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?
I was thinking the other day about how lots of people have great things to say about how drug addition/dependence always begins with reasonable drug use as a coping mechanism against something else, but then how many of these people will turn around and mock the "alcohol culture" of suburban middle aged white people who make jokes about needing wine and "normalize addiction." And it seems like it's definitely incredibly important to recognize how a broader social atmosphere can fail people, rather than how people just fail themselves, and how this leads to the socially individual phenomenon of casual alcoholism or drug dependence.
This! The broader problem with the dissonance between the way people talk about white suburban alcohol culture and the way people talk about addiction in other contexts is that the current atmosphere of leftist spaces has trained us (them?) to look down upon privileged people as idiots without problems. So issues like white poverty and addiction in white people aren't problems of class and capitalism, but problems of white people, and thus dismissable. It isn't tenable, and it isn't fair, and no real growth or change can come of that state of affairs. I would argue that we should look at privileged groups as litmus tests of how bad and entrenched a problem is. If it affects the most privileged of us that badly, how much worse is it fucking up the most marginalized people? And focus on those problems. That ties into a lot of other thoughts I have of the way the left isn't really so good at the big picture, and it's so busy tearing down its icons that it doesn't stop to wonder what happens to us when we tear them down. It's a whole mess.
I would definitely say that many leftist spaces are all too willing to view shit that happens to undesirably privileged people as individual moral failings, whereas shit that happens to protected classes is systemic, and trying to point out the dissonance is unnuanced and It's Not The Same.
Opioid addiction in chronically ill folks? Obviously a coping mechanism to deal with both pain and the failings of the medical institution to recognize disabled folks as people. Alcoholism in homeless folks? Well it's cheap and accessible and gives the illusion of warmth while filling a belly and hey, it's classist to be mad about how homeless people spend their money. But the white lady who makes jokes on facebook about needing a bigger glass of wine because of X petty inconvenience? Definitely not a cry for help or an attempt to find affirmation from other people who find themselves uncomfortably dependent on alcohol. Nope, that's just them awful bourgeois being hedonistic and knowing zero things about real oppression.
And it's just like... on the one hand, it's incredibly important to say "you're allowed to do/have things," but on the other hand, doing/having things is the exact reason why the bourgeoisie is horrible, right? So as long as you can paint a picture of somebody as coping with the wrong things which are choices and not related to their intrinsic suffering as a marginalized person, it's fine to shit on all aspects of their personhood/lives, including the bits that overlap with the folks you do like.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nerdflighter
no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 11:52 am (UTC)I would argue that we should look at privileged groups as litmus tests of how bad and entrenched a problem is. If it affects the most privileged of us that badly, how much worse is it fucking up the most marginalized people? And focus on those problems.
That ties into a lot of other thoughts I have of the way the left isn't really so good at the big picture, and it's so busy tearing down its icons that it doesn't stop to wonder what happens to us when we tear them down. It's a whole mess.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-10 01:08 pm (UTC)Opioid addiction in chronically ill folks? Obviously a coping mechanism to deal with both pain and the failings of the medical institution to recognize disabled folks as people. Alcoholism in homeless folks? Well it's cheap and accessible and gives the illusion of warmth while filling a belly and hey, it's classist to be mad about how homeless people spend their money. But the white lady who makes jokes on facebook about needing a bigger glass of wine because of X petty inconvenience? Definitely not a cry for help or an attempt to find affirmation from other people who find themselves uncomfortably dependent on alcohol. Nope, that's just them awful bourgeois being hedonistic and knowing zero things about real oppression.
And it's just like... on the one hand, it's incredibly important to say "you're allowed to do/have things," but on the other hand, doing/having things is the exact reason why the bourgeoisie is horrible, right? So as long as you can paint a picture of somebody as coping with the wrong things which are choices and not related to their intrinsic suffering as a marginalized person, it's fine to shit on all aspects of their personhood/lives, including the bits that overlap with the folks you do like.