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. Itâs our theory of addiction.
Bruce comes along in the â70s and said, âWell, hang on a minute. Weâre putting the rat in an empty cage. Itâs got nothing to do. Letâs try this a little bit differently.â So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, itâs got in Rat Park. Itâs got lovely food. Itâs got sex. Itâs got loads of other rats to be friends with. Itâs got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And theyâve got both the water bottles. Theyâve got the drugged water and the normal water. But hereâs the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they donât 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. Thereâs a really interesting human example Iâll 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 itâs a moral failing, youâre a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says itâs not your morality, itâs not your brain; itâs your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.
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Weâve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? Weâve 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.Â
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 youâre spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuffâin 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.
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