In the documentary Free Solo (now in theaters), you can watch Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without a rope — something that doesn’t seem possible even after you’ve just watched him do it.
Much of the film is about the reactions of the other people in his life, including his friends, who are making the film. During some parts of the ascent, they leave their cameras running, but have to look away because they’re afraid for Alex.
They’re afraid for good reason. As one of Alex’s climbing partners puts it: ‘Everybody who has made free soloing a big part of their life is dead.’
But his mother puts her own fears into perspective this way: ‘I think when he’s free soloing that’s when he feels the most alive, the most… everything. How can you even think about taking that away from somebody?’
Stop and think for a moment about whether you would be willing to pass laws to take that away from him — to stop him from doing something he loves, just because it’s dangerous, because it may kill him, and cause grief for the people who love him.
I think a lot of people would answer that question by saying something like: I wouldn’t do that kind of thing myself, and he’s probably crazy for doing it, but it’s his life, and he can do what he wants with it.
In the film, one of his climbing partners talks about how he keeps climbing with Alex because it’s a kind of addiction. He doesn’t necessarily want to do it, because of the danger; but he has to do it, because there’s no other way to experience those feelings.
People die while skydiving. People die while scuba diving. People die while hang gliding, and base jumping, and big wave surfing, and in any number of situations where they deliberately put themselves in danger.
Many people try these activities for any number of reasons. Some of them continue because they can’t find anything else in their lives that continues to give them an equivalent level of happiness. It’s when they feel the most alive, the most… everything.
Like Alex, they are less interested in having a long, comfortable life than they are in pursuing their dreams — or, to put it another way, indulging their addictions. Like John Stark, they recognize that death is not the worst of evils.
If they die, they leave other people behind who grieve for them, who wish they had found some other source of joy. But the survivors wouldn’t contemplate pushing for laws to prevent other people from engaging in those activities.
Which raises this crucial question: If we all agree that someone has the right to dive off a cliff, or out of a plane, or to the depths of the ocean — even though there’s great danger involved — because he loves the way it makes him feel, then how can we claim that the same person has no right to dive into the depths of his own psyche, for exactly the same reason?
It’s time we admitted something to ourselves. When it comes to laws against the use of recreational drugs, danger isn’t really the issue. Addiction isn’t really the issue. Grief and loss of life aren’t really the issues.
We know this, because if danger and addiction and grief and loss of life were the issues, then all the activities we’ve been talking about would also be illegal. We’d be putting people in physical cages for all these different ways of slipping out of their psychological cages.
At most, with respect to these other activities, what we do is say: If you want to help people do these things, you need to show that you know what you’re doing.
That is, you don’t need permission to sky dive. You do need permission to charge people to teach them to sky dive, to rent them equipment, and so on. In short, if you’re going to make a business of sky diving, you need permission — in the form of a license, or a certificate — to present yourself as an expert.
Stop and think for a moment about what might happen if we applied this same standard to what we might call ‘psych diving’. That is, what if you could go psych diving, at your own risk, but anyone who wants to make a business of helping you with it would have to demonstrate some level of expertise?
I think a lot of people, if they really thought about it, would recognize that this would introduce a level of safety that we all claim to want. It would reduce our prison populations — spending a lot less money, and ruining a lot fewer lives. It would reduce drug-related deaths in two different ways: fewer deaths from overdoses, and fewer deaths from people killing each other over control of the black market we’ve created.
So if danger and addiction and grief and loss of life aren’t the issues, what is? I think it just comes down to disapproval. More precisely, failure of imagination. That is, I might not want to go out and dive from high places, or dive to deep places… but I can imagine myself doing it. So even if I don’t understand it, I can appreciate it.
Also, a lot of these dangerous activities make for great videos.
It’s harder for me to imagine taking heroin, and there’s no good way (yet!) for other people to use technology to share their experiences with me. And frankly, that makes it easier to think about banning it, easier to use my ignorance to justify depriving other people of what makes them feel the most alive, the most… everything. Not the danger. Not the grief. Not the loss of life. Not the addiction. Just my ignorance.
So perhaps most important of all — at least, for people who claim that their goal is to ‘preserve the republic’ — legalizing psych diving would be a step back from the dangerously misguided idea that ignorance is a proper basis for enacting laws that embody prior restraint, i.e., that we can ban whatever we don’t want to understand.
