Personal Responsibility

There is a book called The Truth About Addiction and Recovery. I've spoken to people who follow the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) model who are actively hostile to the concepts in that book.

One person gave me a piece of their mind about how wrong the book is and how AA is the way to go and talked about being a "dry drunk," in other words still really an alcoholic in her opinion though they had stopped drinking. And she said some not very articulate things that seemed to be an attempt to say "After you take away the alcohol, you still need to deal with the ideas and thought processes and prejudices or you're not really done."

That doesn't actually disagree with the book in question.

The History of Alcoholics Anonymous 

There was a group of alcoholics who had been alcoholics for decades and it was literally killing them and they still could not seem to stop. They were hospitalized and dying and formed a group where they:

1. Admitted they were alcoholic.

2. Admitted they had no control over it.

3. Gave it up to God to handle.

And that worked for that initial group, so it became a treatment model. 

And today a lot of people get referred to AA because they went on a bender at age nineteen. That's not the problem AA was designed to solve and the reality is most people drink less as they get older.

AA was aimed at longtime alcoholics who could not stop though it had destroyed their lives and health and was literally killing them. In desperation, they admitted they had no control over this and that helped them.

What the Book Says

The book says that you see more alcoholism in cultures that blame the alcohol and explicitly see alcoholism as something you can't control and you see less alcoholism in cultures that hold you responsible for your behavior. 

In places like Italy and I think Japan, they make allowances for the fact that people do stupid stuff while drunk and may be rude, crude and socially unacceptable, but there is no attitude that "Alcohol is the work of the devil and once you take a sip, you are out of control."

Cultures that blame the alcohol see more heavy drinkers and more people who abstain entirely and won't touch the stuff. Places like Italy routinely serve wine with family dinner with children present who may themselves get a small amount of watered down wine with a meal.

So in Italy:

1. They do a lot of social drinking under social circumstances where people expect you to keep it clean.

2. Most people have experience with alcohol and know how it impacts you neurologically and they know if x is reasonably blamed on the alcohol or that's just an excuse.

3. There is no concept that you lose all control and can't help yourself and can't stop after one sip.

In places like the US, alcohol is frequently subjected to Sin Tax and frequently sold in places like bars, casinos and strip joints that are adults only environments and where part of the reason for that is there are sexual displays or people are looking for explicitly sexual relationships: "hookups" where you agree to sex with someone you don't really have a relationship with.

America is more religious than most Europeans countries and infamous for sexual hangups we associate with or blame on religion, a la "Protestant puritanism." Sin Tax on alcohol and Dry Counties where you can't buy alcohol are associated with strongly Christian places and probably trend towards lower education levels.

So you can't readily say religion per se causes this. My belief is that religion and similar social phenomenon are frequently an attempt to control behavior under circumstances where the populace in question doesn't have adequate knowledge and resources to handle the thing in question without it being a disaster or excess burden.

If you have Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD), no condoms and no birth control, you make an edict from GOD that you shall burn in HELL for all eternity if you have premarital sex because the price that everyone pays for casual sex that spreads disease and results in unintended children where you may not even know who the father is simply too high. Without adequate options for mitigating the issues and adequate education for everyone so that's common knowledge, if you can't scare the youth into mostly not doing this, you don't have a functional society at all.

Alcohol is a social lubricant. One thing we know that it actually does is lower inhibitions. That's why it gets called liquid courage.

In the sexually uptight US, from what I have read, most initial sexual encounters involve alcohol. 

I never did that. I don't typically engage in casual sex. I talk to people and White men and only White men sometimes act like I must be throwing myself at them because I was chatty and they become disrespectful and then act baffled that I run hot one minute and cold the next.

So I believe America is generally less sociable than a lot of countries and White Americans especially somehow trend towards being too socially dysfunctional to effectively deal with sex without large numbers of people relying on a shot of liquid courage and this is a root cause of what gets called Rape Culture.

I've seen comments online where some gal was saying roughly "If we weren't so hung up, we could have a piece of paper showing we were recently tested and negotiate hookups." I think I didn't reply because my understanding of life, the universe and everything is if a woman is willing and her target audience is men, once word gets out, there will be a line down the street and around the corner and her new problem will be trying to convince people she's not interested in hooking up with them in specific.

Historically, it was believed that alcohol caused pedophiles to molest kids. Then at some point they did a study and concluded that in reality pedophiles drink to facilitate their crimes.

I have never heard anyone suggest that "We all know if you get drunk, little kids are suddenly HOT!" 

We have expressions like Beer Goggles to describe going home with an ugly woman because it's three a.m. and all the pretty girls left long ago with someone and you have kept drinking and adjusted your standards down the later it gets and the drunker you are.

So we know people are more likely to have sex because they become less inhibited and we know it impairs judgement, but people don't suddenly think gay sex or child molestation makes sense because they are drunk.

I have a long-standing interest in topics like addiction and alcoholism because my brother who molested me was a cocaine addict and my father drank heavy for years and then simply quietly quit without anyone ever describing him as an alcoholic and without attending any kind of treatment program like AA.

My mother never drank because alcohol made her violently ill, so she was a "t-totaller" minus the judgy bitch part. She never touched the stuff and also didn't care that my dad drank.

My mother explained that by saying "He was never a mean drunk and there was always enough money." So in her view, his heavy drinking wasn't causing problems, therefore it wasn't a problem.

My parents were from different cultures -- dad was an American soldier and mom was a German national when they met -- and there was a language barrier. He pursued her hard and for some years early in the relationship it was apparently a great romance and they had a lot of cutesy stories from well before my birth.

Dad once called mom while out drinking and playing cards and told her he was hungry and coming home and please cook dinner. Hours later she calls him back and says "Bill, your dinner is getting cold." and he says "Woman, you don't tell me when to come home."

He was so drunk he didn't remember calling her and telling her to cook dinner. And they laughed about it and told that as a humorous story for decades.

Another time, he was drunk and asked her "And when I'm X age, how old will you be?" over and over as if he thought their age difference would shrink. 

She was an extremely beautiful woman and twelve years younger than him. She got mistaken for younger than she was and he got mistaken for older than he was in part because he lost all his hair in his twenties to malaria. So people sometimes thought he was her father and that apparently bothered him.

Those are the ugliest stories I ever heard about my dad being drunk. My mother never felt that drinking gave him a pass on personal responsibility and like places like Italy or Japan, she made allowances for moderate dumb behavior fueled by alcohol but would have probably left him if his behavior had been abusive.

My dad was a two time decorated veteran who fought in World War II and Vietnam. He drank heavily while he was a soldier and there were lots of family stories about his heavy drinking from back in the day but I never personally saw him drink heavy in my lifetime that I can recall.

He retired from the Army when I was three. I can recall him having a beer with dinner when I was about four years old. When I was seven, he was diagnosed with a heart condition and officially swore off alcohol and never touched the stuff again.

There was no treatment program, no wrestling with the issue and no health drama like delerium tremons. You get the DTs when you go cold turkey as a heavy drinker.

Alcohol suppresses dreams. I think he drank so he could suppress nightmares about war and sleep enough to do his physically demanding job.

And then he retired and there was no threat anymore of going back to war and he just drank less without planning to do so. By the time he dramatically swore off alcohol, it was a minor detail making it official.

Decades of trying to sort out why my brother molested me, whom I had adored prior to being molested by him, and reading everything I could get my hands on pertinent to this personal obsession has turned up one plausible explanation: Pedophilia may be a head injury syndrome caused by head injury in childhood.

So pedophiles are people attracted to children because of brain damage in childhood and child molesters are pedophiles who act on that attraction knowing it's a heinous crime and they PLAN their crimes and drink or take drugs to lower their inhibitions prior to seeking opportunity to molest.

That's what the research says: They plan their crimes and they drink or drug to facilitate their crimes.

That means the decision to molest children was made sober and you can't actually blame drugs and alcohol for it. 

Having done therapy and dealt with a lot of personal baggage and sorted out what life did to me with regards to my sexuality, I think if you plan your crimes instead of seeing a therapist or physician or spending your time obsessing about how to fix yourself, you are responsible for your actions, head injury or no head injury.

If you are capable of hiding it and planning the crimes so you can cover it up, you are legally competent. If you absolutely cannot control yourself in the slightest, you don't secretly molest kids for years and successfully cover it up.

People who have some dramatic head injury where you absolutely cannot stop saying offensive things and doing offensive things end up in asylums or prison in short order.

On Metafilter, someone told an anecdote about realizing someone they knew was probably a non-offending pedophile who chose to never be alone with kids. Some incident where they were asked to do something and declined made the person aware they probably found children attractive and chose to arrange their life to never have opportunity to molest kids.

Another piece on Metafilter was about a sixteen year old who realized he was a pedophile and chose to start a support group for pedophiles similar to AA where one condition was you had to not be molesting kids and there was commentary in the article about one member being on dangerous ground and probably on track to fail because they had resumed seeking out situations that represented opportunity to offend.

I'm abundantly familiar with carrying around a lot emotionally and not knowing how to get your sexual and emotional needs met. I'm not saying it's easy.

I have no reason whatsoever to believe that most people find it easy to get through life while refraining from hurting other people. I have never met anyone who hasn't been a victim of some kind of injustice and hasn't been harmed in some way in life.

Life isn't fair. Even wealthy, privileged people get bullied or have a parent die or have other experiences that money doesn't fix.

But I have abundant reason to believe that if you accept excuses and agree that people simply can't help it, you see a great deal more bad behavior than if you hold people personally responsible for their actions.

New solutions grow out of people holding themselves responsible and seeking solutions because we don't currently have any. If you want to have compassion for such people, work on things like new treatments for head injury or best practices for preventing head injury.

Don't say "Poor baby! You obviously can't help it!"

The evidence says otherwise. The evidence actually says they not only can help it, they need drugs to facilitate it because they often won't do it sober. 

And then they choose to take drugs to facilitate it. Therefore they could choose to find some OTHER answer.