The liver is an organ. The heart is an organ. The brain is an organ... you are intellectualising a mechanical process. If your liver isn't functioning properly, do you take medication for it, or tell someone not to so that their dissatisfaction with life isn't removed?
If you asked them whether they were a heaven drinker and they said yes, would you tell then to take a medication or to stop drinking?
If someone's thyroid isn't working properly, and thyroxine gives them the amount their body needs, do you tell them to stop taking the thyroxine?
Suppose they're taking an iodine-rich heart medicine, wouldn't it be best to see whether they have a horrible diet beneath their arythmia?
You are looking at the brain as if it's a magical organ, simply because it produces the conscious experience of "you". If it's given the chemicals it needs to function properly, your life will improve, because your attitude, which is just the internal state of your brain, will improve. When your brainstate is improved, it produces options and choices it never produced before. Those options create a better future.
I don't think the brain is magical at all. What seems more like magic is a label of "correct" level of brain chemicals.
The circuitous path you are talking about is the one you are presently on. You can't move past it because the organ (your brain) which you need to move past it with, can't see past its pain... just like when your back hurts, it's like a wall of pain in your mind...
Everyone moves between circuits. Everyone has a routine after all. I worry that when "my pain" goes away I will be content with a position in society that I should be "grateful" for, but is actually beneath what I could achieve if I followed my instincts.
If you gave a coal worker regular morphine injections, for example, perhaps he would be more grateful going to the mine. If not, perhaps he would be pushed over the edge, run away... Maybe find an education, get a better job, or die.
He is taking a greater immediate risk, but is death worse than the drugged life that otherwise awaits?
You can talk forever about whether or not being tormented is a good fuel source for this or that etc etc. I'm not telling you to do one thing or another.
What I'm saying is when you've had enough of enduring internal torment and pain, you will then seek help. Until then, you will try to think and rationalize you're way out of it... because the thing with which you are communicating with me atm (your brain), is not functioning properly.
And it is obvious to anyone reading your thoughts that it is so. The reaon it isn't obvious to you, is because the tool with which you would make such an assessment with is actually the one that's not functioning normally...
Is "normal" reasoning better than "abnormal" reasoning? As you've pointed out, an abnormal mind doesn't have the same values as a normal mind. But the reverse is true as well. You are rationalizing (i.e. providing reasons for) your position to at least the same degree as me, so far.
Neither of us is telling the other how to think, but i'll ask again: when you were in my position (if you were) did you also doubt whether quashing your suffering with a drug was the right choice?
Have you ever listened to an alcoholic or a drug addict describe, some in great detail, how they don't have a "problem"?... That's how you sound.
No, I haven't. But I have listened to countless office workers (I worked in an office for 5 years, by the way) describe, in great detail, what seemed to me patently absurd reasons to continue what I saw as a degrading existence. I imagine you could find many parallels between their stories and those of drug addicts, with little imagination.
For example: everyone admits that suffering is universal. And the simplest explanation for the near universal reliance on stimulant drugs (caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc.) in the work force, if not that it makes more bearable and perpetustes a self-destructive mode of existence?
No doubt many will scoff at the comparison of these drugs to alcoholism... which to my "abnormal" way of thinking only completes the analogy between the "normal" citizen and degenerate drug addict.
