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"Meat. Meat, honey, corn porridge... Going hunting for baboon, antelope, zebra."
 -- Socolo, leader of the Hadza tribe,
    in response to the question, "What is the most important thing in life?"

How do you escape from an artificially imposed need? The need for meaning, for a higher purpose in life, does not seem to be natural or universal. As I explained in my previous post, the quest for meaning should be interrogated as a parochial social construct particular to latent Christendom, not as something essential to the human condition.

There are, of course, certain needs and drives which *are* essential to the human condition. You need food. You need water. These things take precedence over cultural programming. Let a person who calls themself a "nihilist" have their face shoved into the water and they will quickly find that there *is* something in life worth striving for, actually.

There are also social needs. I'm of the opinion that Homo sapiens is a species whose behavior may be fairly characterized as "almost eusocial". That is to say, our reliance on our fellow human beings is so great, our integration with human society so complete, that the only behavioral modality more social than ours would be that of a hive. We have come a long way from the troops of 50 to 150 individuals which characterize the other species of great apes, creating a social organism which totally eclipses the architectural and organizational capabilities of ants, termites, and bees. On the basis of this opinion of mine, I might even speculate that if human civilization endured in its present form for another million years or so, we would become truly eusocial - that is, we would lose our individuality and act in concert as cells of a huge body, with zero regard for self-interest and sole concern for the social interest.

As it is, our eusocial tendencies are already strong enough that in some cases, they can take precedence over our self-interest. Consider those who protest by means of self-immolation, hunger strike, et cetera. There is a photograph out there of a buddhist monk, sitting cross-legged and upright while engulfed in flames. He doused his body in gasoline and set himself on fire to protest the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the dictator of South Vietnam and representative of U.S. imperial interests. The self-immolator's need for societal justice and progress has outweighed his need for safety, comfort, and life itself. In the picture he is still sitting still. How is it possible for a social need to supercede a physiological need to such an extreme degree?

If you have ever attended Christian worship services, you may be familiar with the following experience. You get up with everyone else, you feel the music, you are singing with the congregation. The deep breathing and standing causes you to release endorphins. The singing, a fun activity, releases dopamine in your brain. Maybe the old 5HT-2a receptors get to see some action as mild hypoxia causes you to release small amounts of DMT, and you feel the holy spirit of God move through you. Areas of your brain concerned with socialization, vocalization, respiration, and conceptualization are all working in concert to produce a sense of commonality with your fellow churchgoers. This is an experience that has been carefully refined by two thousand years of liturgical practice, the product of social selection pressures favoring the worship practices that attract the most worshippers. The imprint of those social selection pressures is found at every level, from the acoustic properties of the architecture, to the evangelical doctrine promulgated by Paul et al. as a revision to the insular religious practices of Judaism.

This view of Christianity, as the product of thousands of years of social selection, might be compared to the development of the opium poppy. I couldn't find any conclusive answers as to why Papaver somniferum evolved to produce morphine and codeine prior to human cultivation, but once it fell into human hands, I have no doubt that we must have started to naturally select it to produce more of these compounds. The endorphin receptors have a biological purpose in the brain, a purpose that has nothing to do with what's good for the poppy plant. Endorphin receptors serve a human need: the need for comfort, the need for pain relief, the need to place your exhausted, injured body in a safe, warm, clean environment where you can heal and grow scar tissue and be ready to go out into the harsh world and fight again. This need is truly essential to the human condition. You have to sleep every night. When you are injured, you have to go somewhere where you can rest and heal. But the poppy plant has developed a biological trait, in fact a very complex metabolic pathway that's hard to recreate via chemistry, which exploits this human need. Of course, the subject-object metaphysical arrangement doesn't quite accurately describe this reciprocal relationship; it is equally true to say "we did this to the poppy" and "the poppy did this to us". Anyway, my point is, the same reciprocal relationship exists between Christianity, a mind virus which primarily inhabits the memetic sphere, and Homo sapiens, a multicellular eukaryote which primarily inhabits the biosphere. There is some essential need in the human psyche which Christianity has evolved to hijack.

Quitting opioids is famously very difficult. I'm very lucky to have never tried opioids myself. At the time of writing, the Wikipedia page for "Drug rehabilitation" states,

Different results have been reached for other drugs, with the twelve steps being
less beneficial for addicts to illicit substances, and least beneficial to those
addicted to the physiologically and psychologically addicting opioids, for which
maintenance therapies are the gold standard of care.

(source for this excerpt)

The same source says: "This process [of drug addiction counseling] begins with a professionals' first goal: breaking down denial of the person with the addiction". In the actual practice of trying to help people quit doing addictive drugs such as opioids, the first step is always to get the addict to admit that they are addicted to the drug. Suppose we want to treat the search for the meaning of life as an addiction, one intentionally cultivated by Christianity, one which has outlasted the hegemony of Christian dogma as the universalizing worldview of European culture. If the first step is to get the addict to recognize that they have a problem, then we have already taken the first step by recognizing the need for meaning as socially constructed rather than natural. How do we proceed from there? Unfortunately, current methodologies of addiction rehabilitation do not offer a consensus.

If you haven't heard of Rat Park, go look it up and read about it. Rat Park was a study into the causes of addiction, and it was a study that turned out to have a degree of replicability, which a surprisingly large number of psychological studies fail to achieve. Everything I have written up to this point should make it clear what I mean when I say this: Rat Park proves that socialism is the cure for addiction. We need more enrichment in our enclosure - we need an environment that does a better job of promoting play and socialization in addition to health and comfort. Karl Marx himself put it quite succinctly in 1843 when he wrote, "Die Religion [...] ist das Opium des Volkes". People whose endorphin receptors have only ever been stimulated by endogenous activity, rather than by ingesting opioids, do not feel a need for opiates. But once a person acquires a need for opiates, it becomes very, very difficult to escape this need and deny its power as a need altogether. The recovering opioid addicts I've personally known have all, without exception, relied on methadone to stay sober. I'm glad that methadone exists - it is truly fantastic that there is a safe, legal drug that is effective as a maintenance therapy for opioid addicts. However, it would obviously be very foolish for me to take methadone to suppress my need for life to have an ultimate meaning.

In the 20th century, the USSR and the PRC both started with the same approach for addressing drug addiction and the God itch: forced abstinence via criminalization. It's interesting to see how this has played out differently in Russia, which was Christian prior to the Revolution, and China, which was not.

The Soviet policy on most drugs was plain old prohibition, one of the few aspects of their socialist experiment that remained basically unchanged from beginning to end. Lenin's administration tried to implement prohibition of alcohol, but this was repealed by Stalin in 1925 - even the guy whose name is a byword for "authoritarianism" didn't dare put his authority up against the Russian people's thirst for vodka. Similarly, despite their best efforts, the communist party was never able to implement a blanket ban on religion altogether. Instead, the policy of the Soviet Union, toward both drugs and religion, was similar to the behaviors you might expect to see in an addict who realizes they have a problem, but can never quite stay completely sober; they might be able to quit some drugs while staying on others, or they might repeatedly "cut back" on their use without ever achieving more than a temporary reduction in the dosage, all the while verbally professing their earnest intention to eventually become completely sober. Nowadays, with this analysis, you might view the counterrevolutionary Russian Federation as a "relapse".

What fascinates me is the fact that the Chinese experiment appears to have been more successful. During the Century of Humiliation, the British Empire successfully dragged China into the global capitalist machine by getting the Chinese masses addicted to opium. Simultaneously, Christian missionaries from imperial Europe were attempting to get a foothold in the region by establishing churches and spreading the gospel. The difference between the prerevolutionary conditions of Russia and China is key here. Russia had been under the influence of alcohol and Christianity for a very long time. When the Soviet government tried to free the people of both vices, it was like an alcoholic struggling to kick their long-held habit. But in China, Christianity and opium were foreign imports, something imposed upon them in recent memory by outsiders with self-interested intentions. So when the Boxer Rebellion erupted to liberate the people from these insidious artificial dependencies, their righteous fury was equally directed at both Christian missionaries and opium importers. These two things must have appeared quite clearly connected in the eyes of the Boxers, as two sides of a coin. Wikipedia tells me that an unnamed Chinese official explained it thus: "Take away your missionaries and your opium and you will be welcome." The salvation brought by European imperialists who tell you that you need to be saved was as unwelcome as the comfort brought by a chemical which tells you that you need it to feel comfortable.

Unfortunately, I was born into a culture where Christianity has been foundationally influential. Thus, my situation confronting the search for meaning is more similar to the situation of the Soviet revolutionaries attempting to promote or enforce atheism. I can squarely pinpoint the search for meaning as an absurdity. I can accept that there may not be an answer to the question, "What's the point of it all?" But I have not yet figured out how to free myself from the question. When I am exhausted, when I am frustrated, when I am at my lowest, and I need comfort and reassurance, I can't continue until I have some response to the question, "What's it all for? Where does it all lead?" The literal answer offered by cosmology to this question is anything but helpful; current models predict that the ultimate fate of the Universe is heat death, i.e. an arbitrarily cold, thin, featureless Bose-Einstein Condensate. That answer to "what's it all for" leads me to "Oh, so this is all pointless, so why should I continue what I'm doing right now? Why bother doing what's in front of me?"

So, as long as I'm awake and sober, I go through the hard parts of life with the existential outlook of a heroin addict white-knuckling their way through withdrawal.

What else can I do?

Psychedelic drugs? Tried that, didn't help for very long. Religion? I have been intellectually incapable of taking religious ideas seriously for many years. Exercise, spending time with friends, transitioning my gender, throwing myself into my studies... Yes, these things help with the pain, but they all dodge the question. I would like something to just un-ask the question for me. I would like to never wonder what's the point of it all.

What else can I do?

If no one is going to give me a real answer to this question that's implanted in my head, and not a bullshit answer, and not just telling me to focus on something else, then I must simply live with the discomfort of not getting an answer. White-knuckling your way through withdrawal is your only option if you remain unaware of a more effective or gentle alternative.

Later, I guess.