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By Root 1076 0

its crazy myths. Think of the special “blue blood” of the aristocracy—a whole society, over a thousand years, based on the idea of special blood! Or consider how the actual lives of people through history have been dominated by the cultural myth of the sanctity of virginity. Consider the conviction that making money is vulgar. We think of ourselves as living more reasonable, happier lives because we are free from such myths and able to base our behavior on common sense and empirical science. But that isn’t true: we are swamped with cultural messages that are as subjective as those of any other moment in history. And when our culture determines our approach to happiness in a way that seems, in light of history, particularly limiting, it is right to take a good look at the situation.

Consider, for instance, that the difference between a society that encourages sad people to sip opium drops and one that encourages them to take Zoloft is not “the advance of science.” Rather, the difference is that nowadays everyone drives cars and handles money. Clearheadedness is more important now than it ever was. We devalue euphoria in our drugs—describing bliss as an unwanted side effect, like hair loss—because we value productivity. When it comes to the care of the body, our scientists search for longevity and not for euphoria. If experimenting on chocolate cake, our scientists will study how quickly it kills you, not whether the pleasure is worth it. These days all the bliss drugs are taken under the cover of another action—killing pain or inducing sleep—or outside the purview of legal medicine. This cultural bias toward productivity and longevity is so strong that it makes our euphoria decisions for us! The huge assumptions about happiness that guide our actions are based on myths, fantasies, cultural hypnotic trances. We have to snap ourselves out of them. Our “trances of value” keep us from things that might make us happy; indeed, they make us feel conflicted about the way we negotiate the choices that are left to us.

Historical perspective can so alter our assumptions as to make genuine happiness more available—sometimes in the flash of a realization. For instance, I’ll bet you think that the happiness you get as a result of drugs is less valid than sober happiness. I’ll bet that when you think, while in a period of drug-assisted happiness, “Gee, I’ve been happy a lot lately,” you hesitate to compare this time favorably with other, drug-free times in your life. Yet not all cultures tell people that drugs create fake happiness. How could drugged happiness not be as real as any other kind of happiness? The idea that drugs create fake happiness is a prejudice, an assumption about value. Historical study of the emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s opium habit makes me wonder why we are so convinced that drug-related happiness is not an authentic happiness. On some subjects, I fear I will sound like an apologist for indulgence, but I do not think it is morally justifiable for an able-bodied man or woman to devote huge amounts of time and energy to worrying about things that do not really matter much. Don’t you know people who are very proud, for instance, of their “healthy” diet, and other people who are very ashamed of their “unhealthy” diet? Shouldn’t these people be proud and ashamed of something of more substance? I am embarrassed by how pathetic some of our priorities will look to the future. I think it will be clear to future historians that these mythic obsessions with the body are responsible not only for the bony fashion model, but also for the extra-large average person, for whom eating becomes an expression of rejecting these shaming forces of control. And it will be clear that our myths about drugs are responsible for a lot of unhappy drug taking and a lot of unhappy drug abstaining. I believe that a moral imperative to be of use begins with a moral imperative to get one’s mind right, to be able to see nonsensical cultural assumptions—trances of value—for what they are, to develop oneself as a truth detector. There is