We all know what causes addiction, right?
Drugs and Alcohol.
Wrong.
Pushers and bad neighbourhoods…
Nope.
Genetic inheritance?
Wrong again.
Some fascinating research has come out that shows pretty conclusively that drug addiction, which killed nearly a hundred thousand people in the USA alone in 2016, a year on year increase of over ten percent, is caused by none of the above.
So what could it be?
In the mid 20th C most of the experimentation into addiction and the conclusions drawn, which provided the popular model we have as to its causes, was done on rats in cages. They were given the option of regular clean water or water laced with heroin or cocaine. Without fail the rats took to the drugged water and duly expired, all of which seemed to demonstrate how helpless Ratus Ratus becomes in the face of temptation..
and by association, you and me.
Psychologist Bruce Alexander was unconvinced. He reflected on the number of folks in hospital on high grade diamorphine, the kind of painkiller used in hip replacements, used for weeks or even months at a time, that did not result in addiction. He also looked at heroin use by Vietnam soldiers, an estimated 20% of those deployed, and found that there was a staggering 95% spontaneous recovery rate once they returned stateside.
So what was the difference between the rats and the soldiers/ hospital patients?
The cage.
Alexander sought to test this hypothesis and put dozens of rats into the equivalent of five star rat heaven with ample toys and food and most importantly the opposite sex, along with the traditional option of heroin water and ordinary water. He found that the rats mostly ignored the drugs. They were far too busy being with each other.
The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is connection. Something we are not very good at despite our sophistication. So how can we account for this loss of connection? It doesn’t seem enough to talk about class conflict or capitalist competitiveness a la Marx, the loss of shared values suggested by Durkheim or Weber’s’ ‘alienation’ – mindlessly having to obey the rules of a faceless bureaucracy.
The maddening process of having to adapt to a mad world put forward by R. D. Laing is more tempting. You cannot manage such a contradictory dance without becoming internally split and having basic security unseated, though this still begs the question of what it is about contemporary society that makes it mad in the first place.
Social isolation, alienation from the group, is fairly easy to spot. The black sheep of the family, the kid who sits alone at lunch, the hostile co-worker, the crazy driver who carves you up in traffic without thought for the consequences. Less obvious is alienation from oneself. Being alone need not necessarily constitute loneliness. Most folk positively need alone time to recharge themselves. Likewise, being in the midst of others may not reduce loneliness at all. It might even make it worse.
Deeper and more biting than social isolation is self-estrangement, the kind of internal disaffection where I no longer comes calling on Me, where the inner pathways between different aspects of ourselves have become overgrown and abandoned.
One of the principle ways this happens is when kids grow up feeling they have to fulfill certain conditions in order to get loved. They learn that they have to be a certain way to gain approval, carry parental burdens whose covert expectations bends them out of shape, bury aliveness that draws envious sanction. This has the effect of walling children off, not just from one another but from themselves. A healthy ego cannot develop because there is way too much invested in projecting an ever more entrenched and idealized self-image. This ideal gets reinforced with social approval, momma’s little helper, teacher’s pet, the leader of tomorrow.
The cost to the child is they don’t know who they are anymore, their own destiny has been hijacked, hitched to a star not their own. The need to belong subverts the need to become.
This dynamic is poignantly expressed by Danny Kay’s Tubby the Tuba, who so wants to be a part of the orchestra that he has lost faith in the sound of his own song. He’s tempted to capitulate and just oom-pah along as he is supposed to but then reminds himself in a song of what that would cost him..
”Alone am I, me and I together. If I went away from me, how unhappy I would be.. Me and I .. oh my…’
He’s helped by a wise frog who encourages him to find his own voice though he risks the fury and rejection of all the other instruments in the process.
The question is, how does this prospect of self-estrangement cast its pall over our entire culture, so much so that tens of thousands of people a year are killed by addictions created out of the need to dull its pain?
We might get the idea of an isolated incident where a child feels compelled to betray itself for the sake of belonging and take to drugs as a way out. As a young heroin addict once told me, ‘Its easier just to take on all the family pain and then numb it with drugs than it is to shuck the burden.”
But how does this happen by the million?
The answer seems to be that self-estrangement is weaved into the very fabric of what we otherwise uphold as our fine upstanding social norms.
Trigger alert!
We are collectively encouraged to consider ourselves better than others to the point that healthy patriotism can become zenophobic hatred of entire nations upon whom we then happily project all those inferior aspects of ourselves that don’t fit with the ideal we are supposed to be, the ideal that gets us loved.
Couple this with any religion that supports such splitting, making other perspectives on spiritual life not just alien and stupid but wicked and evil, and soon you have entire populations that have effectively denied and demonised aspects of their inner worlds en masse to the point where only opioids will bridge the divide and give a moment’s respite from the resulting schism, stretching like a canyon across the desert lands of our otherwise proud and uplifted hearts.
It gets worse. The divisiveness that clings to ever narrowing bands of shining selfhood must go to war with any aspect of personality not quite up to the mark, which means that ego structure is weakened to the point that connection to the higher self, to embodied soulfullness, is lost.
Spirituality that is no more than ‘vain and empty repetition’ cannot be entertained because the personality is so divided against itself, so weakened by inner conflict, that the Self, whose impact de-integrates even the healthy ego, is experienced as simply too overwhelming. This is why Jung says, ”the more the church develops the more Christ dies.’ The covert purpose of such establishment is to prevent people from having their own experience, evicting them from the Ground of Being.
Divided and bereft, longing becomes craving. The Waters of Life become Gin, the manna of heaven, a ten dollar wrap or a handful of pills, the capacity for reflection – a line on a mirror.
Is it then too simplistic to suggest that the solution to epidemic drug use has something to do with collectively becoming a little less damn holy? Becoming tolerant of weakness rather than trying to eradicate it? Allowing oneself to feel shitty without it having to mean you’re shit? Letting others have a different point of view without it negating your own? Being curious, valuing divergence, rubbing shoulders with not-me?
If you want to kick the habit, get connected. Rediscover that childhood fascination with the new and the strange. Share something of yourself with your neighbour, even if it’s just your smile. Meet the eye of the newspaper man, give your fellow earthlings a nod in the street, raise the bar of receptivity.
but above all clear back the brush that’s overgrown the paths between your inner houses, knock down some of the stoney old walls of inner divisiveness and self-judgement, or at least acknowledge their presence and name them. Ask what rules you’re living by and break a few.
You’ll live longer..
and better…
and so will those around you.
If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.
