Zyn saves civilization
What your teachers didn't tell you about nicotine
I could limit the argument to “look at France”, but let’s dig deeper into why and how nicotine and caffeine are actually pillars of civilization.
The nootropic effects of nicotine are well known, and after decades of biohacker experimentation with various jungle vines and oriental cave mushrooms, it remains the most effective nootropic known to humanity. It gets better though - as it turns out, nicotine also directly acts against the biological basis of schizophrenia. So not only does it make you smarter, it also makes you saner, improving both the quantitative and qualitative axis of cognition.
The following argument depends on the assumption that the major brake to civilizational progress has been not only stupidity, but also collective irrationality. I find this uncontroversial to the degree of being self-evident.
We might observe that the recent descent into collective insanity in western countries coincided with a suppression of nicotine use, motivated by the obvious and terrible health hazards of smoking: but now that we have vastly safer modes of delivery like vapes and nicotine pouches, the logic changes substantially. What remains of the case against nicotine is addiction, which is however highly individually variable and not necessarily that bad when the subtance is harmless or even healthy, and a reflexive puritanism based on “but mommy said it’s bad” and "anything enjoyable and stimulating is metaphysically bad”, which we can reject as the flailings of unserious people. The cost/benefit ratio of nicotine when considered separately from smoking actually kind of makes sense.
All the while governments, discounting the safety of new modes of delivery, have been suppressing nicotine, which makes you smarter and saner, they’ve simultaneously been normalizing and legalizing marijuana*, which does the opposite, making people dumb and schizophrenic. Since I am a nicotine user and not a stoner, I will refrain from paranoid explanations and give them the benefit of the doubt: surely they got it exactly upside down by accident. As usual. Just because it’s been a consistent pattern that coincides with their interests in having a dumber, more credulous and brainwashable population, doesn’t mean they’re doing it on purpose.
The war on nicotine joins a long procession of well-intentioned public health interventions with shitty unintended consequences, such as fortified flour. We’ll have a whole article on those later.
In light of this new information, I may need to update this old meme:
Nicotine’s anti-psychotic effects also add a second, non-mutually-exclusive factor to my hypothesis that the rise of rationality and abandonment of religion in Europe was the result of a millenium of catholic anti-schizo eugenics via sequestration in monasteries and clerical celibacy. The church was a sterilizing asylum**
Was it actually nicotine, introduced only slightly later than coffee? The secret of the scientific and industrial revolutions and modernization was probably both caffeine and nicotine ackshually, synergistically.
We finish where we started: look at France.
Or any number of modernized, heavily industrializing, chain-smoking Asian countries, such as China, the industrial takeoff coinciding with widespread use of nicotine in 19th century Japan, and the renaissance of tech culture and hard innovation, and the rise of the bodybuilding gigachad tech bro archetype replacing the longhoused eunuchs of the 2010s, now that all of Silicon Valley is on Zyn.
*Weed is plausibly why so many people go crazy in college, in addition to herpes and toxoplasma infections from promiscuity (don’t stick your dick in crazy, as it might quite literally be sexually transmitted).
**Since societies regrow lost load-bearing limbs, the function was since picked up by climate anxiety and gender reassignment. The consequences of having religiosity associated with higher rather than lower birth rates might readily be observed in e.g. Afghanistan and Israel, but also the part of America’s founding stock descended from protestant religious extremists too insane even for 16th century England.