It’s threads like this that make me especially glad I’ve joined up here.
Before Europeans started farming ten thousand years ago, our ancestors were all hunter-gatherers. When the transition began from a low-carb hunter-gatherer diet to high-carb farmers’ diets, the human digestive system had to change as well. The problem is that the Celtic peoples remained herders (cowboys), which is close to hunter/gatherer, until very recently whereas Germanic and Mediterranean peoples have been farming for many thousands of years. What this means for purposes of our discussion is that the ability to drink alcohol responsibly came with having the farmers’ digestive system (farmers tended to consume huge quantities of beer and wine as food whereas herdsmen did not); those with the old Celtic herder digestive systems tend not to be able to handle alcohol as well. For example, since the American South is filled with Celts, the South had, and still has, relatively strict alcohol laws. This also explains why African Americans, and particularly Indians, suffer much higher rates of alcoholism than whites or east Asians. Whites and east Asians have been farming much longer, and have a much greater chance of having the farmer’s digestive system, which tends to handle alcohol better. Of course, this theory doesn’t explain other addictions.
Thank you for explaining this @Dunnyveg. This answers some questions for me.
A study I read conducted by the FBI showed that 99% of men convicted of domestic violence were never violent in past or future relationships. It was just THAT particular relationship that got them in trouble.
@BigDaddySnuff Would you happen to still have a link to or copy of this study? I would love to read the specifics. My second marriage was similar to the story you described. It never got that bad, and the police were never involved, but my wife was abusive and sometimes violent. I never hit her, but I did have to force past her in a doorway or hallway to put some distance between us a few times, and I still have a scar on my arm from one night when she was doing her best to provoke me - to no avail. But man, could she push my buttons and get me angry. In fact, on topic, before this relationship alcohol only intensified good times - during this relationship, at some point I realized that alcohol intensified anger as well. Point is, it never happened with anyone else I’ve been with. I thought we big nasty patriarchal brutish men were the only ones that beat on people just because we can!
BigDaddySnuff, your comments here are poignant, and mirror some of my own self-discovery journey in some ways. Would love to compare notes sometime, at the very least on shamanism.