Drunk, Running
In “Drunk, Running”, Lizzie McAlpine sings about a friend who is an alcoholic.
What did you mean when you said that you were sober now?
Caught you in bed with a Red Bull vodka
Two weeks outNo one stops you
Nobody takes it from your hand
Even when you break your leg, drunk, running
Everyone knew, but no one did anything. And it hit me, because I’ve been there. We laugh it off. “It’s not a Friday if she’s not partying!” “Lol, he’ll be hungover tomorrow and still get more done than any of us!” But it’s serious and it causes damage.
It takes a lot of courage to say something because you are telling that person they cannot do what they desperately want to. You are risking their retaliation and a friendship. But I am thinking of how impactful it is when someone does speak up. For example, the much-publicized Intervention staged by John Mulaney’s friends. They invited him to a meeting. Twelve comedians over the age of 40. And they told him, in complete seriousness, that he was a drug addict and needed to take care of it. Later, Mulaney would joke, “Fred Armisten was serious. Do you know how off-putting that is?”
One valid fear for speaking up is the fear of judging others, that they make choices and we should respect them. For that, there’s a framework I return to occasionally, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, by Isaiah Berlin. The two liberties contrasted in this essay are negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is what we normally think of as liberty, freedom from the control of others, or “the area within which the subject...should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons”. Positive liberty is concerned with the source of freedom – that the rational individual is making the choice.
According to Berlin, negative liberty is freedom from. Positive liberty is freedom to. This is referenced in one of my favorite passages from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Marathe’s chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress.”
“But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to? How for the person to freely choose?”
Freedom-from without freedom-to leads to choices that are not “freely chosen”, as Marathe puts it. Addiction is the choice to continually pump dopamine into the body, similar to a child only eating sweets because they don’t want to eat veggies. There is 100% negative liberty in letting a child eat only sweets. But there is 0 positive liberty. Addiction damages the ability to really choose.
However, too much positive liberty at the expense of negative liberty is also dangerous. For example, arguing that kids actually want to be straight — only the external influence of teachers and peers makes them queer. Unlimited positive liberty allows for, “You’re not making a rational choice. So I will make the choice you really want to make for you”.
Figuring out the boundaries of negative and positive liberty is a tricky problem, but luckily one we don’t have to figure out here. Berlin’s essay is meant for creating a functioning State. This essay focuses on how to be a good friend. For friends, I think it is important to bring up the concern in a serious way and note the empirical effects it has had on them and others. And if it is a behavior that hurts others, it is okay to say you can no longer support them if the behavior continues. But you are not outlawing their behavior. You are not making their choice for them. You are checking them, and giving them more knowledge against which they can make their own choice.
Every time I hear a frat boy rape story, I feel immeasurably sad.
Or any of the Hollywood stories, where a man in power took advantage of a woman who was not. I feel sad for the victims. But I also feel sad for the situation. For these men had lived in a bubble where people told them this was how the world worked. For every man imprisoned for bad behavior, there were many more around them, who participated in “locker-room talk”, who encouraged their peers to be more aggressive, who glorified drunken partying, who never challenged norms of a woman sleeping her way to power. They started as newcomers, desperate for acceptance in a group, and many ended as leaders and perpetuators. This is why culture is important. It creates our every day behavior. If everyone around you thinks something is okay or expected, it is easy to rationalize the behavior as okay. It is easy to hurt other people.
When I was at Amherst College, the most significant thing I learned was how to read. And from Adam Sitze and others — I learned that to read closely is to love a text — as deeply as loving a person.
For loving is not a simple passive act. It is not falling in love. It is not pandering, loving and following another. To love another person is to care about them, who they become and how they affect others. It is to laugh with them, cry with them, and always listen to them. But it is also to speak up when they have spinach in their teeth, when they are addicted and hurting others, when they are hurting themselves. When they can’t get off the couch but you believe they can. When they are being arrogant, harming others and their own reputation. To set boundaries. To listen to their dreams and champion them, to believe who they could become and walk along the path with them.
This is how to read a text. This is how to be a friend, there for a friend, drunk, running.