The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Pain

Are We Doomed to Live In Hell?

I was in my 20s when I learned that the human body is capable of experiencing far more pain than pleasure, for far longer periods. I spent three months in the hospital, days screaming, weeks in pain, throwing up multiple times a day, crippled, and unable to move.

Recovery took years, and for months at a time I was in pain, near-crippled. The simplest movement would often occasion agonizing pain.

Earth isn’t hell, precisely. That’s a misunderstanding.

It is the human body, the vehicle through which we experience Earth, which makes this world Hell.

This isn’t to say pleasure and happiness and all the good stuff isn’t real, it surely is, but it is a pale shadow of the suffering that the human body can impose upon its resident consciousness.

People will say things like, “Pain exists to let you know there’s a problem,” but that’s a very partial explanation, so partial it’s wrong; you can experience pain so severe it is crippling, rendering it impossible to do anything to reduce the pain or address the underlying problem. If pain were strictly utilitarian, it would cut out far below, “Scream until you’re hoarse and don’t move at all.”

The human condition is, thus, biased towards evil. We have much more capacity to suffer than we do to experience pleasure and the pain we can experience is far greater than any possible justification.

There are those who take advantage of this. Civilization was built on it: The cruelties that various kings and governments have imposed, the tortures, are legendary. Civilization “domesticated” humans, but what is meant by that is similar to what we mean when we say we broke a horse. A small group of humans banded together, formed strong ties to each other, and then used unimaginable cruelty to force everyone else to do what they said, or else.

And they meant the “or else.”

(Christopher Columbus, having dogs chew the intestines of still-alive natives who didn’t bring him enough gold is the sort of thing we’re talking about. Or the Tudor habit of burning people’s intestines while they were still alive, and watching. Or various Chinese routine judicial punishment tortures.)

The human body has much more ability to experience hell than heaven, and some humans have taken advantage of that to rule in Hell, over the rest of us, using the most fiendish evil imaginable. If there is somewhat less of this today than thousands or hundreds of years ago it is only because, like a wild horse who now “willingly” carries a human on its back, we, too, have been domesticated; broken.

Our entire society, though more subtle than, “burn their intestines while they’re alive,” is based on nothing more or less than the fear of dying in poverty or homeless if one doesn’t do whatever various bosses (masters) tell us to do. This is, in the first world, nowhere more true than the heart of our modern civilization, the United States, with its record-setting incarceration rates and routine police theft, violence, and brutality — even as homeless people’s tents are destroyed.

This is, however, a choice. Oh, we (probably) don’t choose to live in human bodies. But how we treat each other, and what we tolerate from our elites, well, that’s a choice. The human body can experience good, and even a lot of it, if we organized our society around that instead of using terror to break entire civilizations.

The human body means that Hell is easier to experience here than Heaven is.

But both are our within our grasp, we have simply chosen the easy path.


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The White Opiate “Epidemic” Is Not About Pain Killer Prescriptions

I’ve spent a lot of of my life in pain, and often in a LOT of pain. I’ve taken a lot of pain killers.

The best, in most cases, were opiates. Codeine and morphine (forget all the fancy pills designed to cost more, morphine does the job).

Now, in the US, white middle class people are getting addicted to opiates in large numbers and there are screams to make it harder to get opiate prescriptions for pain.

But the simple reality is this: According to the large, annually repeated and representative National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse starts with people using medication that wasn’t prescribed for them–obtained from a friend, family member or dealer.

In general, new addictions are uncommon among people who take opioids for pain in general. A Cochrane review of opioid prescribing for chronic pain found that less than one percent of those who were well-screened for drug problems developed new addictions during pain care; a less rigorous, but more recent review put the rate of addiction among people taking opioids for chronic pain at 8-12 percent.

It is already hard to find a doctor who will prescribe opiates for chronic pain. They’re worried about law enforcement coming for them, and they’re paranoid about addiction. When I was in my 20s and in a lot of pain, it took me seven doctors to find one who who would prescribe opiates, and I was in so much agony, standing from sitting down was nearly impossible and I often didn’t sit at all, knowing I might be stuck for hours.

This level of pain, in Canada, and it took seven doctors before one was willing to chance that I might not be lying. One asshole rushed me out of his office after screaming at me that I was a fucking addict who just wanted a fix.

In one of those neat catch-22’s, if I hadn’t been in so much pain, I would likely have beat him to a pulp.  (Yes, yes, I said that someone like that is someone I would have broken if I could. It took almost a month for me to find a doctor who would help me, that man put me through agony most people cannot even imagine.)

People who are in serious pain need serious pain killers. That often means opiates, sometimes it means cannabis. People who stop chronic pain sufferers from getting the pain relief they need are responsible for huge amounts of suffering.

Don’t do that.

When I was in hospital, in so much pain I could not even push myself up in bed, I said to my doctor at the time, “What if I get addicted?”

He replied, “Take the pain relief you need and we’ll worry about the addiction later.”

Later I was slightly addicted–I couldn’t sleep without a pill. One night I simply stayed up until I slept without it. As it happened, that was about a 40 hour day. But the addiction was broken, and it wasn’t much of an addiction to begin with.

Even if it had been a terrible addiction, I still would have said that the pain killers were worth it, because without them I was in so much pain I could barely walk. I remember taking well over ten minutes to walk a single block. I once ate breakfast at a restaurant standing up, because I knew if I sat down I might not be able to stand again.

Pain.

It sucks.

Don’t deprive people who need pain killers of them.


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