addiction

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 is that 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 hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, 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. 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, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

(no subject)

Eliminating parental rights to coercively impose their values on children while allowing parents the opportunity to express their values through persuasion and by setting examples that their children will want to emulate would enable parent–child relationships based on greater respect for each parties’ equal dignity. A majority of European countries have either prohibited corporal “punishment” of children by parents, or committed to eliminate it, as have some Latin American countries, and Sweden has had a ban on corporal “punishment” of children by parents for over thirty years.

 

Just as marriage survived the introduction of domestic violence laws (over the objection of patriarchal fears for the preservation of marriage), there is no reason to equate greatly curtailing parental power with ending the family. The elements of parent-child relationships founded on mutual consent that provide care, enjoyment, support, and love would remain intact. Requiring parents to negotiate with and persuade their children rather than commanding obedience backed by an implied or express threat of state sanctioned violence is likely to encourage mutual understanding and appreciation. Children and parents may have closer relationships in a legal regime that respects children as persons, not property or extensions of their parents’ interests. 

 

Samantha Godwin, Against Parental Rights (2015)