Page 95 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Here’s an example. Lots of people drink when they are feeling down because they think it will
chase their troubles away. That’s inhibition-thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s
plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But at other times, when an anxious
person drinks they just get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on
what the anxious, drunk person is doing. If he’s at a football game surrounded by rabid fans, the
excitement and drama going on around him will temporarily crowd out his pressing worldly
concerns. The game is front and center. His worries are not. But if the same man is in a quiet corner
of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking
puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate
experiences. 2
Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness
has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations,
one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional
comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you
don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can
resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact,
whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning
and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of
that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The
alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback
regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When
you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.

This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that
what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their
sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you.
As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”
But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a
crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the
conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations.
That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is
willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with
longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on
our behavior, it obliterates our true self.
So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of
“communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily
labor tended to be solitary, the hours long. There were few neighborhood or civic groups. The daily
demands of their lives made socializing difficult. So on the weekends, they used the transformative
power of alcohol to create the “communal expression” so sorely lacking from Monday to Friday.
They used the myopia of alcohol to temporarily create a different world for themselves. They gave
themselves strict rules: one bottle at a time, an organized series of toasts, all seated around the
circle, only on the weekends, never alone. They drank only within a structure, and the structure of
those drinking circles in the Bolivian interior was a world of soft music and quiet conversation:
order, friendship, predictability, and ritual. This was a new Camba society, manufactured with the
assistance of one of the most powerful drugs on earth.
Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It is an agent of transformation.

6.

In 2006, England had its own version of the Brock Turner trial, a high-profile case involving a
twenty-five-year-old software designer named Benjamin Bree and a woman identified by the court
only as “M.” It is a textbook example of the complications created by alcohol myopia.
The two met for the first time at Bree’s brother’s apartment and went out that same night. Over
the course of the evening, M had two pints of cider and between four and six drinks of vodka mixed