(…) As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.”
But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct out personality by managing the conflit between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs )to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (toraise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constrainsts on our behaviour, it obliterates our true self.
—Malcolm Gladwell, Talking To Strangers, Little Brown, 2019