Everybody exists to sort themselves out, to find their own private meaning and discern their own personal voice regardless of whether political climates forbid or enhance life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For the sake of argument, let’s have that as a given.
Natural hallucinogenics can be criticized as dangerous short-cuts to transcendental awareness, the zenith of psychological well-being, but any talk of psychotropic prescription pharmaceuticals as dangerous short-cuts to psychological well-being is taboo. Contrary to the world around us. Meditation itself, the natural way, is not copyrighted by any orthodox faith, or by the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, religion is a carjacking of the most natural state the human mind can be in, while pharmaceutical manufacturers actively seek to replace it altogether.
But I see this growing trend of denigrating the practice outside of orthodox theologies.
As exampled by Prosperity Doctrines, and the Nazi’s Positive Christianity, and Capitalism itself, we see this unnerving push for worldly success over spiritual fulfillment. Don’t evolve happiness, pop pills and fake it. Yet when material wealth is finite, then so too is material profit. The only endless bit is the suffering. The unnatural, artificial alternatives to spiritual or psychological well-being promoted as the carrot on the stick is the elephant in the room, to mix metaphors as I am oft to do. And while elephants retain long memories, our modern society prevents us from anything better than the briefest and most fleeting recall, widely and enthusiastically distracting us even from formulating our own thoughts and feelings. The majority of people today simply do not think for themselves. And this is very much by design. Everybody exists in segregated safe space echo chamber bubbles. This virtual world makes it criminally easy to manufacture that, to such extents that people want it IRL all the more, forgetting the broad history of wars over the dangers of such close-mindedness.
Another elephant in the room with no doors, the unobserved dilemma of dilemmas, is in modern society’s weaponization of the rights to free speech. This train of thought incidentally also serves as a great means with which to distinguish liberals from leftists.
The concept of legalized free speech should fundamentally guarantee legal protections, but not protections from social ramifications of said speech, elsewise it amounts to the imposing of ideas. Mandated speech is the opposite of free speech. Criminalizing piss-takes or shit-taste is censorship. Legally, in public venues, all words must be protected. By all means clock their lights after the fact, but objective law cannot be used to enforce opinion, popular or not, because it leaves pathways wide open for misuse. Nobody wants to acknowledge this because everyone ultimately wants to wield the whip themselves, rather than abolish it altogether.
Although always purported to promote free speech, safe spaces are merely rebranded segregation. Essentially they are one and the same thing, means for censoring unwanted or unpopular ideas. Universities fundamentally exist for young minds to be challenged with new ways of thinking, alternate perspectives, etc, but nobody learns anything when locking themselves inside bubbles thicker than scar tissue and echo chambers more hollow than a Trump’s oaths. Popular or not, meaningful or not, lessening the discussion is definitive censorship. I don’t believe “progress” should mean catering to the point of inability to work out problems unaided. In the country, if you get sheltered too much you get tenderfoot. You develop no tolerance. You can’t forge metal without fire.
Having an opinion is actually a good thing, rare as it may honestly be in today’s world, where everything is repetition and reaction with no inch of hindsight or foresight. Both mental and emotional evolution can only come by propelling and objectively considering all voices, not by enabling certain voices at the expense of others. Equal rights does not equate to special privileges. That’s bias. Allowing the musical chairs of Powers That Be to set standards tends to end disastrously for the majority more often than not. Accomplishing that censoring upon ourselves, doing the bidding of our masters unbeknownst or not, meets with the same end. Avoiding conflict does not instill the ability to resolve conflict. Trump is feeble-minded because he’s been sheltered his entire life. That’s the result. The whole purpose of gated communities is to block out an awful lot.
The law should never be weaponized for dictating which opinions are permissible, just as it should never be weaponized to dictate the public’s response to whatever opinions expressed. And as with the Golden Rule, we should not put ourselves or each other through that, either. Everybody must be permitted to reach their own conclusions, to learn their own truths, and to suffer the consequences of their own actions. Or why bother even pretending that freedom truly matters in a society?