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    Everything you know about addiction is wrong

    mudra
    mudra


    Posts : 23210
    Join date : 2010-04-09
    Age : 69
    Location : belgium

    Everything you know about addiction is wrong Empty Everything you know about addiction is wrong

    Post  mudra Sat Jun 12, 2021 1:54 am

    Everything you know about addiction is wrong F8257410

    Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

    https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong/up-next

    Best thing I've read in ages ...

    "Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.

    Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is 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.

    We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.

    The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things not people. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that."
    ~ Johann Hari

    For more ...
    https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong -
    ** About the work of Bruce K. Alexander

    ClearWater likes this post

    Carol
    Carol
    Admin
    Admin


    Posts : 31699
    Join date : 2010-04-07
    Location : Hawaii

    Everything you know about addiction is wrong Empty Re: Everything you know about addiction is wrong

    Post  Carol Sat Jun 12, 2021 1:01 pm

    "Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment."

    WOAH! This is utterly amazing and so true. Thanks for a great article mudra.


    _________________
    What is life?
    It is the flash of a firefly in the night, the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

    With deepest respect ~ Aloha & Mahalo, Carol
    mudra
    mudra


    Posts : 23210
    Join date : 2010-04-09
    Age : 69
    Location : belgium

    Everything you know about addiction is wrong Empty Re: Everything you know about addiction is wrong

    Post  mudra Sat Jun 12, 2021 5:24 pm

    cheers Glad you enjoyed it Carol

      Current date/time is Fri Apr 26, 2024 6:19 am