Monday, May 23rd, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
As blogger and amateur porn creator I’ve found myself indulging in stuff that some people find squicky or at times even horrid. I have any number of reasons for why I feel no need to apologize for my activities. One, easy to articulate, is that it’s just a brute fact that eros is an outlaw. There’s another, though, which has long lingered in the back of my mind which I haven’t made all that explicit up to very recently, when I’ve found someone who did it for me.
Very intense blogger Sister Y, in a post which at the moment is currently my second all-time favorite (after this) rightly calls out people for what she labels “cheery social policy.”
Why are drugs, prostitution, gambling and suicide illegal, when they clearly give so much relief to suffering people? I think it is because, at a societal level, we are deluded into thinking that happiness is possible, maybe even easy or likely, without these things. I have called this cheery social policy.
The fundamental problem with this sort of cheeriness is the assumption that a good life – a pleasant life – is relatively easy to achieve. Cheery people are able to hold such a belief because they are able to ignore – and perhaps can’t even conceive of – the suffering of a significant minority of the population. A good life is not easily achieved for many of us.
There is a majority belief that we need not use extraordinary means to achieve a happy and meaningful life. Behaviors that deviants engage in, perhaps in pursuit of a tolerable life – weird sex with lots of people, say, or using steroids or marijuana or LSD or benzodiazepines – strike cheery people as perplexing and frightening. For a cheery person, these behaviors are wholly unnecessary – life is perfectly tolerable without them. And they increase the risk of harm! Who wants harm?
What the cheery cannot imagine is the importance, the function of these behaviors, and others like them – the pursuit of the interesting, and the temporary suspension of the intolerability of existence, which intolerability (for many) the cheery do not even perceive, and therefore do not properly weight as a problem.
(Read the whole thing, but only if you’re not easily offended by people who aren’t optimists.)
Reading these paragraphs, something clicked for me, because it “squicky porn” could easily fit onto the list with “drugs, prostitution, gambling, and suicide” as stuff that helps un-cheery people keep their heads above water, hedonically speaking. In my own life, during some of the long, dark periods it probably did have that role. Keep this in mind: something you dislike, something you even find revolting, might be to someone else the difference between keeping going and going under.
Half a lifetime of observation confirms to me that we inhabit a society poisoned by optimism. We belittle the problems of people for whom life is suffering by pretending that with a bit of therapy here or a bit of social reform there or turning to Jesus yon that almost everyone can achieve happiness. Wrong. Dead wrong. Many people have very unpleasant lives, and this unpleasantness is pretty much intractable. Ask Sister Y if you don’t believe me.
The mental model of prohibitionists — at least, those who are not just sadists but who have some fragment of compassion in them — appears to be something like this: life is basically good for everyone, and so if we somehow coercively take away what they call “vices,” (drugs and porn and all) then people will be left with good lives, perhaps better lives. Again, wrong. For many people, life is just not good. The very things you call vices might just be what gets them through their days — or nights.
So there’s another reasons, should you need one, to stand up for the stuff you don’t like. It’s not just that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like then by the time they come for the stuff you do like you will have already lost. (Thought that in itself is an excellent reason.) It’s that if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, you’ll see not just lives blighted, but lives ended.
