Nutshell Knowledge

IX.—Drink.

Some people blame capitalism for most of the unhappiness that maddens our century. But surely despair is older than capitalism; surely man has always been subject to pain, sorrow, sadness and death. Unhappiness is caused not by economic factors, but by our divine unrest. Long before the advent of modern capitalism, Shakespeare wrote of the "heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."

Western materialism has bred a habit of looking for causes. Since unhappiness is ordained in the nature of things, its cause is life itself. Its cause can be removed only by suicide, and certain objections to that course immediately suggest themselves. Western materialism leads us into this cul-desac. Eastern spiriturality teaches us that insteading of fighting our troubles we should try to escape from them. It was true wisdom that made Omar "often wonder what the vintners buy one half so precious as the goods they sell." Drink furnishes the easiest and rosiest escape from our cares.

If you can afford it, drink is a good thing. It furnishes a harmless expression for the bravado of youth. In the upper and middle classes it soothes a few twisted individuals whom prohibition would drive to far more dangerous neuroses and perversions.

Most drunkards, however, are poor people who manifest however, are poor people who manifest their innate stupidity by drinking when they cannot afford to. They go drinking even though they have to do without things that we consider necessaries. The swine get drunk with money that is needed for feeding and clothing their children. They have lost their moral sense and don't deserve to share the benefits of civilsation.

Some people say that if the government introduced prohibition of poverty the problem of drunkenness would almost solve itself. That's obviously wrong, because then the stupid sot class would have more money and would have more money and would buy more drink. The only way to solve the problem is by priceraising with or without "prohibition."

—Spectator.