SATURDAY, JAN 23, 2021: NOTE TO FILE
Addictions R Us
Denormalizing the believing mind
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: REPEATING PATTERNS, FROM THE WIRES, WE NEED TO BELIEVE
Abstract: Humans have many potential and actual addictions, but the addiction is uncharted, unrecognized, unacknowledged. We swim in a sea of error, ignorance, and illusion that is hidden in plain sight. But we would rather believe than know.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Addiction is considered a problem if it involves drug and alcohol use (i.e. legal and illegal use of addictive substances despite adverse consequences to the individual and society):
A quarter of a billion people worldwide aged 15 to 64, used an illicit drug in 2014 (250 million). Opioid dependence contributed most, being responsible for 55% of lost years due to premature death.
The global addiction crisis includes legal drugs, approximately 240 million people are dependent on alcohol globally, with over 3 million deaths caused by harmful alcohol use each year. Tobacco use, an illegal drug in Bhutan only, claims over 1,300 million addicts worldwide, with 8 million deaths a year, but users can still drive cars and it mostly harms the user and only after they worked to increase the GDP and retired, so almost everywhere nicotine addiction is not considered a problem to actually solve.
More than half of Americans report that they had some recent personal connection to the issue of opioid dependence, saying that they or someone they knew had abused, been addicted to, or died from prescription painkillers. Add alcohol, nicotine, and other legal/illegal drugs and the percentage closely approaches 100 percent. Maybe if you live in a Supermax prison you don't know anyone who uses, but you probably have known someone who used or been a user.
The concept 'addiction' is viewed as a 'bad' thing. People can be addicted to sex, food, work, stealing, violence, pyromania, gambling, porn, exercising, cultism, pain seeking, cutting, tattooing, TV, screen-time, video games, guns, internet, social media, shopping, or any too much of a maybe good thing. The universally agreed to boundary is that 'addiction' is too much unto ungood. This creates a huge blind spot the size of a planet that prevents humans from seeing their greater addictions they deem good that are destroying them and the planet they live on. What doesn't seem to be killing them, especially right-thinking descent people, is normalized.
For example, environmental scientist and activist Haydn Washington points out that we humans of modern techno-industrial (MTI) society are addicted to growth. He, of course, wishes to imply that the best thing that could ever happen to a species is a bad thing. That's because, as an environmentalist, he sees that the pursuit of short-term self interest by humans (meaning everyone living in MTI culture) is resulting in the unintended destruction of the planetary life-support system. As an environmentalist he believes in political solutions, so politicizing growth (bad) is needed (imagined) to effect political solutions. That some humans, if only one percent, are supportive provides the social approbation primates crave.
All political animals agree that there are political solutions to advocate for (e.g. degrowth to a steady-state economy by choice) as if humans could anymore stop growing than reindeer on a predator-free, disease-free island could. Environmental problems cannot be solved by the same narrative storytelling that enabled them. Until environmentalists realize they are part of the problematique, the pace of planetary destruction will not slow, nor will any solutionatique be possible. To iterate towards real solutions may require an environmentalism without environmentalists.
This implies facing our vastly greater and more debilitating addictions, which can be boiled down to one: our addiction to belief. We are the storytelling animal who has become addicted to our narratives about self and other, life (good) and death (bad), of like and dislike, right and wrong, blame and justification, true and false, freedom and dignity, rights and responsibilities, us vs them, and the ever popular for and against (e.g. all political and religious narratives).
And the greatest of all beliefs is our belief in belief as an unquestionably good and necessary thing. The brain of every alcoholic knows absolutely for sure that another drink is needed, even if an annoying counter voice opines otherwise. In a society of, for, and by alcoholics, could anyone be sober without being turned into a founder of a cult or religion promising liberation from addiction in the next life (or maybe this)? ('Grant me chastity and continence [virtue], but not yet').
Our purpose-driven life is to believe true claims, absolutely, beyond all doubt, in certitude forever and ever. We quibble and kill one another over what The Truth is, but we need to believe as a smoker needs another puff. Our brain on language as schooled (normalized by MTI culture), have to tell true stories even though there are no true stories. We have and are had by our addictions which we misjudge needs while committing that slow suicide we misjudge our good lives rounded with a sleep. Free me from my addictions, but not yet.
Calhoun's rats of NIMH did not tell stories, and did not have technology to make weapons, nor create substances to abuse. We humans of NIMH can and do. We can tell stories that normalize our pathologies, but we are not obviously (except to modern humans) different in kind from mice or reindeer.
We 'wake up' from sleep to the chatter of thought which sometimes connects to vocal cords or the tip-tap of fingers. Sometimes shadows on the wall of our cave distract us. We tell stories about them. Some stories are more likely than others. Some endeavor to tell likely stories, but everything we think we know is an illusion. The shadows—they might be giants. We cannot know truth, but merely iterate towards it by pausing to listen. To listen is to iterate towards sanity.
'He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know. Who knows this knowledge without knowing?' —Zhuangzi
'Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.... True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true. Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right. Those who know are not learned. Those who are learned do not know.' — Laozi
'I believe I know....' — MTI Addict
Note: What rats are telling us.
When rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles—one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine—the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed and died. Like pigeons pressing a variable scheduled reinforcement lever, they were relentless, until their bodies and brains were overcome, and they died.
But rats put in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs. Of course they did not live multiple generations, 8-12, within their rat utopia, so too little time for a behavioral sink to select for dysfunctional behaviors and loss of functional behaviors. Repeat the Calhoun experiment, but add the drug dispenser. And then what?
