📕 Do not prohibit (Brilliant article, be sure to read)

We are surrounded by prohibitions. Prohibitions are the main function of the state, an important function of religion and the sacred duty of a citizen (everyone after all necessarily has an opinion - what else would be forbidden). The most disturbing objects of prohibitions are weapons, drugs and sexual services. Those very themes, in the discussion of which rational arguments are intertwined with archaic prejudices, often abolishing the very possibility of a reasonable discussion. But it is on their example that the shortcomings of prohibition are highlighted most clearly.

In one long-running program, devoted to the debate around the legalization of drugs, the spectator voiced a characteristic position on the topic. She stated that she agrees with all the arguments in favor of legalization, but morality does not allow her to accept such a position. Thus, she gave a wonderful definition of her morals - this is something that blocks the work of the mind.

There are many rational arguments in favor of the fact that all three phenomena must be legal:

1. The trade in small arms gives an incentive to the development of industry and contributes to public security. Studies show that free arms law is one of the factors that reduce the level of violent crime. Legal trunks occasionally fall into the hands of psychopaths, but 99.9% of civilian weapons are used for peaceful firing at targets, or even simply dusting in closets.

2. Holland is a thorn in the eye of all fighters with drugs. The Netherlands legalized some kinds of psychotropic substances, decriminalized the rest ... and did not turn into one big drugstore, as they were supposed to. Now Holland is one of the safest countries in the world. They managed not only to socialize drug addicts, but also to reduce their number. Against this backdrop, the American doctrine of war on drugs turned into a billion spending and jammed jails with zero exhaust emissions.

3. If weapons and drugs can still be attributed to real harm, the harm to the sexual industry is purely imaginary. And the prohibition in this sphere is based only on considerations of morality. But it is obvious what harm the workers of the industry itself make by depriving them of state protection and handing over to bandits (including bandits in police uniforms).

Often there is a variant when a person fanatically advocates the legalization of one, but equally fanatical - against everything else. The American conservatives have turned the weapons Second Amendment into a cult, but are willing to spend billions of people's money to protect "public morality" and the content of goons from the DEA (drug agency). Social democrats for sex work and drugs, but against weapons. And eurofeminists stand for the criminalization of sex services, but they will not give up a good jamb (if it is not twisted by a male chauvinistic pig, of course).

What unites these people? What is their common morality? I came to this conclusion: it is the belief in the maliciousness of man. As if a man is a wild beast, and only severe prohibitions with the prospect of public quartering keep the beast in the cage. The weapon? Yes, everyone will shoot each other! Drugs? Everyone will become addicts! Prostitution? Everyone will go to prostitutes! And in general, the economic activity of a person should be surrounded by a deaf fence of prohibitions, because this cowardly beast in a free market is bound to cruelly exploit his fellowmen.

The basis is fear. Fear of human nature. Fear is physiologically similar to aggression, which is the standard response to the stimulus - to prohibit, restrict, and taboo. But is man that bad?

📕 Absolutely other monkeys

There are several billion people on the planet who believe that man was created by a supernatural being, then he is tempted by another supernatural being, that's why (attention, logic!) Only observance of religious taboos of millennia ago keeps us from falling into the abyss of violence and debauchery. The joke is that even old scientific concepts copied these ideas in many ways.

In the 19th century, Grandfather Freud put forward the hypothesis that the human psyche consists of three parts. The super-ego, woven from social taboos, restrains the pressure of primitive instincts coming from the "inner beast" of Eid, and the soaring Ego eternally rushes between them. It sounds plausible. Until you ask a simple question - what kind of instincts are they and where did they come from?

Everyone heard that "a man came from a monkey." In fact, man is a monkey with common apes with other monkeys. What is characteristic, too, are monkeys, only extinct. The closest brothers in a big monkey family for us are the chimpanzee. Our common ancestor lived only six million years ago.

Chimpanzees are aggressive creatures, spend most of their time fighting for social status and in collective raids on neighbors. The chimpanzee reigns promiscuity, and the females are in a subordinate position. They are also characterized by cannibalism - they can eat the representative of another flock (pre-scoring him to death), and sometimes there are unique people who are not averse to eating a fellow's cub.

For a long time there was a view that the extinct human ancestors are such big chimpanzees with small eggs. The whole social structure was projected onto the person - from promiscuity to status games (from here went stupid ideas about alpha and omega-males, which are sure to be found in any little book "in psychology"). Well, how can you leave this unattended, and even with weapons?

The first blow these ideas received with the discovery of bonobos or dwarf chimpanzees (the common ancestor of chimpanzees and bonobos lived about a million years ago). And when they took seriously for the study of bonobos, they found out: if the chimpanzees "all life is a struggle", then bonobos prefer to replace conflicts with sex, and hierarchy with egalitarianism. At the same time, bonobos are more intelligent than their aggressive relatives. To this day, the male bonobo named Kanji remains the smartest, after man, monkey on the planet (knows more words than the average Russian policeman). However, the libertine habits of the bonobos frightened the zealots of morality even more than the cannibalistic inclinations of their brethren.

The debate was heated: to whom of the two relatives were the ancestors of man closer to aggressive cannibals or to sex maniacs? What will we return, if we stop listening to the church, the state and other bosses? Severe conservatives sympathized with warlike chimpanzees, enthusiastic hippies - loving bonobos.

This continued until in the 80s anthropologist Owen Lovejoy did not explain - the ancestor of man (ardipithec, 4.4 million years old) did not look like a chimpanzee. He went a completely different way - through monogamy. Ardipithecus formed stable pairs, in which females cared for the young, and males for the support of the family. Sexual selection of males promoted the manifestation of kindness and care, but not "dominance". The need for force competition for females has disappeared, the fangs of males have decreased, following the level of aggression as such. This opened up opportunities for cooperation and gave a strong impetus to the development of language and intelligence. As a result, you read these lines, and our evolutionary relatives continue to jump on branches.

Our eerie "inner beast", which for centuries allegedly restrained by social institutions, religious precepts and the mysterious Superego is a peace-loving altruist-family man. No cannibalism, no unbridled orgies. Complete boredom.

📕 Instincts? No, did not hear

Even more interesting is the situation with instincts - we simply do not have them. According to the strict definition of ethology (the science of animal behavior), instincts are congenital behavioral structures, and quite complex ones (not to be confused with reflexes-simple reactions to the stimulus). For example, a marriage dance or an aggressive demonstration. There is a "principle of instinctive bias" - the learned reaction shifts towards the instinct, if at least something resembles it. This can both interfere with learning and contribute: the social instincts of horses allowed them to domesticate by simply replacing the leader with a man, whereas with zebras they could not do anything like that.

But the person does not see such a shift. Instead of instincts, we have stereotypes that arise in teaching and upbringing. This explains the diversity of social structures in different parts of the world, the existence of many primitive tribes with the most savage mores. The proponents of the concept of the "internal beast" rejoice to tears when it is possible to find another pedophile-cannibal lost in the jungle of the Amazon. But all these wonderful customs are the fruit of adaptation to hostile conditions. How long will you live in the jungle of the Amazon, being a good-natured and altruist?

A number of psychological experiments demonstrate "human nature" in an unattractive light. For example, the experiment of Stanley Milgram, in which the guinea pig, following the orders of the chief in a white coat, was ready to torture a person with a current almost to death. Or the famous "Wallford prison experiment" Phillipp Zimbardo, interrupted in the middle - the guards "guards" too much tortured the experimental "prisoners".

These cases have something in common - they are situations created by means of restrictions and prohibitions. Armed "guards" and unarmed "prisoners" in confined space are an artificial situation based on fear and notorious inequality. And the electric shock and white robes of Milgram ... If the Stanford "guards" got brutalized literally in a week, what did you want from people who all your life were taught to obey the authorities on the assembly line parents-school-army unquestioningly?

This is our bad nature needs limitations, but on the contrary - bad behavioral stereotypes are created by prohibitions and restrictions. By placing people in obviously unequal conditions, creating an artificial shortage of resources, repeatedly pushing them to something they would not do voluntarily. Ugly behavior is the product of an ugly environment. Like the poisonous jungles of the Amazon, prison or army.

📕 Do not prohibit

The situation with weapons is the simplest: either I have a weapon, a neighbor, or both of us do not. The second option gives the illusion of security, but does not take into account the fact that armed people will still remain (criminals and the state). Thus, the conditions of the very "prison experiment" are developing - some are armed, others are not. Who will supervise the overseers? Zimbardo?

The danger of drugs is justified by the fact that an animal is not only dangerous, but also weak-willed - in the pursuit of pleasures, it will drive itself to death, robbing neighbors in the same way. The axiom assumes the statement that drug dependence can not be resisted. These views are based on the old experiments of the 60's - the rat was placed in a special box (skinner box), and pressing a single lever caused injection of the drug. The rat pressed, then again, and again. And then I went to rob other rats and put rats on the needle (in fact, no, of course).

But a group of scientists from the University of Simon Fraser suddenly thought about ... Do you keep a rat in a tight cell for weeks, then put it in a box where there is nothing but a lever, and yet you are surprised that she becomes a drug addict? And if you are so? They conducted another experiment. No, they did not abandon the Conservative alone of St. Quentin's prison with only one syringe in his pocket, although that would be interesting. They settled a lot of rats in a vast aviary with a bunch of toys. Among the inhabitants of this enclosure, called the "Rat Park", wishing to join the morphine joys turned out to be much less than among the unfortunate victims of single cells. Morphine dependence of the rats preferred a healthy run in the wheel, communication with cousins ​​and other healthy HWLs with a straight-through.

Finally, the myth of "insurmountable dependence" was dispelled by Karl Hart, a psychiatric psychiatrist at Columbia University (incidentally, himself a former drug addict and drug dealer from the black ghetto) - he conducted the experiment already in public, and from a "risk group" (residents of the black ghetto ). Each morning, they were brought a dose of cocaine, and then offered a choice: either one more dose right now, or money at the end of the experiment. Most, oddly enough, chose the money.

The human brain according to the latest data contains 86.1 +/- 8.1 billion neurons. The idea that a whole variety of possible neural connections and impressions can be replaced by some one extraneous substance is a very bold idea. You can and can, but first you need to take away the alternatives, all to one.

What then creates the negative that is associated with drugs? Restrictions and prohibitions that create a bias in the economy. They are so inflating prices that a small percentage of those choosing "lever" is forced to engage in criminal activities to ensure its penny (in other circumstances) needs. He moves away from society, becoming a concomitant criminal industry. The forbidden drug business is so profitable that whole regions begin to specialize in its maintenance (and even entire countries - Latin America, the Golden Triangle, Afghanistan - which, in particular, is in the well-known report), losing any alternatives. When a society decides to fight a drug addict, it puts it in a cage like a rat, thereby only strengthening its attachments. Vicious circle.

Well, sex industry - according to statistics, sexual violence is much more in those countries where there are legislative bans, religious taboos and other spirituality: Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. Orthodox Muslim countries are leading the number of pornographic requests in Google. So prohibitions protect people and bring up morality. Perhaps, with the protection of family values, they cope better? But, as we have already found out, these values ​​appeared before prohibitions (dushka-ardipithek is slightly older than paranoid Old Testament prophets). I also venture to suggest that sex industry, on the contrary, strengthens family values. After all, the availability around cheap sex services automatically emphasizes the importance of other things exclusive to family life, such as mutual trust. Well, or the ability to cook.

📕 Trader fear

The sale of weapons, drugs and pornography is a lucrative business (especially if it is banned). But far from being as profitable as the trade of fear. In the US alone, during the 40 years of the "war on drugs", a trillion dollars was spent and 45 million people were arrested. For comparison, the entire world market of cocaine is now estimated at $ 88 billion, and its consumers in 16-17 million people. The whole industry (police and prison) safely feeds at the expense of taxpayers, frightened by the invented threat of general narcotization. And how many politicians made a name for themselves on promises, finally, to defeat drugs? Hardly less than the populists from the opposite camp, screaming about the rare victims of legal weapons, but not noticing the many lives saved by them (by reducing the level of violent crimes). The struggle for morality is another bread issue, on which a huge number of unpleasant creatures parasitize. From the Arab sheikhs to the functionaries of the ROC and ultra-right gopnik.

They all seek to frighten us, make us think worse of ourselves than we are. The journal of the drug-addict Evgeny Roizman is full of news like "a smoky schoolboy hacked his grandmother with an ax". And the very idea that someone can smoke a joint without killing a grandmother seems to him blasphemous. News line FSKN looks approximately the same. As a purposeful attempt to instill in us a phobia. For the purpose of its subsequent monetization.

The logic of the sellers of fear is simple: the gun hanging on the wall will necessarily fire, your daughter will definitely become a prostitute, and the son - a drug addict. But the real world is much better than it seems: guns are rusting on the walls, porno actresses are for some reason the daughters of high moral Mormon families, rats abandon morphine, drug addicts get doctorates in prestigious universities in America, and freedom works better than prohibitions.