thinking about it very deeply. Trying to have a good time is bad because the bible tells them so. Well in fact, the preacher tells them the bible tells them so. Even those that bother to read the bible seem to only understand it selectively.  The neo-cons seek to build a society where people are inherently selfish, but not allowed to be happy.  I think this creates a twisted, self righteous, harmful and fundamentally unhappy society.

But I digress.  If we  leave the word Hedonism out of it, I think that most of us agree that, under certain constraints, it’s a good thing to strive to be happy (we may not agree on the constraints, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). I think I can also say, without fear that I will stir a great deal of controversy, that many of us aren’t having a lot of luck being happy.

Now for some of us, this is caused by certain pathological and easy to identify problems. Maybe they are problems we aware of, or maybe everyone can see it but us, but the fact is our unhappiness is our own fault. I couldn’t hazard a guess as to how many people are like this, but I think everyone knows one or two. But a great many of us are unhappy and can’t readily identify a cause, or even a significant variable which we can control. Thus more and more people turn to pharmaceuticals.

One of the most difficult variables to control is stress-levels. In fact, for a great many of us, excess stress is clear and beyond the dominant variable in the equation that determines out moods. For most of us, it’s pretty much impossible to decouple the problem of minimizing stress from maximizing happiness. It may even be possible to frame them as equivalent problems.

The problem is that optimizing happiness is incredibly difficult. If you’re dealing with a person who has their shit reasonably together, and has eliminated all the obvious problems over which they have any control, you are left with many, many significant and interdependent factors. The weather, your family, your lover or lack thereof, your diet, exercise. So if you’re trying to determine if the johaniskraut or the omega-3 fatty acid supplements are making any difference, or if it’s just because the weather has been a bit nicer lately.

So the problem is, once you get to certain point, it’s just bloody difficult to optimize happiness. There are so many significant variables it would be incredibly tedious (and stressful!) to keep track of them all. Beyond that many of the significant factors are terribly difficult to quantify. Mood itself is terribly difficult to quantify. Finally of course, it’s pretty taboo to talk about maximizing our own happiness. Tell someone one of your interests is pursuing enlightenment, see if they laugh.

Nevertheless, I predict that there will be a resurgence in this field of human endeavor. As pervasive-computing becomes a reality, people will begin tracking their own biometric data, and tracking those factors they think will have an influence. Biofeedback therapies will advance. Someone will create an open access database to allow people to freely contribute their data, and we will begin to explore inwardly, using technological tools.

There will be resistance to this. It will be considered hedonism. The technology, data, and human energy involved will be directed towards sex and drugs. Some individuals will see this as a lapsing of morals. It will be an influence which brings society in a more empathic direction, which will threaten the violent, and those who are financially or politically empowered by violence. It will teach us that the pursuit of wealth, and our commercial culture have only limited benefits. So like the counter-culture movement in the 60′s, this movement will be attacked. The attacks will be the same as we always see: cultural (like the ridiculing of 60′s counter culture), legal oppression (e.g. most drug laws), and of course commercial co-option (e.g. the commercial counter-culture movement of the 90′s).

But I have faith because I must have faith. Let’s struggle on my hedonistic brothers! I do actually think, on scale of hundreds of years, things have been getting better. Our only problem now is that our rate of technological advance now dwarfs our rate of social advance. But that’s no reason to give up on technology. Just keep trying to apply it to something that actually matters. Kudos to the man who makes the first biometric happiness tracker! Keep it free please!

Categories: Personal, political
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