06/06/2022
A rat in a cage with a bottle of water and another laced with either he**in or co***ne will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly within a couple of weeks. So there you go.
Bruce Alexander: “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 that is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want. Lovely food, got loads of other rats to be friends and have s*x with, loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And the same normal and drugged water bottles.
The fascinating thing is that now they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None ever overdose. None ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.
Bruce showed that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong.
The right-wing theory is that drugs are a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard.
The left-wing theory is that drugs take 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 have created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right?
We have 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.
https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
** About the work of Bruce K. Alexander
