āGet 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. Itās our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ā70s and said, āWell, hang on a minute. Weāre putting the rat in an empty cage. Itās got nothing to do. Letās try this a little bit differently.ā So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, itās got in Rat Park. Itās got lovely food. Itās got sex. Itās got loads of other rats to be friends with. Itās got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And theyāve got both the water bottles. Theyāve got the drugged water and the normal water. But hereās the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they donāt 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. Thereās a really interesting human example Iāll 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 itās a moral failing, youāre a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says itās not your morality, itās not your brain; itās your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. [ā¦] Weāve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? Weāve 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. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if youāre spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuffāin 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.ā
