Please read this very interesting article:
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is
Not What You Think
Here
are my thoughts. (Perhaps my rant.)
I agree generally speaking with the story here.
However, the writer appears to discount the small percentage but big numbers of
folks who are lost in estrangement, behavior or chemical (or all of those) and
have no ladder out because they have been so deeply anti-socialized in their
families before the drug or behavior or estrangement is blamed later on.
Many refuse to go to meetings or have no clue how to find meaning in the
society of meetings and even less in the society at large. They have no
emotional tools to find meaning in themselves and can't stop abandoning
themselves and those they love. Then you throw in prison culture,
poverty, declining middle class, poor education opportunities, rampant political
power struggle, rampant manipulation in media and relationship, guilting and
shaming politicians, religions, families and peers and then they continue
to be offered a cultural War On Drugs and class and racial and other minority
baiting as solution. And this is what every person trying to find
their sobriety faces in their attempts at transition to better self-care and
simpler, safer social life. This environment is nothing at all like the
facile-perfect little rat colony play parks the author offers us. This
shallow, too easy idea feels impossibly lacking in self-honesty and is quite
full of emotional nakedness and dangerous pit falls that will find victims in
so many of us having no tools to begin strengthening themselves. This sort of
easy idea with no actual ladder is what many current and future addicts are and
will be trying to escape.
These issues abide in our culture and we are no where near
close to even starting to back out of our huge shame based, punishment and race
slavery profit motive prisons.
So I agree with his nice and true observations and the
scientists he is agreeing with but he lacks for the courage of concept and the
inspirational language and leadership (and perhaps self-honesty) to raise up
the first generation of reformers that must emerge to pull this
off eventually in our culture.
The changes it requires in our American culture alone will
be so deep that it must be a revolution taking perhaps centuries. How
long has it taken SO FAR to establish basic rights for Women, Minorities
and Children? Where is the ERA? These days we are taking giant steps
backwards. And much of the rest of the world is even more backward on
these cultural and social issues than ourselves (for the moment).
Of course a new and healthier culture must be built.
We progressives must stop fighting among ourselves FIRST if we
are serious about making real progress on this mighty and inevitable
project. Inevitable, unless we are overcome first by a cultural collapse
that these days (on darker days and those days are more frequent since last
fall) feels imminent!
So...?
