Every now and then, in a rare moment of repose, I like to put myself in the shoes of a social planner—a person who plans societies—and imagine what I would do to make society run “as it should.”
Of course, how a society should run is hardly a neutral question. Instead,it’s a question that depends on the particular interests of those doing the asking. A “benign” social planner, one who works on the basis of generous assumptions about individual liberties, collective goods and higher purposes, will have very different ideas about running a society from a mastermind who just wants to maximise the ease with which his own class, or the autocratic ruler he works for, can keep the hoi polloi quiet and extract as much value from them as possible. Even so, despite these differences, both “good” and “bad” social planners have plenty in common, not least of all the willingness to make decisions on behalf of other people that those people would not otherwise choose to make themselves. It’s easy to call for sacrifice when you’re not the one giving anything up, right? Both are also willing to use secrecy and obfuscation, even lies, if they believe the means justify the ends.
The tradition of social planning is a deep one in Western culture, stretching back to the very beginning, to the Greek philosophers. Plato was maybe the first truly full-scale social planner in the Western tradition, at least whose written work survives.
In Book II of the Republic, Plato has his mentor Socrates muse on how a society could be controlled simply by ensuring the ordinary people ate only a vegetarian diet. Nothing else. This is a part of the Republic that readers and commentators tend to forget, focusing instead on things like the famous Noble Lie, the eugenic sexual practices and Socrates’ insistence that poetry and music would be banned in an ideal republic, to ensure the proper moral education of its citizens.
Although the section on vegetarian diets and social control is brief, it’s very instructive. Plato’s Socrates seems to have believed that vegetarian diets suppress what the ancient Greeks called thymos, or spiritedness, which includes the drive to excel and compete. Thymos is something the ancient Greeks believed all men possessed and could develop. Indeed, properly developed thymos—developed through things like working out in the gymnasia and participation in the agonal contests that were at the heart of life in the ancient Greek city-states—was considered an essential grounding of citizenship. In the dangerous little thought-experiment presented by Plato’s Socrates, however, thymos is a threat to social harmony.
The implication is that, if men are less spirited, they’ll be happier with their lot and they’ll get on with living their lives, without being a pain to each other or, more importantly, their rulers.
Painting of a scene from Plato’s Symposium (Anselm Feuerbach, 1873)
In the present day, I can certainly see how making a society adopt a “plant-based” diet could make it easier to rule. Or, indeed, the whole world. I’ve actually made that latter premise the subject of a book, The Eggs Benedict Option, in which I consider how and why we’re now being told the entire planet needs to eat a uniform plant-based diet. To do so would mean surrendering total control of the food supply to corporations, a process that has been underway for well over a century, with serious repercussions for our independence and individual prosperity, but it would also have huge implications for our health, including reducing men’s testosterone levels significantly. A low-fat plant-based diet has been shown to reduce men’s testosterone levels by as much as 25%, making it one of the single most effective interventions if you’re looking to reduce levels of the hormone that makes men what they are—or, rather, what they should be.
Testosterone is important because it is, in many ways, a proxy for thymos. Plato’s Socrates was right. As dozens if not hundreds of scientific studies tell us, men with more testosterone display more thymotic behaviour. Men with high testosterone are more motivated. They have a greater sense of agency. They’re more inclined to express unpopular, minority, views in the face of a majority that disagrees with them. They’ll meet aggression face to face with aggression, rather than backing down.A society of men with testosterone levels of 1200ng/dl will be significantly harder to rule than a society of men with testosterone levels in the “normal” range today, which can be as low as 300ng/dl, and is only getting lower. This is beyond dispute, as far as I’m concerned.
Another way you might craft a docile population is to get everybody hooked on a euphoric or soporific drug. Something crafted for that purpose, like Soma, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Or even marijuana.
I’m not the first person to suggest that the promotion of marijuana and its associated products as opposed to, say, tobacco might have more to do with social control than health. In one of his final monologues while still at Fox, Tucker Carlson railed against a proposed move by the FDA to ban all menthol cigarettes outright.
“[Our rulers] hate nicotine,” Tucker said. “They love THC. They’re promoting weed to your children, but they’re not letting you use tobacco, or even non-tobacco nicotine-delivery devices which don’t cause cancer. Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind, and THC makes you compliant and passive—that’s why! They hate it. It’s a real threat to them.”
Big Agree
Tucker Carlson: "They're promoting weed to your children but they're not letting you use tobacco or even non tobacco nicotine delivery devices which don't cause cancer. Why do they hate nicotine? Because nicotine frees your mind & THC makes you compliant & passive." pic.twitter.com/my9eMabueB
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) January 21, 2023
Anybody who has used both drugs will know that their effects are about as polar-opposite as it’s possible to get. A writer looking to sharpen his creativity does not choose coffee and marijuana, unless he’s an idiot. But it’s not just the mind-numbing and sedative effects of marijuana we should be worried about when we’re thinking of the aggregate effects of the massive growth in its use.
Marijuana is now legal for medical use in 38 of 50 US states, and for recreational use in 24; although it remains illegal at the federal level. Cannabis has become the sixth most valuable crop in the US after corn, soybeans, hay, wheat and cotton, in that order. 2,834 metric tons of cannabis were produced across 15 US states in 2022, with an estimated value of $5 billion. Cannabis production and use are heading in a very clear direction—the opposite of tobacco.
More people in the US now smoke marijuana than tobacco, according to Gallup polling. Sixteen percent of Americans surveyed said they currently smoke marijuana, against 11% who said they smoked conventional cigarettes. Half of all American adults were cigarette-smokers in the 1950s. Now, say they’ve smoked marijuana, whereas only 4% admitted to doing so in 1969; although, given the social stigma associated with its use, the figure was probably greater than 4%. Even so, it’s a stunning reversal of fortune. Americans now overwhelmingly see cigarette smoking as a “very harmful,” with 83% of adults selecting that response in a 2019 survey. About half of all respondents in another survey, from 2022, said that marijuana is a positive force for good in society.
Truth is, we simply don’t know whether that’s actually the case, even if we’re restricting ourselves, for the moment, purely to the individual health effects of marijuana and not considering its broader effects on behaviour, and especially political behaviour.
The extent of marijuana consumption today is belied by polling which focuses on smoking and ignores the consumption of other products like oils and gummies infused with CBD and THC, two marijuana extracts. Far more than 11% of the population are likely to be using some form of marijuana product, and they’re using them in all sorts of novel situations.
ashton / Wikimedia Commons
A new survey-study, for example, claims that 11% of 12th graders have used delta-8-THC vapes and gummies in the last year. Delta-8-THC is a variant of delta-9-THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana. It’s only been available on the US market since 2018 and, as such, there are no federal regulations restricting its sale to minors. Delta-8-THC vapes and gummies are now a fixture at gas stations and they’re readily available online. There are no reliable safety data on delta-8-THC.
Just over 2,000 12th graders completed the “Monitoring the Future” survey and answered questions about their delta-8-THC use. The survey is considered to be a “gold standard” for tracking substance use among teenagers. The participants were selected and their answers weighted to ensure the results accurately represent the demographics of the U.S. population.
Of those surveyed, 11.4% reported using delta-8-THC in the past year. Among those who had used delta-8-THC in the past year, 35.4% said they had used it 10 or more times.30.4% of respondents reported using marijuana.
The researchers behind the study are suggesting that delta-8-THC products should be given safety warnings on the packaging, but realistically, this isn’t likely to be much of a deterrent. If anything, it will encourage use.
Even more worrying is the growing trend of pregnant women using CBD oil to ease the symptoms of morning sickness, despite recommendations from the FDA and CDC that this may not be safe. Two studies last year suggested that consumption of CBD oil and THC while pregnant could have serious developmental effects on babies. In the first, the offspring of female mice given CBD oil while pregnant showed impaired problem-solving abilities and reduced responses to stimuli in key regions of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. In the second, testicular cells from human fetuses were exposed to CBD and THC and the effects on hormonal production were measured. The experiment showed that the cannabis extracts altered the expression of nearly 200 genes within the testicular cells, with the potential to seriously disrupt the production of vital developmental hormones, especially testosterone. In short, marijuana is an endocrine disruptor. Gynecomastia—the development of female breast tissue—has been observed in male marijuana users by physicians for decades.
Cannabis vape pen (Elsa Oloffson / Flickr)
Researchers are now trialing the use of CBD as a food preservative. Would you believe it? But all that marijuana has to go somewhere—remember, it’s the sixth largest cash crop in the US. This is a pattern we’ve seen repeated with other edible crops, most notably corn. When there’s a massive surplus, producers have to find somewhere for the crop to go, or they face ruin.
Back in the very earliest days of the Republic, the absurd abundance of corn was turned into whisky, and for a time America was known as the “alcoholic republic” for its sheer consumption of cheap liquor and the drunk men and women who were visible wherever visitors to the fledgling nation went. Then, in the twentieth century, after the bottom fell out of the European market at the end of the First World War, corn found a new home in processed food, along with novel industrially produced ingredients like vegetable and seed oils and margarine. It’s not an exaggeration to say that processed food was created not to satisfy a demand for long-lasting convenience products, but simply to find somewhere to put stuff that would otherwise go to waste. This also explains the creation of new corn-based food ingredients, including high-fructose corn syrup, which over the last 50 years has been insinuated in ever greater quantities into every conceivable food product, from condiments to hot dogs. High-fructose corn syrup was marketed as a replacement for traditional table sugar, but things worked out quite differently. As well as consuming unheralded quantities of table sugar—150lb a year—Americans now consume 60lb of high-fructose corn syrup a year too.
I think it’s safe to say that Americans are probably going to be eating marijuana products in the very near future, whether they know it or not. At present, the research on marijuana as a preservative focuses on using CBD in a gel emulsion to coat fruit and vegetables, and it seems to work well, extending their shelf life for weeks. But you can bet CBD will be used as a preservative ingredient within processed food soon too. As I say, all that pot has to go somewhere.
The effects of consuming CBD on a regular basis in food—American children now gain 58% of their daily calories from processed food—are simply unknown, just like the effects of consuming CBD oil while pregnant or smoking a delta-8-THC vape every day while you’re still at school. If the history of foodand medicine in the twentieth century is anything to go by, it will only be long after people have started consuming CBD-laden food and consuming other marijuana products copiously that we’ll have any indication of whether or not that might be a good or bad thing. And, of course, the problem then is that, in a real-world setting, causality is much more diffuse, and disputed, than in the lab, as ten thousand other harmful substances and lifestyle factors are thrown into the mix.
If I were a social planner, looking to intervene and mould society from the wings, out of the darkness, I’d be thankful things were so. I’m talking hypothetically, of course.
