My friend Karen Hadley wrote:
I’ve had a realization about how a society can drive its population into drug use.
Over the centuries, Man has naturally been drawn to the Divine. He has sought knowledge of God and gods. If you erode a population’s interest in or sense that they can participate in this search, that population is left with the physical universe and goals related to material success to engage with. So Man seeks piles of money, big houses, trips around the world and sensations of the flesh as signs of success.
If he fails at those endeavors and loses any hope of success in the material realm, what echelon lies below that? Blotting out the pain with drugs and drink.
So how do you drive humans into drug addiction and alcoholism? Remove faith and God from the lives of humans, then feed them vast quantities of false information about relationships and finance; provide them with misleading models of success so they feel defeated before they ever make an effort.
Further, create an atmosphere of insecurity, fear and anxiety.
The susceptible among the population will reach for drugs (medical or illicit) and alcohol to make the pain tolerable. But a certain number of them—far too many—will lose their lives in the effort to blot out that pain.
And thus you have the path America has been on for the last several decades. This erosion from the Divine to the defeated is continuous, relentless and perpetrated in the tiniest, most minimally-offensive and most logical-sounding increments possible.
Many of us work every day to reverse this descent and return Divinity to Mankind as its birthright and true nature. (Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)