Great book on addiction, if you can handle the Adbusters/Occupy POV. The author is a psychology of addiction professor who taught at a university in Vancouver for 35 years, and realized/decided that the traditional understanding of addiction was false.
For example, he thinks that there is no such thing as a particularly "addictive substance," and spends chapters disproving what he calls the "demon drug" mythology. This is the "Just Say No" paradigm that says some drugs are just inherently super addictive, for instance, crack cocaine, alcohol or heroin. He points out that for most people, the physical withdrawal from even these substances is relatively mild, it's the psychological withdrawal that is terrible. This jibes with my experience; Allen Carr's "Easyway to Quit Smoking" book is a good example. If you're quitting smoking, focus on JUST the physical affects of withdrawal. They aren't severe at all - waves of mild anxiety and perhaps sweating that last 5-10 minutes, between three and ten times a day, for two weeks. It wouldn't be difficult to quit smoking cigarettes at all if you were just dealing with the physical withdrawal, but when you add in the psychological component - smoking is cool, smoking is almost impossible to quit, smoking keeps you thin, etc etc - it becomes VERY difficult. Ditto heroin, alcohol, and crack - there are withdrawal symptoms, sure, but the physical symptoms for most addicts are actually quite mild. Heroin withdrawal for most addicts feels like a few days of the cold, alcohol withdrawal for most addicts doesn't have DTs, but (like cigarettes) a few waves of anxiety that last several minutes, for about two weeks. BUT. Losing your community, your identity, your social lubricant, and so forth causes extreme discomfort relative to the actual physical symptoms. I quit a terrible meth habit by sleeping for two weeks, but I missed my friends for years; I finally had to move to a different city for those withdrawal symptoms, from my friends and identity as a tweaker, to subside. And besides, 80% of addictions are to non-physically addictive things, such as gambling, self-absorption, video games, pornography and so forth. Withdrawal is 100% psychological and all are very difficult to quit.
After "debunking" several other addiction "myths," such as the "addictive personality," he proposes a new hypothesis of addiction. Well, new-ish, he uses Plato and St. Augustine, among other writers, to show its prevalence throughout history. This hypothesis says that addictive behavior is an adaptation to dislocation.
After all the definitions, this seems like a no-brainer. Dislocation is the state of being blocked from what he calls "psychosocial integration." Basically, you are ostracized from community. Since humans are adapted to live in small, pedestrian communities with integrative structures including religion, social safety nets, and so forth, we have a hard time dealing with the modern world, in particular (this is where the Adbusters/Occupy POV comes in) the cultivated dislocation required to keep hypercapitalized social systems on track for 3% growth.
Capitalism as we know it is relatively new, only becoming entrenched in the past 200-400 years or so. Free markets tend to dislocate people geographically. For example, the slave trade; the movement of indigenous Americans from their homelands to reservations; the migration of small farmers forced off their plots by more efficient, large, mechanized farms to cities; the movement of affluent city dwellers to non-pedestrian suburbs; the movement of pedestrian cultures to car cultures; the movement of entertainment from live performances to television; the movement of families to follow jobs. There are scores of examples.
The need for consistent 3% growth also provides a reason for corporations to cultivate addiction. For example, if you want to keep taxes low, promoting gambling can convince dislocated individuals to pour their money into an addiction and state coffers. Advertising non-necessary goods and services can convince dislocated individuals to pour money shopping addictions, status addictions, romantic addictions, fitness addictions, and so forth. He posits that dislocation is caused, promoted, and exploited by the free-market economy. And, since addiction gives people a sense of purpose and community, it provides an easy replacement for both.
His solution to addiction? Promoting more psychosocial integration. The move toward pedestrian neighborhoods is an effective measure. Things that help families stay together - maternity leave, health insurance, etc - are good. While he is an atheist, he thinks organized religion (as opposed to "eclectic spirituality) is great for fending off dislocation. He also suggests that a ban on advertising to children would stop cultivating addiction in children who feel dislocated growing up in small, unstable families that move around geographically. And so forth.
It was a very interesting book, though he kind of blew his wad in the first six, brilliant chapters, with the remaining 2/3 of the book more like awkward pillow talk, basically lengthy academic and historical proofs of dubious conclusivity. I mean, showing that Maoism (basically all the community organizations created as part of his communist structure) cured opium addiction in China as evidence that the free-market economy causes dislocation and addiction seems a bit of a reach. Some of the corollaries were quite thought-provoking, however.
For example, the book was published in 2009, before social media really hit its stride. He talks about how forums like this one, and how they are actually good for psychosocial integration, because we're communicating, making friends, and creating community. According to the dominant psychological paradigm that is currently part of our shared cultural experience, however, the process of belonging to a forum like this one mimics addiction, we consider it an addiction, because we are used to thinking of addiction as a negative obsession rather than a replacement for psychosocial integration. So, when we achieve actual psychosocial integration (a forum like this one), we think of it as addiction. But it's not - it's the real deal. So when a person is ostracized, or banned, we think of the difficulties associated with that ostracization as "withdrawal," because the forum is addictive like a drug. That is certainly how I perceived it.
If his hypothesis is correct, however, it is addiction that mimics psychosocial integration, and withdrawal that mimics ostracization. Not the other way around. The forum IS psychosocial integration, getting banned IS actual ostracization, exactly the situations that addiction is mimicking.
Maybe that's obvious to some people, but it kind of blew my mind.
After pondering that one for a while, my thoughts turned to Facebook, which was still just a small, relatively unknown social media site when he was doing his research. People talk about it as addictive, and you can go to psychologists and pay $150/hr to be cured of the addiction:
From his point of view, however, since it provides psychosocial integration, it would actually stave off addiction and be a positive part of building community, communicating with others, and all that other stuff humans actually need but find lacking in modern society, "free-market" society. What's interesting is that this basic social need has been standardized, commoditized, manipulated and monitored by Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and other large megacommunities, rather than being spread out over the chaotic internet, wild and free, like the olden days. The imminent and perhaps deliberately catalyzed death of this forum, for example, was precipitated by a move to Facebook by most participants. This is troubling, because one of our most basic needs, community, is being privatized and therefore subject to the needs of capital, i.e. 3% growth, i.e. cultivated dislocation and cultivated addiction. Hmmm….