Society thinks, when it thinks, like a dysfunctional individual, dealing at any moment with the most obvious crisis only, as though determined to know itself only to an extent that enables it to continue with the minimum of trouble and difficulty, writes John Waters.
Collectively, we seem incapable of talking about anything until it becomes a crisis; then we talk of little else.
I'm thinking particularly of the national alcohol problem, now so irrefutable as to be spoken of by the President, Mrs McAleese, who is constitutionally prohibited from saying anything not blindingly obvious to everyone.
Even yet, there is a residual tendency - manifest in some unfavourable commentary about the President's airing our dirty linen in public - to insist that not talking about a crisis makes it less of a crisis.
The President's words are to be welcomed, with a frisson of regret that they were not uttered by a senior politician with executive responsibility to act as well as speak.
But there remains a concern that she has repeated a number of myths about alcohol and the Irish, which, unless clarified, will continue to thwart a proper understanding of the problem.
"More money in pockets has visibly lifted standards of living, but it is being badly spent too, on habits that have not gone away," the President said.
"The Irish love of conviviality has its dark side in the stupid, wasteful abuse of alcohol and its first cousin, abuse of drugs."
In these two sentences are repeated several core fallacies about alcohol and Irish society - worryingly, since they infect perhaps the most high-profile attempt at frankness on the subject so far.
One such, implied by the phrase "habits that have not gone away", is the idea that alcohol abuse is some kind of Irish "tradition".
This is unfair to Ireland Past and likely to sabotage an understanding of Ireland Present. The image of the hard-drinking Irish is a product chiefly of the world's observation of the Irish abroad, in particular those who went to the US and UK, and has its roots in immigrant alienation.
Those who stayed home were, until recently, abstemious in the main, and remarkably so when compared to the present.
That the idea of the drunken Irish is less a myth than it was suggests that those who have been relieved by prosperity of the burden of emigration are now as alienated from their own society as their ancestors were from the inhospitable streets of London and Boston.
All the indications are that this problem is not some sudden capitulation to excess following release from an impoverished and tyrannical past, but rather an inability to deal with new, unexpected and largely unacknowledged tyrannies in the present.
A cursory look at the statistics of alcohol consumption reveals some interesting broad patterns, suggesting that the idea that we drink more as a direct consequence of having more money is at best a simplification.
While there is some parallel between growing consumption and increasing wealth, there is a disproportionately higher increase in consumption by those who gained little from the boom, with the notable exception of farmers and agricultural workers, suggesting that the connection may not be between drink and money but between drink and what we call modernisation.
And yet, paradoxically, drink has been perhaps the most reactionary force in Ireland since independence, far more so than the twin liberal demons, nationalism and Catholicism.
Drink enables us not so much to enjoy prosperity as to endure it.
And, in truth, Ireland's "dark side" is infinitely more complex than the drink issue enables us to perceive, as alcohol has acted as a mask on our darknesses.
Another fallacy is manifest in the President's reference to "conviviality", reflecting another of our core beliefs about drink: that abuse reflects a marginal excess of enjoyment, which must be curbed to avoid "spoiling the party for everyone".
It is as wrong to read alcohol abuse as a linear progression from normal drinking as to see paedophilia as a progression from healthy sexual activity. But, anyway, we need to stop thinking about drink the instant we think about ways of enjoying ourselves.
The national drink problem has its roots in some form of collective psychiatric condition, and so the use or abuse of this lethal drug must, as a matter of urgency, be intellectually and otherwise separated from our concepts of leisure, pleasure and relaxation.
That false connection has hitherto caused those seeking to draw attention to the alcoholic disintegration of Irish society to be dismissed as killjoys, when in truth they were drawing attention to the greatest killjoy of all.