The Perfect Humanoid Symbol, 19

But while with other addictions this inability to confront remains somewhat confined within a private and circumscribed sphere, in that the addicted consumes the poison in some kind of secluded nook, and then gets out to try to face life and the world, the peculiarity of smoking as to consumption allows this inability to infect every moment and every minor issue in the smoker’s everyday life, so that he or she ends up unable to confront anything without grabbing on to poison, incessantly – a stage of degradation even more abject –.“Impatience” is usually not merely the inability to confront something isolated, but tends to spread everywhere in one’s state of being, and conversely it could be said that the basic ability to confront is that to be there at one’s ease and observe, decide and act as cause instead of effect, period – where “period” means not just toward any specific item or issue, but as a basic general and permanent ability and attitude in one’s existence –. And no other humanoid irrationality more than smoking and the share of life invaded by its consumption is the head−on opposite of this basic requisite of life, and demonstrates its absence in the addicted. As I previously said, all poison addictions are equal, but smoking is more equal than others.

Something comparable to smoking in terms of spread can be found, if ever, certainly not among other addictions but rather in the realm of Floods, cataclysms, plagues and curses; smoking deserves being considered one of them in its own right, and it definitely is, as testified for instance by the fact that a certain World Health Organization issued a report entitled, “WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic 2008”. Anyone can easily read up far and wide on the prevalence of tobacco consumption; far and wide meaning in time and space: the statistics of this prevalence through different times in history and different societies in civilisation. Alas, the statistics of prevalence of smoking are unequalled, and, alas again, unequalled at the dreadfully highest magnitude. So much so that, irrespective of whether you’re looking at the statistics or lifting your eyes to look around, the far too recurring and dejected thought remains, “But… hardly anyone escapes this nightmare at all…”