It’s just another rationalization by drinkers to re-affirm their life. It’s in the same area as “I can quit anytime.”, etc.
Also, note that it is extremely common for people who do X to aver that it’s the other people who do X instead. “I’m not lying, it’s so-and-so that’s the liar.”
I’ve always heard it as “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink” and took it to mean that a man who is in a situation where drinking is going on, but refrains from drinking is not to be trusted because he just waiting to take advantage of those that are drinking. People like that are not to be trusted.
I’ve heard various versions but usually coming from someone who does drink. I always took it as “I don’t trust someone who isn’t like me in this respect”. I’ve also heard a couple varieties such as “I would never trust anyone who can’t drive a car” and others.
I agree with the statements mainly dating this sort of feeling to (as far as US society) to an earlier time. The difference between then and now isn’t that totally different things motivate people, or ever have. Rather, it’s another manifestation of a more homogeneous and conformist society then than now. It’s more frowned upon, and less practical, now to pressure people into a particular mode of behavior as in ‘here’s how men act’. And the OP says trusting ‘someone’ who doesn’t but it was men who didn’t drink There was never any mainstream stigma toward women who didn’t drink.
But even in its heyday it varied by subculture. The parent and especially grandparent generation of my family were still Irish ‘ethnics’, even though the last immigrant came in the great grandparent generation: they stayed mainly among themselves and were still somewhat distinct. It was odder not to drink among them than in WASP/assimilated society. Similarly in the other direction for parts of the country with more religiously motivated abstainers. Those were rare where I lived (no teetotaling Baptists, nor any Christian Scientists, Mormons to speak of, very few Muslims anywhere in the US back then, etc).
Wait…what? Lots of people never drink. It’s not even that uncommon.
This puts me in mind of a work by James Thurber: “The Bear Who Let It Alone” in Fables for Our Time.
My immediate thought on reading the title was that it sounded like something W. C. Fields would have said. And sure enough…
I think it’s akin to Tony Stark telling Steve Rogers he “doesn’t trust someone who doesn’t have a dark side”.
Also, in the TV series Band of Brothers, some of the men of Easy Company didn’t trust Captain Winters initially because he didn’t drink (or they thought he was a Mormon).
I think part of it is having to do with the fact that drinking is a big part of socializing, really starting in the teen years. There’s a perception of something “off” about someone who doesn’t partake it what’s perceived as normal social interactions.
At the very least, someone with absolutely no vices might appear to be a bit of an uptight stick in the mud.
I believe Trump doesn’t drink.
“Son,” he said without preamble, “never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
Then he paused for a long minute and added, “And, son, never trust a drunk except when he’s on his knees.”
–James Crumley, The Wrong Case.
Personally, I find it hard to trust someone who doesn’t take responsibility for his own behavior or isn’t in control of his own actions. This certainly doesn’t apply to everyone who drinks, but it does apply to those who seem or claim not to be able to control when or how much they drink or what they do when they’ve been drinking.
This is another one of those rationalizations that drinkers have.
I really don’t drink. I find non-drinkers to be very, very common. Lots of reasons too. Not always recovering alcoholics or for religious reasons. Many times just personal preferences.
If you have a problem with someone that doesn’t drink, it means that you have a problem.
It’s quite possible that there are quite a few teetotalers like me who stay on the wagon because their fathers, or other kinfolk, stayed way off it. This is a family tradition I have chosen not to preserve. My older brother perhaps likes to have a beer with some of his fellow veterans. And my sister likes a glass of wine now and then. But I abstain. I know what Demon Rum can do and I do not want to take chances. And at my age–67–it’s wise not to start. James Thurber wrote a fable titled “The Moth and the Star” and I took its message to heart, disregarding social pressure to drink.
My former stepfather, a heavy drinker, contracted lung cancer in his mid-70s. The doctor said the cancer was inoperable due to his heavy drinking. I’d prefer being called a “stick in the mud” to that.
I have some serious boozers in my family tree, but it left me a light beer only drinker, not a non drinker. But being a non-drinker could definitely be a reaction to that, or religious reasons, or something completely different.
But ‘not trusting’ non drinkers is a largely obsolete kind of concept sort of the same as everyone likes a nice thick steak, a baked potato, etc and pie ala mode. Some article I read spoke of a Life or some magazine like that which polled and something like that was the favorite American meal from some huge % of respondents in 1948 or something. In today’s more diverse and fractured society there just aren’t as broadly shared perspectives like that. And again it was a distrust of men who didn’t drink. It never applied in a society which (at least ostensibly) aims to treat women equally.
Sounds a lot like the strained relationship between my father and my Great-uncle Charlie, who used to say things like, “Never drank, but I don’t hold it against a man who does!”
My father thought Great-uncle Charlie was a sanctimonious prig.
Did your great-uncle consider your father to be an intolerant drunkard? Sorry, I don’t mean to demean your father, since I know nothing about him–I just want to know your great-uncle’s candid opinion of him.
“Never trust a man who doesn’t drink because a man who doesn’t drink can’t trust himself.”
Hemingway
Coincedentally I came across that quote today though I’d never heard it before. I also don’t agree with it.
Never trust a drinker with a shotgun. He might have an “accident”.
—Me
Well if I’m completely honest, I did have a plastic cup of beer in 1983, a Blue Hawaii (or possibly a Blue Hawaiian) in 1985, and another beer in 1986. But I’m still comfortable saying I never drink.
I think the saying is more about an “us” vs. “them” mentality. People who drink consider other drinkers to be part of their group, while non-drinkers are outsiders and therefore not trustworthy. Related to the concept of “someone you’d like to have a beer with.”
In the Brothers Grimm version of the fairy tales (which they collected from German peasants) Little Red Riding Hood takes a bottle of wine to her grandmother. The mother says “here is a piece of cake and a bottle of wine; take them to your grandmother, she is ill and weak, and they will do her good.”
When I first started teaching the story, 25 years ago, in college classes on folklore, students were not particularly concerned, but their responses nowadays are very alarmed–the mother should be reported to CPS, what a horrible story, how could anyone ever say that wine would do the grandmother good, etc etc.
As a non-drinker I’ve occasionally had this saying directed at me, and the people who have done so have been good enough to explain exactly what they meant by it: that a non-drinker is fearfully or dishonestly concealing their “true self”.
Interestingly enough, some of these same people are quick to blame it on the alcohol when their own “true self” does something they later regret.