Alcohol: the modern opium of the people?

Alcohol: the modern opium of the people?

Drinking alcohol is not a free choice: it is the old bread and circuses recipe adapted to the 21st century. While terraces fill up with beer and parties with mixed drinks, the power structure looks on calmly. Alcohol not only numbs, it also creates dependence and submission, turning the working class into a docile mass that tolerates job insecurity, rising prices and social cuts in exchange for its daily dose of chemical escape.

Indoctrination from adolescence

The cultural machine has spent decades normalizing alcohol as something inherent to human nature. TV series, films and cartoons repeat the cliché of the rebellious teenager sneaking a beer, associating drinking with maturity and fun. This message, repeated from childhood, has managed to make 90% of the population consider drinking as natural as breathing. It is no coincidence: the entertainment industry acts as a transmission belt for a system that needs anesthetized citizens.

A historical precedent: the anarchist FAI

This is not the first time this strategy has been denounced. The Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the political wing of the CNT trade union during the Spanish Civil War, already argued that alcohol harmed the working class to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. That is why its members were teetotalers. A radical stance that today, revived in marginal debates, takes on renewed relevance when we see how the elites fund multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns and block any regulation that would reduce consumption.

Who drinks at the top?

The uncomfortable question is: do those who really hold power drink alcohol? The suspicion, recurring in critical analyses, is that the true elites —not salon politicians or media celebrities— live in drug-free environments, alcohol included. They know that whoever drugs themselves weakens, loses their capacity to react and accepts the status quo. That is why they promote it among the masses, while they themselves stay clear-headed in order to keep control.

The thesis is not new, but it gains force when combined with consumption data from Spain —one of the countries with the highest per capita alcohol rate— and the social passivity in the face of an economic crisis that never ends. As long as the beer keeps flowing, the guillotines can wait.