‘Live, love, laugh and be happy’ goes the common refrain. Unfortunately for those of us in the West, our historical approaches to recreation have been coloured by a Christian philosophy of life-denial that considers all pleasures inherently sinful. The logic of the Abrahamic cults is that the world is evil, and that all pleasures are the province of the forces of evil, and so recreational pleasures are forbidden.
Complicating this are ruling class narratives about how the working class needs to be put to work or it becomes destructive. Capitalist dogma holds that if the working class is given too much opportunity for recreation it will stop wanting to work, leading to economic collapse, and therefore recreational opportunites must be restricted.
On top of this is a lingering workamania that makes people feel as if recreation is immoral.
All of these factors have drawn people away from what would be a rational approach to recreation. Great thinkers such as Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius advocated for a middle way between asceticism and indulgence. The alternative centrist prefers this to either the indulgence of the Satanist or the life-denial of the Christian.
Plato, in Laws, argued for the importance of drinking parties. His logic was that moderate alcohol use, by repeatedly inciting a small loss of self-control, trained people to exhibit greater self-control in times when it might otherwise have been lost (e.g. mass hysteria). A contemporary cynic might observe that a list of the countries that have banned alcohol overlaps heavily with a list of the countries whose citizens commit the most rapes and sex crimes per capita in the West.
Aristotle noted, in Politics, that tyrants prevent people from coming together in common cause, prohibiting common clubs and education so as to sabotage mutual confidence and high spirits. The idea is that preventing recreation will demoralise a population into submission. Adhering to the Second Acceptance would therefore involve doing the opposite of this. Thus an alternative centrist state would encourage any and all group recreational activity that was not degenerate or criminal. Even if outsiders could not see much value in some activities, the reasoning is that social bonds are developed in any case, and therefore the general health of the nation is strengthened.
All of this presents a clear picture to the alternative centrist.
The alternative centrist state has to promote recreation for the sake of the population’s mental health: the opposite approach to a tyranny. This is not just for the sake of the recreational activities themselves, but also for the social aspects of the recreational activities, which contribute to the solidarity necessary for a nation to function.
This will mostly require the government not to step in, but to get out of the way.
In particular, this means ending the War on Drugs. Existing drug law would be replaced with a model based on the work of actual drug scientists, such as Prof. David Nutt, whose works such as Drugs: Without The Hot Air would form the bedrock of future policy.
The alternative centrist looks to history and sees that Western societies have generally tolerated alcohol and the harms caused by alcohol. Experiments with prohibition have caused more harm than they prevented. The most intelligent way to balance order and freedom, therefore, is to tolerate alcohol and also every drug safer than alcohol. Because alcohol use is normalised, any less-harmful drug effectively becomes an exit drug for alcohol. The California Sober phenomenon reflects the will of people today to live a healthier lifestyle than is possible with an alcohol habit, and is proof that people will naturally use less harmful recreational alternatives to alcohol if given the choice.
California Sober is mostly about using cannabis instead of alcohol, but several other drugs meet the criteria of being safer than alcohol when used in a recreational setting.
Licensed venues for consuming several of the safer drugs would be a feature of alternative centrist recreation. Apart from bars there would also be cannabis cafes, MDMA lounges and magic mushroom grottos. Licensing would be a complicated and expensive process, so as to exclude clowns and cowboys from the market, but would not be substantially harder than getting an alcohol licence.
The alternative centrist state would generally have an extremely light touch when it came to sporting, cultural and spiritual organisations (although it might run a state religion: see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Religion). Sporting and cultural organisations would be heavily funded and promoted, and created if they didn’t already exist.
To a major extent, sporting recreation will be a function of the history of the nation and of the local geographical opportunities. In most scenarios this would be self-funded and self-organised. The role of the alternative centrist state would be to facilitate opportunities where they wouldn’t otherwise exist, such as maintaining a conservation estate for trampers and hikers, or subsidising sporting insurance through economies of scale. Maintaining facilities for racing, drag racing or drifting would have the bonus of justifying hard crackdowns on anti-social road use.
John Wanamaker’s famous quote “People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness” is relevant here. This suggests that workers ought to be able to make enough money in a 40-hour work week to own a home and raise a family (a point addressed at length in The Alternative Centrist Approach To Work And Employment). This should allow them sufficient time and energy for appropriate recreation.
For cases where recreation goes as far as addiction, see The Alternative Centrist Approach To Mental Health.
As alluded to above, a fair and reasonable approach to recreation, rejecting the tyranny of moralisers, would provide full and fair opportunity for any pro-social recreational desire, and would therefore justify crackdowns on anti-social elements. This is one of the reasons for the severity of The Alternative Centrist Approach To The Law.
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This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.
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