Chua tries simultaneously to document the destructive effects of neoliberal globalism, and argue that these effects are not inevitable. She succeeds in the former, at least. I see no reason to imagine that we in the West are immune from similar pathologies of our own - more resilient, perhaps, but I think not perfectly so.

Your unfamiliarity is clear in your prior comments - which is not the judgment it may initially sound like. You would claim Netflix as the opiate of the masses. It is not. Opiates are. You want to see a world at war with itself? Every headline about the opioid epidemic is showing it to you, if you will only choose to see. Those who die of overdose are among the battlefield casualties of the war I describe. Those who have not yet done so are among its walking wounded. There are many other sorts of casualties in this war, of course. But rather than complicate the issue, let's concentrate on these.

I doubt you are at all personally familiar with the effects of strong illicit opiates. I am only passingly so familiar myself, a happenstance for which I regularly make time to thank an evidently benevolent God. But even my little experience is enough to know very clearly that these are not drugs to which one turns because one is weak or stupid or deceived, or because one's life gives one scope for ambition or hope for self-improvement.

These are not drugs you take when you're happy - because their effect is to make you feel nothing at all. If you were happy, you no longer are. If you were sad, you no longer are. If you were pained, or angry, or bereaved, or guilty, or ashamed, or hopeless, or frustrated, or stifled, or desperate, or anything else in the world - you no longer are. You only are. You exist, and nothing in the world can touch you. Nothing in the world can make you suffer. For a while. Then the world comes back, twice as hard as before.

These are drugs to which you turn in a final bid for solace, against a world in which you can find no way to make a place for yourself - a world so full of lies, so polluted and corrupted and stuffed chock-full with them, that it has no space left for you. These are drugs you use to approach the solace of the grave as closely as it is possible to do while your heart still beats and your blood still flows. Sometimes, people overshoot, and we read "opioid epidemic" news articles about them. Mostly, people don't, and the world continues not to care about them. Only when they turn up dead do they become of interest.

I'm sure such experience is as alien to you as it is to me. We've both been assiduous in taking advantage of the opportunities that we've been able to find or make in life, and have consequently been about as successful as our talents and diligence make it possible for us to be. That makes it easy for us to ignore those aspects of life with which we have little or no direct experience - and I'm not talking about yacht ownership here. That makes it easy for us to tell ourselves, for example, the lie that the same opportunities open to us are open to all, or the lie that "society is generally safe". Yes - for us. Not for all. What is there noble in this lie? Do you imagine it's believed by those who live whole lives among the evidence of its falsehood? Do you imagine they are so much less than human that they fail to recognize this lie? Do you imagine they are not angry about it? Do you imagine they should not be? Even if you don't care for such people in their own right, which is your choice entire however you choose to make it - do you imagine there is enough heroin or fentanyl in the world for this anger forever to be without consequence?

The other day an NPR article linked here on Hacker News made mention of a Baltimore community organization distributing naloxone kits and training in how and when to use them. In the week I have free between leaving my prior professional role yesterday, and commencing my next on the 14th, I mean to attend one of this organization's meetings and ask if I may participate in this program, for the same reason I now carry glucose tablets in my personal first aid kit despite not being diabetic - that is, because it is not unprecedented in my experience to come upon someone in desperate need, about whom a world absorbed with constant lies has chosen not to care. There is that about choosing to walk and take buses and trains, rather than to drive: one may not so easily maintain a comfortable isolation from the world in which one moves.

You will therefore forgive me if I decline to agree that, on top of all the lies that have brought us here, adding one more to the mix is likely to help solve anything, or that there is anything noble in one more lie. I do not doubt your intentions are good. But in this world we are judged not by intentions but by results, and the result of all the lies that have made the world around us is not the steady, if deeply and pervasively delusive, state that you and Plato would have it be, but rather a positive feedback machine whose every gyration brings it closer to toppling than the last. We have seen this pattern before in history. It has proven extremely unlovely in its outcomes.

Are you sure this time will be different from all the others? Or is that just another "noble" lie?