We said it a million times and we’ll say it forever: bans and prohibitions come from the mentally, morally and emotionally inadequate. You don’t know how to handle it? Forbid it!

Paternalism and prohibition are extremely addictive, immensely more than a good cigarette. That is because the controllers create closed loops: as things are forbidden by those who already don’t know how to handle them but want to feel and be powerful nevertheless, the victims of prohibition lose the ability to handle what’s forbidden along with many other things too. What is not yet forbidden (and the growing inability to handle it developed in the meantime) creates fear. Mental inadequacy does not allow the acquisition of the proper way to manage what creates the fear, thus prohibition becomes the “solution” once again.

Bans have become the way to govern by bodies of intellectually retarded politicians. Unfortunately, for people, the race is to adapt and to obey fast enough rather than dethroning the authority that forbids, as it is indeed easier to obey (and to whine) than it is to get organized and be courageous enough to put an end to the current state of affairs.

In that way we get to absurdities like this: kids are forbidden to hug friends in schools. We are not joking. Here is the link to the Fox news report that tells the story. Please observe the tone of surprise of the announcer, as well as that of the parents… and imagine that chances are that those people have welcomed smoking bans! The two things are unrelated? Not at all. Rather, they have strong common denominators: the belief that prohibition is “therapeutic” against the paranoid threats that are proposed to us, and that regulation of the smallest manifestations of our life is the way to good government, health & safety, and “progress” while in reality the diametrically opposite is true.

We can easily envision a similar tone by the presenter and parents, had a smoking ban been proposed in 1977; but, today, the same presenter certainly would not make faces were she to announce the umpteenth smoking ban in some county. What has changed? Certainly not our scientific knowledge on passive smoking, which is nothing but a pile of frauds. What has changed is our perception of the function of authority – from the custodian of our liberties and sovereign right of self-determination to that of paternalistic manager of our priorities and behaviour. We are devolving into a society of children and – like all children – we like to cheat (ourselves) by defining that “social progress”.

Something to think about.

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