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 with Red Bull. Bree, who had been drinking earlier in the day, matched her round for round. Footage from closed-circuit cameras showed the two of them walking back to her apartment, arm in arm, around one in the morning. They had sex. Bree thought it was consensual. M said it wasn’t. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to five years in prison—only to have the verdict thrown out on appeal. If you have read any other accounts of these kinds of cases, the details will be depressingly familiar: pain, regret, misunderstanding, and anger.
Here is Bree, describing his side of the story.
I was hoping to avoid sleeping on the floor and thought that maybe I could share her bed, which in hindsight seems such a stupid thing to do.
I wasn’t looking for sex, just a mattress and some human company. She woke up and I lay down next to her and eventually we started hugging, and then kissing.
It was a bit unexpected, but nice. We were indulging in foreplay for about thirty minutes and it sounded like she was enjoying it.
And then, from the court’s decision:
He insisted that M appeared to welcome his advances, which progressed from stroking of a comforting nature to sexual touching. She said and did nothing to stop him. He told the jury that one needed to be sure about consent which is why he stroked her for so long. The complainant could