“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Civilizational Drink
Alcohol is dead and you have killed it! You, the cautious optimizer. You, the sterile class. You, the frightened moralist. In your quest to avoid risk, you’ve banished revelry. In your war on vice, you’ve murdered joy.
America congratulates itself: fewer people are drinking. Gallup reports only 54% of adults now consume alcohol, the lowest rate since 1939. Public health bureaucrats cheer. Tech moguls sip mushroom tea and beam about sleep optimization. The sterile class sees this not just as good — but as moral.
They envision a world where no one sings off-key at midnight, no one raises a glass in joy or grief, no one stumbles home from the bar with a stupid grin and a new friend. They want a world of low volatility, zero risk, and no revelry. A society of sober units optimized for output and compliance.
But a fall in alcohol consumption does not signal the rise of health. It marks the triumph of sterility.
Alcohol is not just a “habit” or an “indulgence.” It is one of humanity’s oldest medicines, rituals, and social technologies. The winepress predates the hospital. The brewery predates the pharmacy. The tavern predates the HR seminar.
If alcohol were purely destructive, it would have been abandoned centuries ago. But it has not. It has persisted through plagues, empires, famines, and reformations. It has been condemned by prophets, taxed by kings, outlawed by governments, yet it remains.
Why? Because it fulfills permanent human needs: festivity, release, communion, trust. It is Lindy, a cultural technology that has survived because it works.
And if something that Lindy is abandoned, civilization itself begins to forget how it was built.
Alcohol as Medicine Before Medicine
Wine was not invented for pleasure. It was born of necessity, survival. In much of the ancient world, drinking water was unsafe. Fermented beverages were safer. They killed bacteria, delivered calories, and carried trace nutrients.
Hippocrates prescribed wine for fever and wounds. “Wine,” he wrote, “is an appropriate article for mankind, both for the healthy body and for the ailing man.” Romans added herbs to create primitive tinctures. Soldiers drank wine to dull pain and boost stamina.
Medieval monks brewed beer for sustenance during fasts, calling it “liquid bread.” It was calorie-dense, sanitary, and spiritual. In monasteries, brewing was sacred, a discipline of devotion and survival.
Alcohol functioned as anesthetic, antiseptic, antidepressant. Before lab coats and pill bottles, alcohol was the doctor of mankind.
Modern pharmaceuticals are fragile. They require patents, profit margins, regulatory approval, and brand campaigns. They rise and fall like consumer fads.
Alcohol has no patent. It needs no marketing. It is stable. Accessible. Time-tested. It was medicine before medicine and it still serves that function. Not just chemically, but socially and spiritually.
The Sacred Cup
Wine appears in the Bible over 200 times. Sometimes as danger. Often as blessing. Always as revelation.
Christ’s first miracle was not healing the blind or curing the sick, it was turning water into wine at a wedding. And not cheap wine, but the best wine, saved for last. The message was not hidden: joy is holy.
St. Paul told Timothy: “Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.” The Eucharist itself — the central sacrament of Christianity, consecrates wine as the blood of Christ.
In Jewish tradition, wine sanctifies the Sabbath and Passover. The Kiddush, a blessing over wine, initiates sacred time. On Purim, Jews are commanded to drink until they cannot distinguish good from evil, a ritual reversal that honors divine inversion.
Alcohol is not peripheral to the sacred. It is central. No other substance occupies this position. Not oil. Not incense. Not even bread. To reject alcohol on health grounds alone is not just reductive. It is sacrilegious. It flattens something rich, complex, and eternal into a data point on a wellness chart.
Aristotle’s Golden Mean
Aristotle taught that virtue lies between excess and deficiency. Cowardice and recklessness are both vices; courage lies in balance. So too with drink:
Excess: debauchery, addiction, self-destruction.
Deficiency: sterility, repression, humorlessness.
Virtue: conviviality, bravery, creative warmth.
Modern society misunderstands moderation. We see it as abstinence, as denial. But for Aristotle, moderation was the practiced art of knowing the right amount. Not none, but not too much.
True temperance is not fear of alcohol. It’s mastery over it. To drink well is to be human. To abstain completely, in fear or pride, is to risk losing contact with joy itself.
The Greeks knew this. Plato warned that the drunk is “no better than a beast.” But he also described symposia, ritualized drinking feasts where wine, poetry, and philosophy mingled. Alcohol was the solvent of stiffness. It opened the door to truth.
Our age does not suffer from excess. It suffers from deficiency. It is not too drunk, it is too dry. It is not too wild, it is too afraid.
Dionysus Against the Sterile World
Nietzsche saw in Dionysus the god of ecstasy, chaos, and creativity, the force that births new worlds. He wrote: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” The same can be said of wine.
Dionysus was not safe. He was not bureaucratic. He shattered norms, dissolved ego, inspired dance, art, and madness. But without Dionysus, Nietzsche argued, culture petrifies.
Our society has banished Dionysus. We track our sleep with apps. We measure our worth by productivity. We swallow pills instead of facing our shadows.
Modern man is compliant but uncreative. Efficient but impotent. Safe but sad.
A single Dionysian night reveals more about a man’s soul than a year of polite small talk. One song sung drunk carries more spirit than ten thousand Zoom calls.
Art, myth, and ritual all have Dionysian roots. Ban intoxication, and you ban the origin of culture. Nietzsche understood this. “What is not Dionysian,” he wrote, “is not eternal.”
Prohibition: The Futility of Suppression
America has already tried to suppress alcohol. The result? Chaos.
Prohibition (1920–1933) led to a black market boom. Liquor didn’t disappear, it went underground. Speakeasies flourished. Bootleggers thrived. Gangsters grew rich. The homicide rate surged. The federal government had to poison industrial alcohol to deter drinking, killing over 10,000 citizens in the process.
The 18th Amendment was repealed not because people stopped drinking, but because the state could not suppress human nature.
Wherever alcohol is banned, pathology blooms. The Taliban bans wine and beats women. Saudi Arabia flogs drinkers. There is no feast, no music, no trust, only control. Suppressing alcohol is not moral. It is anti-human.
Pharmaceuticals: The New Poison
What replaced alcohol? Pills. In place of alcohol, modern society prescribes pills. For anxiety: benzodiazepines. For sadness: SSRIs. For focus: Adderall. For pain: opioids. For loneliness: NOTHING. For life itself: endless pharmaceuticals.
Pharmaceuticals are sterile. They numb without uniting. They sedate without expression. They mask symptoms while killing song.
And they are dangerous. The opioid crisis kills over 100,000 Americans per year. SSRIs are correlated with emotional blunting and sexual dysfunction. Mass shooters are more often medicated than drunk.
A drunk man might punch a wall. A chemically numbed man might open fire. We replaced wine with Prozac and lost the dance, the trust, the spontaneous joy of human presence. The sterile world does not want us drunk. It wants us manageable.
What Alcohol Built
Civilization wasn’t built in silence. It was built in song, story, and drink.
The first cities arose near fertile land and fermentation vessels.
Beer predates bread.
The Code of Hammurabi regulated taverns.
The ancient Sumerians praised Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, in hymns.
American liberty was toasted in pubs:
The Sons of Liberty met at the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston.
The Whiskey Rebellion marked the first test of federal power.
The French Enlightenment was fermented in wine-soaked cafés. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, all emerged from boozy intellectual salons.
Monasteries brewed beer to fund libraries. Without them, much of Aristotle would have been lost. The entire American labor movement began in saloons. Trust was built over pints, not PowerPoints.
Remove alcohol from history, and half of civilization evaporates.
The Lindy Test
The Lindy Principle holds that the longer something has existed, the longer it’s likely to endure.
Why has alcohol survived while other substances vanished? Because it meets permanent human needs. Caffeine endures. Bread endures. The wheel endures. So too does alcohol.
If alcohol were purely destructive, it would have been abandoned centuries ago. Instead, it has survived every attack. It survives because it does something no other substance can: it binds. It frees the tongue. It lowers defenses. It fosters trust. It consecrates the feast.
It survives not because it is safe, but because it is human. It binds. It frees. It consoles. It makes men honest, women bold, and strangers into friends. It is the only drug that works in both joy and grief. At weddings and at wakes. Around bonfires and in cathedrals.
Pharmaceuticals are fragile novelties. Alcohol is Lindy medicine.
Restore the Cup
We are drinking less and living less. Friendships are thinner. Birth rates are falling. Marriage is collapsing. Parties have become awkward, stilted, or nonexistent.
The sterile world tells us to avoid risk, noise, intoxication. But it has nothing to offer in their place.
It says: take a pill. Count your steps. Obey your metrics. But it cannot teach you how to live, how to love, or how to sing.
Alcohol is not a vice to be eliminated. It is a ritual to be recovered. A medicine to be remembered. A companion to joy, and a consolation to pain.
Aristotle taught balance. Nietzsche demanded vitality. History shows that prohibition fails. The present shows that pharmaceuticals numb. The lesson is ancient, and it still holds:
Drink too much, and you destroy yourself.
Drink not at all, and you dry out your soul.
Drink well, and you rejoin the human story.
Let them keep their pills and their HR seminars. I’ll take the wine, the music, and the firelight. Wine endures. Beer endures. Whiskey endures. They are not relics. They are reminders. A civilization that forgets them forgets itself. Restore the cup.