Size Matters

A few friends were over the other night and prior to us delving into our delicious Cuban Cigars, we discussed the role government should play in people’s lives. The two opposing views were: (i) the government should ban behaviour detrimental to society; and (ii) the government should delineate given the severity of the detriment.

For example, casinos are a form of gambling, like bingos, so should they be lumped together as detrimental or delineated by some measure. We came up with “Social Impact Circles” coupled with “Enjoyment Circles” which led to circlepolooza.

You see by drawing circles on a blank piece of paper we could depict the relationship between the “Social Impact” on society to the “Enjoyment”of the individual. The larger the “Impact” the larger the circle and likewise for the “Enjoyment”. The larger the disparity, the larger the level of offense or inoffensiveness in reverse.

A casino circle was much larger on the “Impact” side than a bingo, as locales where they pop up suffer bankruptcies and thefts to a much larger degree than bingo locales. This would be a direct relationship to the ability to lose $1000’s in mere seconds at a casino, but physically impossible to lose that kind of money in a bingo.

Both are gambling and both give you the “high” but one is more in line with its enjoyment circle while the other is far more unbalanced and therefore egregious and dangerous. Conclusion: casinos-banned, bingos-on the fence.

Ok so moving on, what about smoking? The health impact is huge, so that gets a huge circle and the enjoyment would be comparatively small. I say this because first-time smokers look like the fireman that wasn’t wearing his mask and hacking up a lung. While long-term smokers look like they have an annoyingly hard to reach itch they need scratched with a nicotine fix, but how good is the delivery device when it only lasts 15 minutes?

Now Heroine is an itch scratcher people! Those people could wallow in their own excrement all day after that puppy. I mean how good is a drug when you don’t care if you are rolling around in shit?! Therefore, this is a big circle coupled with a big circle because excrement surfing is not good for productivity. Smoking-banned. Heroine-banned (only because the “impact” circle approaches extinctions levels haha).

Which reminds me, we should all be allowed a doomsday stash of Heroine. If that meteor from Armageddon is en route then I don’t want to spend 3 weeks thinking about impending doom. Let’s get some of that “1000 times an orgasm” thing going that Ewan McGregor talks about in Trainspotting....but I digress.

There are circles for simple pleasures like going for hikes, playing sports and watching TV where the enjoyment is comparatively very large to the impact, so those things are all good. I mean there are people who slip and fall and hurt themselves or die in a freak occurrence, but nothing is guaranteed safe and we need to live life.

Some of the more interesting ones were alcohol, for example, versus pot. Now I addressed this a few blogs ago, but drawing a few circles seals the deal. Booze has a larger impact circle than pot, while the enjoyment is on par for both. However, let’s not ban liquid courage just yet because it is still a pretty big enjoyment circle and for some of us, it leads to the biggest disparity in circles...sex.

Sex is one really crazy big circle (enjoyment) coupled with a comparatively small one (social impact). I know there is some stuff out there that might give you the pee stings and of course there is the odd trip-cancelling virus, but overall we seem to be growing mightily in the population department so let’s call sex a big win.

Now we have all seen the TV shows where someone is doing something that presses play on our internal soundtrack of “what is this idiot doing?” Like the Running of the Bulls in Spain, for example. 2000 lbs of hardened muscle and gouging horn in a constricted area with your 180 lbs of feeble monkey suit is just a bad idea. However, here the social impact is good. Darwin was right that we need a little survival of the fittest to thin out the herd a bit. Idiot dies = better society.

You see smokers cost the health care system a lot of money which translates into considerable pain spread to all of us. As for the skydiver that packs his chute badly? A small earthly dent and one less pollution machine in our closed system has negligible social impact.

Right now in the States there is a debate over Universal Health Care. The arguments boil down to costs...one side is saying the cost of such an endeavour is a job killer, while the other is saying the cost of doing nothing is a people killer. Sounds like simple circles to me.

See ya next week Top of the Food Chain!

-Life is complicated and far from perfect but it is still great