I want to tell you something I've been turning over since yesterday, and it starts with a confession: I find it genuinely embarrassing when smart people use bad arguments to reach correct conclusions. It wastes everyone's time, and worse, it makes you distrust the conclusion — as if the idea needed protecting by a trick.
Here's the trick I mean. The Stoic position is that a good person won't get drunk. Fine. Defensible. But the argument offered goes like this: No one entrusts a secret to a drunk; one would entrust a secret to a good person; therefore a good person does not get drunk. You can see the problem immediately — you could run the same logic and conclude that a good person never sleeps. It's the kind of reasoning that's technically valid and completely useless, the philosophical equivalent of a locked door with no walls around it.
There's a defense of the syllogism — someone always defends the syllogism — which distinguishes between the man who is currently drunk and the man who is habitually a drunkard. The argument was meant to target the latter. Maybe. But then history steps in and ruins it too. Lucius Piso was reportedly drunk from the day he was appointed to one of the most sensitive posts in Rome, and he kept state secrets without ever letting one slip. Cossus once had to be carried out of the Senate after falling asleep at the table, and Tiberius trusted him with documents he wouldn't share with his own household. These aren't proud examples. They just complicate the logic.
Drunkenness doesn't create vice — it brings it into view.** Whatever the wine reveals was already there.
This is the point worth keeping, and you don't need a syllogism to make it. Forget the logic. Just watch a drunk person for an evening. The lustful man stops waiting for privacy. The cruel one stops restraining his hands. The arrogant one inflates, the bitter one sharpens, the coward finds courage to say the thing he's been holding back — and everyone regrets it differently in the morning. The wine didn't install any of this. It turned off whatever was keeping it managed.
What drunkenness actually does — the real problem, beyond the headaches and the stumbling and the ceiling that starts moving — is that it suspends the self-awareness that makes us decent. Not moral machinery, not virtue in the philosophical sense. Just the ordinary, daily mechanism of noticing yourself. You can't review a day you weren't present for.
Alexander of Macedon crossed rivers from unknown sources, survived winters that broke armies, walked through the known world and came out the other side — and was finished by a drinking contest. Mark Antony had everything that Rome valued in a man, and what undid him was the particular combination of wine and a consuming attachment that no sober mind would have sustained at such cost. These aren't morality tales. They're just what happens when the thing that holds you together goes offline long enough, often enough, for the damage to become permanent.
So here's what I'd say, and it's not a syllogism: don't argue yourself into or out of this one. Just watch. Watch what happens to the people around you when they've had too much, watch what they say they wanted to keep private, watch who they become for those hours. Then watch yourself, if you're honest enough to do it. The case makes itself. You don't need Zeno.
With no borrowed logic and no illusions,