Why vice now?
The world of today isn’t all that different from the world of fifteen years ago, with one major exception—gambling and weed are legal now. There have been some technology improvements too—mostly smartphones, and more of life is lived in digital space—but on a day to day basis, nothing too Jetsons-ish has arrived and changed life up all that much. But if you told me fifteen years ago that weed and gambling would be totally normalized and legal, I wouldn’t have believed it.
It is a pretty big change. Some guy in The Atlantic is melting down about how America has gone too far in legalizing vice. But I’m not interested in whether it’s “good” or “bad.” What’s more interesting is what it represents, and why it’s happening.
Why are gambling and weed legal now? Because it’s the last, best way to suck some money out of the impoverished mass of people while it still has some money left. 63% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck, so most people have very little money left. This is the last chance that the owners of the country have to extract some wealth from them. And when people are very desperate, they’re more likely to resort to drugs, to numb the pain, and gambling, as a shot at saving themselves from financial ruin.
What else does the sudden normalizing of vice mean? It means that morality in a capitalist system is fake, and a joke. For a long time, weed and gambling were considered personally immoral and socially destructive. That was an official part of the moral code in our capitalist society. But now that the economy and society are collapsing, and there are fewer ways for the ruling class to extract money out of the masses, the moral code is thrown out the window.
Morality in a capitalist system is always a lie—it is just whatever they can get away with. For a while, they could get away with pretending like they actually cared about the morals of weed and gambling—like they actually thought those things were “bad.” But now that they are running out of time to suck the last few pennies from the decaying corpse of the working-class before society collapses once and for all, they can no longer afford that fiction. Morality is always a fiction like this—and whenever shit gets real, it always goes out the window.
It’s difficult to visit a park and avoid the corrupting stench of weed and it makes me angry every time it assaults my senses. But again, there is strength in forgetting the mistakes of others and one’s own past. Knowing the destruction the drug wreaks on their soul can afford an intense shadenfreude that almost serves to alleviate the bloodlust their public habit arouses. You see the majority of new weed smokers to be middle class whites, though I have no statistics to back that. I assume their impassioned rationalizations have more to do with their capitulation to downward mobility and replacement than any Rogan-tier insights on health or “wellness”. If they live to pass on their genes, their children will be more ardent drug warriors than the most brutal Irish Catholic conservatard cop with qualified immunity at the height of the bush era, and lolbertarians will be begging for legal imprimatur to forcibly vacate potheads from public spaces.
You don't answer your own question by saying that vice increases because society becomes more vicious, that's just displacing the problem. Why does society is becoming more vicious? Is the question "why" even pertinent here? How would one begin to answer a question like that? I've virtue ethics becoming more and more popular with academics, as a kind of desperate bid for an alternative which is still anchored in subjectivity. The problem of course is that you need to think a virtuous collective subject ; the individual subject being vicious can be explained away through psychology, but a collectivity as being vicious is another kind of problem. It's not a very good problem, in my view. How are we meant exactly to grasp the collective subject as a whole and judge it as good or bad? I mean I guess one might want to do this in order to feel better (perhaps in the immediate, non-virtuous sense : ranting on about how the world is shit), but how is this of any use, politically or philosophically?