...sometimes it's the ones who try to help
that hurt the most...
- Days N' Daze
These are quick examples of our egoistic nature and its effect on the things that supposed to bring good into the world, but instead revealed that our nature turns things upside down.
The first example - outlaw and war on drugs (including alcohol and currently strengthening fight on smoking). Seems that people were tolerating and enjoying psychoactive substances for thousands of years. And then for some reasons people decided that this is evil and should be eliminated. Sharia law was among the first to implement such restriction and forbade consumption of alcohol in 7th century. However, further need to expand this restriction in some regions to all intoxicants shows, that people were actively replacing alcohol with other substances. Results of national prohibition are well known to everyone. So far the ‘War on Drugs’ resulted in insane growth of incarceration rates, contributed to internal wars in developing countries, already cost hundreds of billion dollars in taxpayer money. And we come up with something, that benefit further growth in drug abuse, as well as development of more toxic, more addictive and deadlier synthetic drugs. Meanwhile, the legal cultivation and exports of poppy or coca around the world, would bring hundreds of billion dollars in taxes and provide additional workplaces for millions of people in developing countries.
Moreover, there are still cultures where consumption of strong psychoactive substances or opiates are completely tolerated as a cultural heritage, and those societies continue to function and people live their lives.
I wasn't able to find such statistics, but it would be interesting to see charts representing decline in cigarette smokers and growth of use of antidepressants. My guess is that we could find some interesting trends in there.
Another example is desire of 'good and correct' people to help homosexuals to live 'better and proper' life. Similarly, to use of drugs, homosexuality was totally tolerated and even respected through the history around the globe. However, one day, people decide that homosexuality is evil and started to correct this by condemning or even punishing with death penalties. At first this motivation was supported by religions. Later science also joined the game and offered their 'help' through psychiatric interventions. Luckily these practices were eliminated from the list of psychiatric disorders by American Psychiatric Association in 1973. While WHO excluded homosexuality from the list of illnesses only in 1992.
It seems that finally people started to realize that human should not intervene into processes, just because they seem odd to us.
One more example is communism. Seems such a beautiful idea, absence of social classes, no state, nor money and everyone leaves and enjoys a perfect life. However, we see that in all countries around the world, where majority supports even less extreme forms of socialism tend to be quite poor countries. It was always difficult for me to understand how is it possible that biggest and richest in natural resources country was not even able to feed itself. As one of explanations for this phenomenon I was able to find in work of Yehuda Ashlag - "The Writings of the Last Generation" where he says that egoism is embedded in the nature of every person, as in any animal. Hence as the person knows, that he will neither be rewarded for his diligence, nor fear his own negligence. As a result, there will be no fuel to motivate himself to work.
