Restore Factory Settings?

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/opioids-pot-criminal-justice-reform-helped-undermine-decade-s-war-ncna1108231

An interesting article, but it doesn’t seem to clearly make the point that the war on drugs was a guaranteed failure from the very moment it was conceived. (With the exception of its suppression of racial minorities elements, which I will not address here.) Quite a number of us knew this at the time and asked, isn’t this just Prohibition all over again? Didn’t that do no good at all but in fact made the mafia great and powerful? Won’t this just do the same? And it did. Obviously.

The biggest question is, why do we do such stupid self-destructive things?

Isn’t it possible that we human beings could actually do things that are rational and sensible instead of things that are hysterical and self-destructive? It’s possible. But we rarely seem to do it...or at least all too often we go for the hysterical and self destructive.

Why?

Because our emotional default setting, our factory setting, is emotionalism. It’s clear why emotions evolved. They allow us to act without thinking. They guarantee behaviors that might rationally be rejected in favor of evolutionary preferments. For example, an individual might logically choose to save himself at the expense of his children. Emotions will direct him to save the children, which saves the passing on of his genes. It might be argued that you can always have more children, but that may not be true. Furthermore, how many children would survive childhood if we didn’t feel an emotional need to protect them and care for them? Ignoring the issue of a life-and-death situation, we all know the horror stories of children who have been killed by their parents either Through neglect or physical abuse and that’s even with emotions working in the child’s favor.

To repeat one of my favorite default phrases, we are facultative rational beings but we are obligate emotional beings. That is to say, we can think rationally, but we must feel emotionally. This is not a condemnation. This is simply an acknowledgment of reality. If you discover that you have a tendency toward alcoholism, this does not mean you may as well give up and become a drunk. It means that you must spend the rest of your life being very careful not to fall into that trap. The same applies for tendencies toward cancer, Alzheimer’s, or any number of other debilitating diseases. It follows that if we humans have a tendency to be emotional to the point of self-destructiveness, we must struggle very hard to develop protections against that fate. We must learn to think rationally. We must learn to think objectively. We must simply learn to think.

It is important to note again that we should not give up on emotions. They are essential to our existence. A non-emotional being is a psychopath, if it can even manage to survive. Rather than eliminating emotions, we must learn to control them and to direct them.

This is easy to say; and very, very difficult to accomplish. Yet, in a world in which we are more and more capable of inflicting mass destruction upon ourselves, we must learn to do this. It is a matter of our survival.

Which is an excellent emotional reason to learn to think effectively and clearly.