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| Morgan Dandie Hannah |
One of the things that Hannah emphasized is that there are many different types of addictions. This was really brought home to me in my article about problem gamblers. This got me thinking about the nature of addiction.
I've been addicted to drugs. I probably still am. I was a smoker and I had a hard time quitting. I woke up in the morning and had a hard time breathing until I had the first cigarette of the day. When I tried to stop "cold turkey" this unpleasant experience kept on all day long. This lasted for about three months. This was nowhere near as bad as having "crank bugs" or "dope sickness"---but it was bad enough. I think that this was my "detox" phase.
After that, I spent years relapsing and tapering down by switching to cigars and a pipe. I finally was able to quit completely once I had the realization that I kept going back to smoking when I "had the blues" and believed that there was no real sense to my life. When I felt optimistic and enthusiastic, I wanted to quit again. Armed with this insight, I tried to "reprogram myself" to have a positive worldview. Among other things, through this process I learned that there's no such thing as "self-discipline"---but that it is possible to construct good habits. This was my "therapy phase". I was no doubt helped by the years I spent studying philosophy, training under various meditation masters, and, visiting a therapist weekly to deal with my PTSD.
Later on I learned that I was (and still am) addicted to caffeine. I found this out when I had a job travelling on the road for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and, Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). I got sick of drinking crappy coffee at Tim Horton's so I decided to quit doing "cold turkey". The result was absolutely mind-bending headaches. I don't remember if I completed the detox or if I just relapsed after a few days. Now I live with a very hard-core coffee "pusher" who delivers super-high-test product right to my easy chair or desk several times a day. So I've definitely got that monkey on my back right now.
Some readers might dismiss the above as being "only trivially true". But I think they'd be wrong. As I pointed out in one of the previous articles on this subject, it's clear that the worst elements of addiction are not intrinsic to the actual drug---they are socially constructed by how society treats the people who are dependent on them. People die of overdoses because we have made it impossible for them to find a safe, dependable source. People also become prostitutes, dealers, and, thieves because of the inflated prices that criminals charge. These aren't the result of the drug and people's dependency on it, they are the result of criminalizing these specific addictions.
In researching another article, I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn't created problems in places like Long Term Care Facilities---it's just pointed out the places where our society simply doesn't work very well. That's why the death rate in private long term care homes is generally so much higher than in not-for-profit and government facilities. It's the same thing with regard to addiction. Like me, there are lots of people who are addicted to various legal substances. This often causes problems---ranging from insomnia to lung cancer. But if we tried to stamp out the use of these substances the same way we do heroin, we'd have people turning tricks and stealing bicycles for cigarettes.
It's true that lots of people don't get addicted in the first place or are able to get off the drugs on their own. But addicts are generally folks who have other significant long-term problems. And these people are poorly served by our catastrophic lack of willingness to properly fund our social safety net and mental health facilities. Drug addiction is like a giant sieve that sorts out a lot of the broken people in our society and tosses them into the "discard" pile. Indeed, I once heard a police chief from Alberta talking about this. He said the overwhelming majority of people that his officers deal with over substance abuse issues are "self-medicating" for one problem or another.
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There is a lot of "behind the scenes" work putting out this blog that readers might not know about. For example, the gif below of a guy losing his marbles over having to wear a mask was taken from a Youtube video (perfectly legally, using the "Fair Use" provision), but I had to find a "work around" because lawyers had threatened "Git Hub" with a lawsuit if they didn't remove a sub-program that allows people to download videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawyers went after Youtube, and that allowed Git Hub to put it back on---but not before the good people at Linux Mint had removed it from the latest update of my computer. As a result, I did about an hour's research to find a "work around" that I could use to download the video. Then I had to edit it into a much shorter version. Then I had to refresh my memory about how how to use a command line program to convert this clipped version into a gif. I suppose lots of folks could do this in their sleep---but could they research and write this blog too?
Just a new way to sing the old song. This blog takes a lot of work to put out. So why not support it if you can? You don't even have to subscribe (easy to do, through Patreon), as there is the option of a one-time payment through PayPal if you don't want to lock yourself in. (Thanks Peter for being so awesome!)
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The above points are relatively trivial observations. I'm certainly not the first person to give voice to them. But they needed mentioning before I dig a little deeper to talk about what I really want to blather on about in this post.
I've spent decades of my life practising the internal martial art called taijiquan. For those of you who don't know about these things (I assume most of you), an internal art is one where you don't use brute strength to defend yourself but rather a sophisticated understanding of how the human body operates. Here's a video advert for a book that illustrates (at least in part) what I'm talking about.
What the teacher is doing is using the geometry of his student's body to control his centre of gravity. The result is that the student then has to spend all his awareness and strength just to remain vertical and protect the joint that has been locked from being broken. This effectively neutralizes him as an opponent.
The only way to develop the skill necessary to do this is through years of careful, thoughtful, applied practice. I don't mean mindless "muscle twitching" of the sort that we all had to suffer through in school phys ed classes. I'm talking about careful, meditative, body awareness. To get good at the internal arts, one has to dissect their body with their minds. That's how you learn to do those subtle ways of manipulating another person that the teacher is showing in the above video.
And when you start walking down that path you learn that you have to dissect your consciousness too. That's because once you really get into doing this, you learn that your (for want of a better term) "state of mind" is tremendously important. For example, if you are angry the natural tendency is to tense up, which renders all of the techniques you want to use for self defence pretty much worthless. As a result, you have to learn to get into a specific type of consciousness when you practice if you want to do it right.
This type of training is something of a meditative practice all on it's own, which is why when you start out learning the internal martial art of taijiquan you end up spending long periods of time doing slow forms training that looks like a weird dance routine. It looks silly to people who don't understand what is going on, but you simply cannot get any good at internal martial arts without doing this sort of thing.
Here's a video of a very good taijiquan teacher (Paul Compton) practising this sort of thing while the audio consists of someone explaining---through the use of two translated old Chinese texts---what needs to go on in your head when you practice the solo form properly.
At this point I suspect that lots of readers are asking themselves "Why is Bill telling us about this?" Well, I'm trying to point out that if you develop a certain sensitivity to how your body and mind operate (that "dissecting your body with your mind" thing), you begin to realize how many people's attitudes and beliefs are influenced by the way certain hormones flow through their bodies.
When I get angry, I can feel the subtle changes. When I'm afraid, I feel other changes. And so on. That makes me aware of the way these chemical reactions influence my beliefs and behaviour. And, ultimately, that sort of thing is what governs all addictions. When people take opioids they do so because specific parts of the chemicals they ingest fit into specific parts of their bodies called "receptors". Scientists have found these things and described them using modern chemical models. Here's rendering of one particular opioid receptor. (Don't ask me what each part means---by now I've already maxed-out my understanding of neuro-chemistry.)
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| An animated view of the PDB 4DJH structure showing the human k-opioid receptor in complex with the JDTic ligand. By Dcirovic, c/o Wikimedia Commons |
Those receptors in your body weren't created to plug alien chemicals into, that's only an accident---like finding out that a random part from some other machine just happens to fit into a slot on your computer and does strange things.
Instead, those receptors were meant to react to a chemical that your own body creates. That's what happens when I get angry---one part of my body releases a chemical that flows through the entire body and then sticks into receptors that---among other things---makes my muscles tense, and, my heart beat faster. These are counter-productive to the technique of internal martial arts, so part of my training has involved learning how to consciously counter-act those instinctive reactions. (And that's how I became aware of all this stuff in the first place.)
In turn, this helps me understand how something like gambling addictions work. The body creates its own "fix" and to a certain extent people can create it internally instead of having to go down the street corner and buy it. That's what is going on when gambling addicts "get into the zone". Even more revealing is the fact that game designers can---using trial and error based on data collected by electronic gaming machines---create specific experiences that will addict a significant fraction of the public to shovelling their life's savings into the coffers of casinos.
Now let me expand on the issue based on my personal experience gleaned from a lifetime of self-observation from studying meditation and internal martial arts. Human beings do a lot of things in pursuit of creating internal chemicals to fit into their receptors so they can feel a specific internal "high". Let's reel off some obvious examples:
- sexual arousal and orgasms
- exercise---such as the runner's "high"
- rhythmic activity where you "lose yourself", like dancing
- religious services where you do things like "speak in tongues"
- spiritual practices like formal meditation, yoga, taijiquan, chanting, prayer
Now let's get into some less obvious, but just as important examples. People often "groove" on the feeling of the chemicals coursing through their bodies and jamming into their receptors from much more mundane experiences. These include:
- cheering on a sports team
- being scared witless by a suspense or horror movie
- having a "good cry" while reading a sad novel
- laughing until they feel exhausted at a comedy show
- getting enraged by the injustice you learn about in a news article
OK. If you are still with me, now what about the following things that some people watch over and over again?
- "Doomer porn", that says crazy things like the Climate Emergency is going make all multi-cellular life on earth extinct within 30 years?
- Animal rights posts that show positively horrific footage of grotesque animal abuse?
- Ludicrous conspiracy theories like Q-anon that say that the leaders of the Democratic party kidnap and torture hordes of children so they can harvest their blood to make anti-aging drugs?
- Political propaganda that says that refugees crossing the boarder (following the UN refugee rules) are in some mysterious sense "illegal" and that the government gives them all sorts of money that our veterans aren't entitled to receive?
- Whack-a-doodle videos that state that George Soros and Bill Gates are involved in an enormous conspiracy aimed at "micro-chipping" the entire human race so we can be controlled in some sort enormous Stalinist world tyranny.
- The conservative propaganda that says that opposition to the tar sands is being artificially-created by foreign charitable foundations that channel outside money into Canada.
It seems clear to me that the people who compulsively pursue and repeat the above stories also seem to addicted to some sort internal chemical "rush". If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider the following gif I created from a Youtube video of an anti-masker at a city council meeting in Florida.
I can tell you from personal experience that the guy in the above gif was "main-lining" a lot of very serious "rage hormones". IMHO, the people who created the propaganda that whipped him into this frenzy are "pushers" just like guys who sell crystal meth in dark alleys.
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When I was young there was recent research that showed that you could stimulate a part of an animal's brain to evoke a response that would motivate it to immediately push a button to cause another stimulation. That's classic addiction behaviour and rats would literally keep pushing the button until they died of dehydration or starvation because they wouldn't even stop to drink or eat. (Does this remind you of the some people in casinos? Check out this subReddit to read some first-hand stories if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
Writers of all sorts had a field day with this subject. One particular example I can remember being deeply disturbed by was a pulp fiction crime novel (I think by John D. MacDonald) who had a villain who had lobotomized a woman and attached her brain to an apparatus similar to the one above (albeit wirelessly) and used the reward system to get her to compulsively exercise until she became a super strong killer. I don't think we've quite gotten to this point in our collective journey to absolute perdition, but in a way, I think we're pretty close.
Social media, electronic gaming machines, and, political fundraising don't involve inserting an electrode directly into people's brains. Instead, they communicate through traditional intermediate means: pictures, written texts, flashing lights, music, video, etc. But what is new is the fact that people's responses are being reduced to a number and carefully tracked in order to constantly "sort out" the fraction of the public who are most receptive to the given message. This statistical analysis is also being used to refine the message sent so it creates stronger and stronger responses.
Let's zero in on how this emergent technology works with political propaganda. It's true that most people don't get "hooked" by the populist message. But that's exactly the same as both drug and gambling addictions, which only catch a small fraction of the population. But a small fraction isn't the same as an insignificant one. There are enough gambling addicts to fund an enormous financial sector. And much the same thing can be said about illicit drugs. Similarly, a majority is never going to believe that Hillary Clinton tortures children so she can drink their adrenaline-saturated blood. But even a tiny number can create a huge amount of chaos if they grab a rifle and head out to support a call by Q-anon to fight the good fight.
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And on that cheery note, I will leave you dear readers. Be nice to the people around you. Hug your significant other, cat, dog, rabbit, or, whatever. Eat right. Take your vitamins. Exercise. Wear a mask and keep your distance. AND REMEMBER THAT THIS TOO SHALL PASS!
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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