Extract

‘Man, being reasonable, must get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.’

-Lord Byron

Once upon a time I was a boy of 18: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, lightly pimpled. I had the beginnings of a goatee and some green-and-red hippie pants, stupidly long hair and a new pack of rollies. I had bought a book by Michel Foucault and very nearly read a whole chapter, and was doing my best to like music that did not have a tune. I was more of a feminist than any female I knew, and more than happy to tell them all why – just after I’d finished explaining racism to migrants.

 In other words, I was all set for uni.

 My subject of choice was History, of course. (Or ‘Herstory’, as I may well have called it.) I mean, why on earth would you study anything else? War and peace, murders and suicides, revolutions and riots, tights and ruffs – to me, it sounded far more fun than torts, and all that other dreck they dish up in a law degree.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t at all. History – as taught at uni, at least – turned out to be all about idiotically complicated theories instead of fun, racy facts. It wasn’t enough to know what stuff had happened, we were expected to understand why. If I was to tell you that in our first semester we were taught ‘parametric determinism’, ‘cultural materialism’ and the ‘theory of historical trajectory’, I think you would agree that we suffered.

Anyway, I’ve forgotten that stuff now. I’ll probably be able to tell a psychiatrist all about Hegel’s ‘dialectical method’ 30 years from now, but for the time being it remains safely suppressed, somewhere deep inside my subconscious.

But what I do remember is this: crudely speaking, there are two basic theories of history, two broad and unifying explanations for why humans do what they do, from which all the more complicated theories derive. The first is what’s known as the ‘Great Man Theory’. Essentially, it just means that history was made by a small handful of people – generally men – each of whom was in some way exceptional. It’s the idea that the Roman Empire would never have happened without Julius Caesar, for example, or that there wouldn’t have been a Russian Revolution without Trotsky and Lenin. Individual intelligence, individual charisma, individual goodness, individual evil – these are the fundamental forces that most shape our world.

 The second theory is exactly the opposite. It essentially says that individuals are irrelevant: that underlying economic forces make us do what we do. If Caesar didn’t conquer Western Europe, some other Roman would have. The Russian Revolution was inevitable, regardless of which Russian led it. A true understanding of history involves looking at the means of production – at who owns stuff, who profits, who gets exploited, and so on. And doing your best to not then fall asleep. Anyway, there’ll be none of that rubbish in this book. And that is because, in it, I propose a third theory of history – an entirely new, and perhaps not entirely stupid, hypothesis about why various things might have happened. That theory, in short, is intoxicants. Beers, wine, spirits. Dope, mushrooms. Opium, heroin. Cocaine, speed and so on. What I’m saying is that, ever since Australopithecus afarensis came down from the trees and found some fermented fruit lying about on the ground, human beings have been taking things to relax and generally cope with this hell called ‘reality’. From presidents and prime ministers, to painters and poets, to sailors, soldiers and scientists, pretty much everyone has, at some time, drunk more than they should or taken something that one should not take.

And it’s a custom that can have consequences. In my case, these involve waking up after a party confused and embarrassed, then texting a few dozen apologies. But other consequences can change the course of our world. So forget the Great Man Theory of History, folks. I would instead like to give you the Trashed Man (not to mention, lots of not-so-straight women). And, above all, forget about the means of production. This book is about what goes on when humans are not being productive at all.