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percy-l - [percy-l] Tom Moore as a thief

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Subject: Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion on Walker Percy

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  • From: Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>
  • To: Walker Percy List <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [percy-l] Tom Moore as a thief
  • Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2009 01:42:47 -0600

It's been about twenty years since I've read _The Thanatos Syndrome_, but
as I recall it opens with Tom Moore returning from a prison stint for
dispensing illegal pharmaceuticals through an abuse of his state-sanctioned
script privileges. Today we hear that in the last ten years, the
prescriptions for SSRI's have doubled - while within the day we also find
out 70% of our children may be vitamin D3 "insufficient" (a condition known
to cause depression, not to mention autoimmunity, allergy, obesity/diabetes
and various viral, fungal and bacterial infections). This too is a topic
we have hashed out on the list before.

We live in an era where people campaign against smoking because it's
unhealthy and harms others but at the same time they also campaign to let
"sick" (I think Kierkegaard would have some fun with this word) people
"self-medicate" with "medical" marijuana. There is, of course, no
condition under which the combustion of any substance could be construed as
healthy for the lungs. It's certainly not medicine when there's no
clinical trial to determine optimum dosage for given diseases. "Go home
and smoke three lids as needed for pain" is hardly scientific.

Supporters of legalization have yet to convince me you can have a rational,
free market in a good whose proper use denies individuals of that very
rationality needed to make free markets work in the first place. This
quandary is as true for dopamine-dispensing sugar-filled slushies as it is
for hillbilly heroin, albeit in different degrees.

My question is this. After watching all the rich people dropping dead
lately because they live in a world that can't tell them no - Michael
Jackson, Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith - what is Tom Moore's crime
really? Is he guilty of giving people a little too much "mind-expanding"
fun or is Tom Moore really guilty of stealing rationality?

Can the "self" ever safely medicate? Especially with a substance that
seems to destroy or suspend a very necessary part of that self? Are we, in
fact, suspending this self in the name of "freedom" or
"consciousness-expansion" because we just don't like its constant nagging?

Is there more to the dopamine delusion than drugs?

Did Percy have in mind Charismatics too? The
go-with-your-gut-not-with-your-head George Bush crowd?

Senator John Ensign doesn't really apologize for his affair and cites King
David as a way of saying that whatever his faults are, he's doing God's
work so it's "all good" whatever his sins. We have to take his word for
that - and "whose" word exactly is his word? What's up with that?

Given the recent revelations about "The Family" in Washington political
circles where men like Hitler and Pol Pot are revered as "divinely"
inspired, are we witnessing an upsurge in the age-old self-aggrandizing
theological fallacy of foreordination? You're either saved or you're not
so nothing really matters? Nothing happens without God's okay so if Hitler
had power, his actions must have been somehow blessed or sanctioned.
(Ironic that "The Family" predates the digging up of the "Gospel of Judas"
by about fifty years.) It totally effaces any system of free will, choices
and consequences. It's a psychopathic doctrine of narcissism that's
understandably magnetic for people with wealth and power who don't want to
be held accountable.

Is this the grandest bender there is? It's got to be hard to sober up
after a dose of that.

How broad is this epidemic of self-justification?

Does that awful book _The Secret_ provide a secular bookend for this
'revival?' If you just wish hard enough something will come true? Triumph
of the will... uber alles... with extra TARP funds on top?

Why are we constantly trying to get rid of that part of the self that helps
us probe the external world and defines us in relation to that world - to
others?

Joseph Goebbels said, "Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of
character." Is there anything left in modern media which really challenges
that?

So is Tom Moore's real crime theft? Is he like the guys toying around with
heavy sodium intoxication? Are they just bigger, state-sponsored thieves?

Is he a thief of rationality? Are there others out there trying to steal
free will? Or do we just collectively pretend they have that ability?






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