justice – Page 87

Humanity’s Greatest Conceit

Many people are happy to hold the belief that other creatures have a “lesser” or “lower” form of consciousness to themselves, despite the absence of a logical basis for it

The single greatest conceit of the human animal is that humans like it are somehow more conscious or self-aware than the beings who make up the rest of the animal kingdom. This belief is not only insane and irrational, but it has had devastating consequences for the rest of the Earth.

When it comes down to it, no-one has any fucking idea who or what else is conscious. This follows simple logic. After all, how could we possibly know? Each one of us can assert with absolute certainty that, as an individual, they are conscious, because being conscious of your own consciousness is sufficient evidence that it exists. But this gets taken to illogical conclusions.

The vast majority of humans labour under the erroneous assumption that other creatures are only conscious to the degree that they are like those humans. A chimpanzee is considered to be very similar to us relative to the rest of the animal kingdom (and it is if the comparison is made in physical and anatomical terms), but this has no relevance to whether or not the chimpanzee is conscious.

If we can’t observe or measure consciousness in other humans, then we can’t measure it in other creatures either. So if consciousness has never and can never be either observed or measured in other creatures, then any belief about the consciousness of another creature must of necessity be an article of faith.

Simple enough, but the difficulty arises when this iron-clad logic meets the infinite human capacity for self-delusion. The vast majority of people make the erroneous assumption that their brain generates consciousness and therefore that other creatures are similar to the extent that their brains are believed to be similar.

But this is pure superstition, and not logical.

Even worse, despite being a majority, are those who assume that they are superior to all creatures of “lesser” consciousness, and that the supposed lower consciousness of other creatures give us a green light to abuse and exploit them.

It’s common for humans to look at a cat and think we see an animal that is uncomprehending of the greater existential questions, but how can we rule out that the cat has long since solved all these questions and is now blase about them, to the point that any human wondering about them merely appears sophomoric?

How can we know that the cat, who sleeps 15 hours a day, isn’t meditating for most of this time? Cats might all be spiritual masters on the order of Buddha.

How do we know that the ant that appears to go forward mindlessly, isn’t at perfect peace with its role in the world and accepts it without reservation?

The logical flaw is also evident if one observes that many people are willing to assume that these creatures have less consciousness on account of that they didn’t evolve as much of it as we did – but they aren’t willing to make the same assumptions of different races, even though the logic is the same.

The argument that differing selection pressures could account for differences in consciousness between humans and the other mammals, but could not also account for differences in consciousness between white people and black people, is a contradiction on its face.

Humanity’s greatest conceit is that our consciousness is somehow more special or worthy of not suffering than the consciousness of other creatures, and this line of reasoning is what has enabled the rape of the planet that has occurred over the last century.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

VJMP Reads: The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand X

This reading carries on from here.

The tenth, and last, essay in The Interregnum is ‘Politics of Love’, by Max Harris. Like the other essays in this collection, it speaks from an unashamed youth perspective, such as when Harris complains of the “stale language” of the current political discourse.

This essay is about the politics of love, and it opens by defining what love is to Harris: “a feeling of deep warmth that is directed outwards towards an object, such as another person.” There is nothing objectionable about his definition of love; indeed it seems fairly comprehensive, especially when he writes that “the idea of love is closely tied to relationships and the connections between people.”

Predictably, given the Marxist leanings of the previous essays in this book, this essay quickly moves on to a declaration that the politics of love would necessitate “a willingness to accept a greater number of refugees.”

But one wonders why it is that emphasising the aspect of love leads naturally to the conclusions that Harris takes it to.

Why not, for example, stop all immigration to New Zealand from the Third World on account of love for the people already in New Zealand, whose living standards drop when Third Worlders move into their locales? Isn’t it entirely possible that my love for the people of New Zealand impels me to want to see them safe from robbery, rape and murder – the crimes that mass Third World immigration has brought to Europe and America?

Doesn’t our love for young New Zealand girls and women drive us to keep them safe from the rampant sexual abuse and harassment that is now part and parcel of the female experience in Europe?

Doesn’t our love for the homeless and mentally ill already in New Zealand drive us to take care of them as a priority, before we spend money importing irreparably damaged people from the other side of the world to jump in front of them in the queue?

Doesn’t our love for the hardworking taxpayer who has busted his back his whole life drive us to ensure that he can retire at a fitting age, instead of having to work into senescence to pay for gibs?

The essay makes a plea for more solidarity, but how is that possible when diversity is also increasing? It points out that New Zealanders already feel disconnected – so how will importing tens of thousands of “refugees” help? It will only add to the ethnic chaos, making us feel even more disconnected.

But Harris, and people like him, would happily call me hateful for asking those questions.

To Deny That Cannabis Is Medicinal Is To Deny The Humanity of Medicinal Cannabis Users

Opioids kill 1 in every 10,000 Americans every year, but they’re fully legal

One of the most awful aspects of being a medicinal cannabis user is getting lied to by doctors and mental healthcare workers who deny the emotional and spiritual benefits of cannabis use. The problem isn’t that they won’t help you get hold of cannabis medicine (because there are plenty of people who will) – it’s that they refuse to have an honest conversation with you about the benefits and side-effects of using it.

It’s impossible, in most places, for a sick person who uses medicinal cannabis to expect that their doctor will listen honestly to what they have to say. If the patient mentions the benefits of their cannabis use, the doctor will insist that the patient must be mistaken when they believe that cannabis helped them. Even if the doctor goes as far as conceding that cannabis has some medicinal value, they will almost always attribute all manner of ghastly side-effects to using it.

Worst of all, it’s impossible to change the mind of your doctor by presenting evidence from jurisdictions that have legalised medicinal cannabis. It doesn’t matter that medicinal cannabis was made legal in California in 1996 after the doctors there looked at the evidence – those doctors are simply presumed to be wrong, and recklessly so. End of story.

This refusal to speak honestly with patients is, from the patient’s perspective, a dehumanising experience. It’s a way of saying that your experience can be discounted, because you are worth less than a normal human being. With almost every other medicine it’s possible to tell a doctor that it alleviates your suffering and have it considered enough to get a prescription.

This is even true of opioids, which kill 1 in every 10,000 Americans every year, and which have been so recklessly overprescribed that the opioid crisis now has its own Wikipedia page.

Not so with cannabis. Somehow cannabis has the mysterious property of causing suffering that only doctors, politicians and pharmaceutical company lobbyists are able to see. A patient might feel that their suffering is reduced from using medicinal cannabis, but unfortunately for them, they are not considered full human beings on account of the claim that cannabis causes psychosis. Therefore, their belief that cannabis alleviates suffering can be dismissed on account of it being a belief held by a psychotic person.

It’s a vicious Catch-22: you might feel that the cannabis takes your suffering away, but this can be trumped by the declaring that using cannabis robs you of your ability to reason, and then anything you say can be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic.

If a person is suffering psychologically, and they take a substance that they believe to be medicinal, and their experience of using this substance is that it ameliorates psychological suffering, then how can anyone else possibly presume to judge otherwise?

It might be that the side-effects of using some particular medicines are so great that, on balance, it’s better to look for an alternative than to prescribe them, but significant side-effects from cannabis use are non-existent.

The feeling from the patient’s perspective is that doctors are saying that ameliorating your suffering, in particular, is not worth pursuing because you are not valuable. Elderly Baby Boomers are getting stuffed full of opioids at the first murmur of complaint, but if anyone else wants to use some cannabis they have to risk several years in prison.

Does Cannabis Prohibition Cause Schizophrenia?

In The Politics of Experience, the great Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing presents his own understanding on the ultimate causes of schizophrenia. He concludes that schizophrenia is not mainly caused by either genetic or environmental factors but rather “the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.”

This is a position that many schizophrenics could themselves agree with. Common to the schizophrenic experience is a sense of having been “skewered” by the world, in that one is doomed if one chooses a certain option but also doomed if one does not choose it. This kind of Catch-22 situation is regularly accompanied by a level of anxiety that is impossible to live with, followed by the mind starting to disintegrate as a way of relieving unendurable levels of stress.

It’s not a position that receives much sympathy from the psychiatric establishment, who are almost all hard-core worshippers of the cult of materialism. Most Western psychiatrists cannot conceive of mental health in any other terms than brain chemistry, and they cannot conceive of treatment in any other fashion than dishing out pills. That someone has been driven insane by society is an unpalatable possibility.

Cannabis use is believed by many to be the cause of schizophrenia, because the association between cannabis use and getting such a mental health diagnosis has long been noted. In the mainstream Western model, it is assumed that the causal relationship of these two variables goes in the direction of cannabis use causing people to develop psychosis and schizophrenia.

This has led to many psychiatrists telling their patients that not only are the patients themselves to blame for their own mental illness (which leads to terrible feelings of guilt and self-recrimination) but that only by avoiding cannabis can they hope to make a recovery.

The problem with this approach is, obviously, that cannabis is medicinal, and the vast majority of cannabis users know this, and so being told such things by a mental health “professional” is confusing, frustrating and enraging.

Getting lectured about what one needs to do to stay mentally healthy by a person who has never had schizophrenia, who has never had any experience with psychosis and who has almost certainly never used cannabis, much less a major psychedelic, is a difficult thing for any person to put up with, let alone an experienced psychonaut. When that person doing the lecturing is actually ignoring one’s own lived experiences with the medicinal qualities of the substance, it’s mind-boggling.

Because of cannabis prohibition, mental health care workers are extremely reluctant to tell the truth about the medicinal qualities of the substance (if they’re even aware of them). After all, if they recommend medicinal cannabis to a patient in a place where it’s illegal, they’re effectively recommending that the patient commit a crime, which comes with various ethical issues.

The problem is that the patient is frequently aware that the mental health care workers are lying by omission, which puts them in an impossible situation – exactly the kind of situation described by Laing as schizophrenogenic. If you have problems knowing what’s real and what isn’t, talking to someone who you know is lying to you while that person is also claiming to be helping you is just too much for the human mind to cope with.

If doctors and psychiatrists are there to help us, why don’t they tell us the truth about the medicine that does so much to relieve abominable suffering? The fact that they refuse to do so only feeds into the perception often held by paranoid schizophrenics – that they really are out to get you. It also makes people wonder if they’ve fallen into a time warp of some kind.

Prohibition of cannabis medicine is so absurd, so ludicrous, that it actually causes mental illness in the people whose lives are affected by it.