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Social The Delphic Oracle - Know Thyself: P&S Social Ampitheatre of Doom

^ That's freaky!

When I was in Sikkim, I went to a temple that held a similar sort of relic: the bone of an accomplished Buddhist monk, with a very clear indentation shaped like a picture of the Buddha sitting in a lotus position and meditation.

It's things like that that sometimes make me wonder if The Man Behind The Curtain sometimes likes to fuck with us. :)
 
so was alcohol the most influential drug on humanity ?

mostly due to quantity of people overindulging in it
cuz ovioulsly psyxxx are way more influential on 1 to 1 basic (btw sorry im drunk...)
((so time to say i love youz (or most of youz)))

pea ce
 
Most influential in what way?

I think a lot of Westerners would be very surprised to discover how peripheral alcohol is in the social lives of a lot of nonwesterners (though by no means all -- Korea comes to mind). Only slightly under half of all people EVER drink it, and that includes a sizable number who only consume it on rare or special occasions.

In my experience, the whole thing about moderate drinkers being, on the average, a bit better socially adjusted and mentally stable than teetotalers, really only [but very much] holds true for Westerners. In China, India, and most parts of Southeast Asia I've been to, not really drinking much at all leads to a perfectly normal social life. Is this because the native peoples of Europe used alcohol so long as a water disinfectant that their bodies and brains evolved an alcohol-shaped hole? Or is the prominent place of alcohol in Western social life the cause, and the marginalization of those who choose not to partake the effect? It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Caffeine, on the other hand, is used regularly by 70-something percent of all people, most of them pretty regularly, IIRC. Although the benefits outweigh the harms for just-above-threshold doses of both alcohol and caffeine, I'm pretty sure the harm/dose curve is steeper for alcohol, especially on the body.
 
I think he meant in the formation of social institutions that are quite reinforced by this time (ie the formations occurring in the past).

Beer seemed to be key for the formation of civilization (a source of pure hydration for livestock that was resistant to stagnation). So the theory goes by an old professor of mine :D
 
^ what about caffeine? It all but heralded the enlightenment in
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Indeed, although my training leads me to think of Western Imperialism before the Enlightenment. :) Alternately, there is the place of tea in the 'East' prior to major trade with 'the West'.
 
^ I'll throw a monkey wrench in all this and say that to my knowledge of archaeology and history, tea served the same function in the east as beer and wine did in the west -- as a way to make water potable.

Coffee is native to the horn of Africa. The word comes from the Arabic 'qah wah', meaning 'bitter water'. It was discovered far more recently than tea (or alcohol), and promulgated by a chap named Baba Budan in the 600s or so.

Since its first appearance in the middle east, coffee was associated with places of intellectual discussion, because of its stimulant effect. This tradition continues to this day in, say, college town coffee houses. Even the 'faux funky' decor, and notable quotables that characterize the aesthetic of Starbucks are a vestige of this tradition.
 
Our obsession with caffeine certainly says a lot about humanity. I certainly don't believe it has pleasant effects at all. I believe it's primary use is to harness productiveness. We seem to be completely preoccupied with progress towards something... Or perhaps we are just trying to keep up with one another. Caffeine can make a man more successful which achieves him a better mate and he wins better genes for his offspring. Or maybe we just acquire small addictions that we use as a crutch that seems to take the pressure off the self like religion.

I dunno.. I am sure there a lot of factors that go into it.
 
Coffee did get a huge boost in popularity during the enlightenment. I have The Encyclopaedia of Psychoactive Substances in front of me by Richard Rudgley. Its a brief work about social and historical stuff more than pharmacology.

Ency of psych subs said:
The spread of coffee drinking during the Enlightenment was partly due to the fact that it fitted so well with the prevailing notions of the era, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch put it: ‘Coffee functioned as a historically significant drug….it spread through the body and achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically. With Coffee the principle of rationality entered human physiology.
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I can not find the references but I think I remember that there was an anti-coffee movement that argued that coffee was making people to cerebral and uninterested in love, romance, and baby making.

The introduction of chocolate was controversial also but chocolate was accused of being an inducer of passion. On the whole though I don't think caffeine or chocolate move most people very far from their base personality. The most historically significant drug of all time is alcohol but the drug that has caused the most social change in the last fifty years has got to be cannabis followed by tryptamines.
 
what about ergoloids such as LSD? If we are too center on US culture the past 40 years then it has obviously had a tremendous impact on some of our minds.
 
Samadhi Smiles, Ahhh....thats an interesting story...

I disconnected his sense of self and personality from his physical body and doomed him to wander in limbo as a non-physical thing between possible worlds until he could somehow manage to make it back to the actual world.

In the meanwhile I stole his avatar and total belief set and post on behalf of him for purposes of harm reduction.
 
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