Being Addicted Can Help
What lies beyond?
What is addiction?
During my 23 years of academic teaching, I usually asked my students to raise their hands, if they were not addicted to anything. About one in 30 students did that, and I am still not sure, if they understood the question.
I theorized that addiction is based on a segmented perception of reality in which the mind separates a predictable chunk over which the addict feels to be in control, because the outcomes are predictable.
The following related story that goes along with my original idea. You might want to keep in mind that in psychological human behavior is usually emulated by rats, not primates
:“Put a rat in a cage and give it 2 water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself in a couple of weeks. That is our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. Let’s try this a bit differently.” So he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex. Other rats to befriend. Colored balls. Plus both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water. But here’s what's fascinating: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. What Bruce did shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is that it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
Now, we created a society where significant numbers of us can’t bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping... We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for many of us, more like the first cage than the bonded, connected cages we need.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of it, is geared toward making us connect with things not people. You are not a good consumer citizen if you spend your time bonding with the people around you and not stuff. In fact, we are trained from a young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume. Drug addiction is a subset of that.
Apparently, anti-social distancing was focused on human relationships, just like muzzling created divisions among friends and family.
I have also pointed out that there is one thing anyone can do against tyranny:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/the-most-important-thing-anyone-can
Of course, you don’t have to be caged to be an addict. Living among other people imposes severe restrictions on everyone to the point that realizing your potentials is hardly ever possible. It’s not an accident that some of the most fantastically well-meaning and intelligent people I’ve known subsisted on desensitizers to dull the pain of being alive and sometimes on psychotropics in order to expand the cage by drug-induced imagination.
The Addiction to Dying
Dies Irae: The Day of Wrath
One of the most fantastic pieces of music ever written:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVc9G36uxPc
My second worst night in my life was nearly as bad as the the night my 32-year-old sister died after six hours of suffocation as her lungs were filling up with liquid, while she was coughing. I was riding my motorcycle cross-country and I was welcomed by religious people, who allowed me to stay overnight. One tiny thing they failed to mention: there was an elderly lady dying of cancer in the next room, who had refused pain killers. I couldn’t sleep a wink because of the moaning with her every breath and her screaming every now and then, yet I still believe that suffering cannot be in vain, even when it looks like it is.
Can someone be addicted to life? Most people are fascinated and enchanted by death:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/the-sacrifice-of-the-human-animal
Can addiction target happiness?
Most people seem to believe that happiness is a condition. It is not. It is a process that keeps changing, and it always involves personal intent and public outcome. It is like riding on a wave towards a distant shore that only those who persevere will reach, but nobody has seen.
Material gains, including sensory indulgence, result only in obcession
:Here is a joke about obsessive behavior:
This guy is there in the desert for weeks. His only companion is a camel. His libido is too much for his age, and he starts considering the camel. It takes him weeks, but eventually, he makes friends with the idea, so he pulls his pants down and stands behind the camel. The camel steps aside. Again, he walks behind the camel, but the camel walks a little bit away. This keeps going on for months. Finally, a gorgeous white blond (according to worldwide inquiries, those are the most attractive for all races, but it’s probably enough to ask the Swedish or the Germans about their experience since 2015) shows up, stark naked. She puts her arm around our man and says,
“I’ll fulfill all your wishes. What do you want?”
The man’s response is,
“Hold that camel!”
Happiness has nothing to do with being content: it is a fire, burning with desire to do well within the confines of human existence. It has nothing to do with “being positive,” because it involves faith and responsibility. It is not a feeling, because serving what is right sometimes sucks. It is fuel towards a destination, but it is only a means to that end. Feeling safe and satisfied only puts out the fire, but the observant are aware that safety doesn’t exist in this world and being satisfied doesn’t comply with human nature.
How about being bad?
Revolting against the natural order of things is the Promethean adventure and you might also label it the Original Sin. It provides pride and even integrity for those who choose to take the path, which seems to include the whole of mankind.
According to some, “being different” from the herd is also desired, because how else can one be exceptional? That belief leads directly into the bottomless pit of a satanistic persuasion, because nobody can do it all alone. Evil people allying themselves with other evil people carries an irreconcilable contradiction: there is no room left for trusting in each other, because they can turn on each other anytime.
In Tibetan tradition, evil is defined as selfish. In many oral cultures that precede the stage of literacy, evil, stupid, and ridiculous go hand-in-hand, and are sometimes denoted by the same word. Individualistic cultures go back at least to ancient Greece. They were tribal at first, belonged to a monarch next, and ended up in the mythology of a nation. Humans need somewhere to belong, even if the principle is as imaginary as a nation-state.
There seems to be a contradiction here: in order to be evil, one must consider himself superior, and all traditional cultures possess the self-preserving feature of considering themselves better than their counterparts. The globalists certainly look down on the rest of humanity with a special kind of disgust and detestation that, sadly, even proves justified every once in a while, except they forget about counting them in. The difference between them and tribal members is that they objectify people, considering them no better than dangerous parasitic insects, which is perhaps one of the reasons why they want people to eat bugs and worms. Each to their own.
The necessity of continuity
In 1978, a study of several hundred psychological theories found that psychologists can agree only on two tenets:
It is therapeutic to hear out a patient;
Those, whose sense of identity becomes disrupted, lost their mind.
The second statement suggests that people adhere to their previous decisions even if they could easily recognize they were wrong, because they prefer to retain their assumed sanity. Indeed, the strongest motivation I’ve ever seen in humans is what I call “running after my money.” People who have invested too much time, energy, and other resources into something, have a hard time giving it up. Scientology, Ponzi schemes and the like thrive on this characteristic of human nature. In a way, sticking to anything that can be easily proven wrong, is a form of addiction.
Rats are pack animals, whose behavior parallels human tribalism. They develop faster than primates, which saves time for the researcher. They are also cheaper and, unlike primates, are rarely protected by the law.
Credit: Johann Hari
The humanity-project rat addiction:
https://serenityatsummit.com/news/overview-rat-park-addiction-study/
https://exploringyourmind.com/the-rat-park-experiment/
https://healingproperties.org/rat-park-addiction/
https://curioussciencewriters.org/articles/2022/01/31/what-can-rats-teach-us-about-addiction/
https://www.sapience.earth/voices-around-the-fire/bruce-alexander-rat-park
Unwavering addiction to a known goal can be extremely self-destructive.
Outstanding commentary Ray, as was the reference to Mozart's Requiem.
Thank you.
I agree with this wholeheartedly “it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment”