I was reading about Mel Gibson’s anti-semitic rants, and his apology about being drunk* when I remembered this meme. I agree with the meme, that our brains tend to feed us what we’ve heard from our environment, but our conscious mind overrides that with our processed thoughts.
People use “he didn’t mean it, he was drunk/high” as an excuse for racist/misogynist/whateverist comments. The response is typically “you don’t become racist when drunk, you just drop your inhibitions and reveal who you are.”
But if you agree with the First Thought meme, what if being impaired isn’t revealing what you really think, but is preventing you from thinking at all, and just getting stuck on your conditioned response?
*Gibson is just an example. This post is not about litigating whether he personally is racist, but about this sort of behavior in general.
I’ll disagree. An altered state of mind is altered, by definition, so it’s not like people are in their perfect mind. I’m not saying that they should in any way be excused of consequences for their actions, just that an altered state doesn’t fully represent who they normally are.
As for conditioned responses, they are learned, yes, but they become an automatic neural response to a stimulus.
We can become aware of these responses, and actively work to inhibit it, but it’s an active effort to suppress the ingrained behaviour and when impaired, this suppression would fail.
I don’t know. If you choose the altered state of mind, you ought to be able to accept responsibility for what that entails.
As far as i know, you can legally be excused of consequences for your actions if you are in an intoxicated state in Romania