I was reading about Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic rants, and his apology about being drunk* when I remembered this meme. I agree with the meme, that our brains tend to feed us what we’ve heard from our environment, but our conscious mind overrides that with our processed thoughts.

People use “he didn’t mean it, he was drunk/high” as an excuse for racist/misogynist/whateverist comments. The response is typically “you don’t become racist when drunk, you just drop your inhibitions and reveal who you are.”

But if you agree with the First Thought meme, what if being impaired isn’t revealing what you really think, but is preventing you from thinking at all, and just getting stuck on your conditioned response?

*Gibson is just an example. This post is not about litigating whether he personally is racist, but about this sort of behavior in general.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    The ancient Roman/Latin phrase for what OP describes is:

    En In vino veritas.

    In wine, there is truth.

    (thanks to antonim for the correction)

    The phrase goes back even further to the Ancient Greeks, the exact same meaning in Greek ( en oino, aletheia ), but the Roman/Latin phrase is more well known.

    People have known for literal multiple thousands of years that… people do not say stupid shit because they are drunk, the alcohol made them do it… people say stupid shit when they are drunk because they have these stupid thoughts and beliefs all the time, but are normally smart enough to not say them out loud.

    • Okokimup@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      The book I’m reading (Incognito by David Eagleman) mentioned exactly that.

      Robinson and Yarvitz, like many others, suspected that the alcohol had loosened Gibson’s inhibitions and revealed his true self. And the nature of their suspicion has a long history: the Greek poet Alcaeus of Mytilene coined a popular phrase En oino álétheia (In wine there is the truth), which was repeated by the Roman Pliny the Elder as In vino veritas. The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.” It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.” The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that the Germanic peoples always drank alcohol while holding councils to prevent anyone from lying.

      But there are many things that people have “known” for years that turned out to be untrue as our ability to understand the physical world increased. Now we’re finding that our unconscious mind accounts for more of what we think than our conscious mind can control.