Which non-Western utopias have avoided addictive substances? List them.

No one can avoid addictive substances, but at least countries like Singapore try to criminalize or heavily restrict their access via sin taxes AND prosecution of dealers.

The kind of model Canada and California follows could be helpful as well, if only prosecution and the stick was also used in conjunction with cracking down on black markets for drugs the same way provinces and CA do on moonshine.

But smoking and coffee are still popular throughout the rest of the world, and I don't think we top the leaderboard in alcohol consumption...

Tobacco usage in the US is much higher than peers in other developed countries [0] due to limited sin taxes and lack of enforcement of black market tobacco sales (eg. Cigarette smuggling).

Also, our rate of spirits consumption is higher than most developed countries and comparable to Russia [1]. Most other developed countries tend to stick to beer and wine.

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-who-smoke

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption

Your own links contradict your claims. The US is higher than some developed countries and lower than others. When looking at tobacco, you're doing a disservice to exclude smokeless tobacco products, which would significantly increase the numbers in many countries - including Norway and Sweden.

Additionally, whether or not Americans consume more spirits is pretty irrelevant when your link is looking at the equivalent of pure alcohol consumption, that shows the US is below countries like Germany, France, the UK, and Spain, and probably ends up being about average compared to western nations.

> to a certain extent Wang Huning's thesis about America is right

What is that?

Hyper-individualism leading to a nihilistic worldview.

Individuals absolutely should have autonomy to choose what they wish to do, but not if it has an impact on the rest of society.

Fundamentally, some amount of regulation (either via social norms or via actual laws) is needed, yet we as individuals will continue to fight each other while ignoring the core fact that we are all on the same team.

I strongly disagree with Wang and Xi, but on this part I am in agreement - individualism has gone too far in America (both economically and socially), and we need to return to our communitarian roots.

Patriotism previously worked as a check on hyper individualism in the US, tying people to a shared sense of national community.

Now that we collectively know too much about the harms perpetrated by our government, we have also lost that sense of unity and shared values and purpose.

Pretty much.

Access to information isn't bad, but we also need to remember that we're all part of the same team.

Increasingly, partisans on both sides of the political and social aisle don't actually care about the opposing side. They just want to win.

And this is why countries like Russia, China, and Iran have been so successful at weaponizing disinformation - it's being used by partisans on both sides to undermine the other, leading to chaos.

I haven't seen any evidence against "communitarianism" just being authoritarianism with happy words painted over it, pretending that there is a mandate of a community behind the dictators and oppression.

> "communitarianism" just being authoritarianism with happy words painted over it

There are various different definitions of "communitarianism" but the idealized American Town Hall model of direct democracy is a direct example of communitarianism at the local level.

Political Scientists and Philosophers (all of whom are mainstream btw) like Michael Walzer, Robert Putnam, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel all touch on a light form of communitarianism that directly connects with Democracy.

In a word, that it is a civilization without society, or perhaps a society without culture, which (by this lack) is engineering its own decay.

Not exactly. It's hard to translate but I'd recommend taking a read.

You wouldn't say "civilization without society" is pretty close to your first two paragraphs in your comment? Maybe I need a refresher.

"Society" and "Civilization" are very loaded terms, and by "Society" Wang specifically meant the community aspect of society.

For example, he is very positive about the kind of direct democracy he saw in Belmont, MA (the classic New England Town Meeting), and viewed that as a cornerstone of American society, along with a shared vision of innovation and development.

Fundamentally, the core pieces of America that Wang looked up to were the same pieces of policy and legislation that were pushed in the Progressive Era [0] as well as by FDR as part of his New Deal [1] and LBJ as part of his Great Society [2].

In essence, the vision that Wang and Xi are pushing within China today is basically an Authoritarian but also decentralized version of the Great Society and New Deal.

[0] - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/rise-to-wo...

[1] - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/rise-to-wo...

[2] - https://library.fiveable.me/apush/unit-8/great-society/study...

Thanks. I still think civilization without society works pretty well as a (necessarily lossy) compression. The US as a civilization without a sense of communitarian civics. The presence of such in rare cases (e.g. Belmont) puts its broader absence into sharper relief.

> The presence of such in rare cases (e.g. Belmont)

I thought it's fairly common to live in a town with a town hall meetings or PTA meetings? Or visit city hall or met your city council in elementary school?

It's the norm in most suburban towns (use the local PTA meeting as the Town Meeting instead depending on the suburb).

If you live within a big city, then it's a different story of course (city government is absolutely not community driven), but only 12% of Americans live in Urban areas/cities [0] and 69% live in suburbs.

[0] - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cusrancvs.pdf