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 I had a friend named Alan. A couple of years ago, he died suddenly due to a congenital heart defect, and when he did, I lost a friend. I lost a champion, a role model, and the world got a little less safe. He used to say to me all the time, "we've forgotten how to listen to each other! We've forgotten how to talk to each other!"

While I always believed that he believed what he was talking about, I couldn't quite tell what he meant. I didn't understand it. Now I do. Save the Canaries is my attempt to share his insight and that of many others. It is to show what it means to really listen and communicate as we're meant to. I know it's not enough, but it's worthwhile and I need your help.

I know that you understand on some level what Alan was talking about, and I know you want that to change. The good news is that we don't have to invent anything new. We just have to understand and practice what we already know. That is, practice a better form of honesty and a more rigorous sense of integrity, to create trust through vulnerability, to truly understand our wants and needs, and listen to those who've gone before us.

Long ago, men used to bring canaries into the coal mine with them. If the canary died, it was time to evacuate. The canaries died so that those men might live. They loved their canaries. For a long time, there have been human canaries among us, warning us to get out of this toxic mine, but instead of listening, we blame them for dying. Where would the coal miners be? If they did that. Where are we now? And what do our canaries have to teach us?

I will tell you what they have to teach us.

I have an idea for at least two books, and I need your support to make them happen. I have a publisher and book one is more than halfway complete. It's called Save the Canaries, and this is my idea. Addiction recovery isn't just something you do after treatment. It's an environment in which we learn how to talk to each other and treat each other in a better way. It's a manner of living that is both more rewarding than and incompatible with addiction. Once I learned about this manner of living, the widespread consequences of its absence became readily apparent to me.

Now, this manner of living isn't specifically created to deal with addiction. Rather, it's things we all should do, but don't because we think we get away with it. But take a look at the state of our planet and our wellbeing. We're not getting away with it. People need to know what this is, how it applies to them, and how it can improve all our lives.

The language needs to be on more lips. The ideas need to be in more heads. And the feelings that come with it need to be in more hearts. In the first book, Save the Canaries, I will use the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous as a framework because while everybody knows they exist, few know what they are and fewer still know what they mean.

Having gathered the insights of many others, including some 50 interviews, I will offer interpretations of each step to show how they contain valuable wisdom for all of us, not just alcoholics. The principles and practices apply to work, school, the economy, consumerism, and how we go about our daily lives.

They have the power to help us fend off dangerous narratives and to write better ones that more align with our humanity. The good news is that we don't have to invent anything new. Today, conversations abound about stepping out of the old ways of thinking and being, noticing those sneaky and sticky nuances so that we can live a better way.

We have an opportunity to anchor these new ideas in the ideas of those who've gone before us. Many people around the world are searching for bridges that can help us cross from old ways that no longer serve us into new ways that do, while preserving some of the old ways that continue to serve us. The 12 steps are such a bridge if we can see them for what they are.

The first book, phase one, will contain many ideas and examples for the readers to unpack. It will also contain many prompts and questions directed to the reader for phase two. Perhaps a book or something better. I will invite people to submit their responses, perspectives, experiences, insights, examples, et cetera, and we, by that time, it will require a we, a team will assemble them into a cohesive text.

It really does take a lot of perspectives and different kinds of people to actually see this almost invisible problem. With enough of them, we will finally see the elephant in the room. Besides, you never know whose point of view will really register with you. In many ways, our culture, our way of life, is just like addiction. I will share with you some details, and I'll do this by incorporating my own experiences and insights along with the perspectives of other people, including those I've interviewed personally. It can't just be my point of view. This is a pluralistic problem and requires many perspectives to understand it when many voices are talking about the same big, invisible thing.

There is a much greater chance that at least one of those messages will resonate with you. I cannot deliver this message alone, but I can get you thinking about it differently. Once we see enough of the parts, we can finally see the elephant in the room.

Save the Canaries excerpt -- Dislocation

 DISLOCATION

Dislocation is a very important concept. I learned about it from Bruce Alexander , the researcher behind the now famous Rat Park experiment on addiction.[6] I will first turn to Alexander’s words to introduce it.

Free-market society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism, competition, and rapid change, dislocating them from social life. People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural, and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us. [4] p.3

Dislocation is the experience of the absence of belonging, identity, meaning, and purpose. [7]

The “opposite” of dislocation is what Alexander calls psychosocial integration, borrowing the term from Erik Erikson. The best short description I can venture of this happy condition is that it is the state of a person who feels free, but still belongs. [7]

Polanyi explained that a free-market society: ... must comprise all elements of industry, including labor, land, and money.... But labor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market. [4]p. 99

Every society carefully protects its foundational beliefs because they give it stability and meaning. As free-market society becomes globalised, therefore, it carefully obscures the connections between free markets, mass dislocation, and addictive misery because seeing them would undermine its foundational belief in the magnanimity of free markets. [4] p. 336)

 

By contrast, it is not in the least threatening to attribute addictive misery to demonic drugs, neurochemical deficiencies, genetic defects, individual immorality, or original sin, for these attributions do not undermine the foundational beliefs of free-market society. That is probably why there are hundreds of inconclusive theories of addiction within the conventional wisdom, rather than a single useful one. This multitude of theories is the product of an exhaustive search for the underlying cause of addiction everywhere, except where it is.  These theories, colourfully projected on the globalised cave wall by sophisticated communication technologies, protect society from an understanding of addiction that would create unbearable tension. This is blindness. [4] p. 336)

Looking for something everywhere except where it is similar to reasoning from the conclusion.[8] Alcoholics are masterful at this when the conclusion to be avoided is ‘somehow, my drinking is part of the problem.’ Of course, the skills of politicians, pundits, and media magnates in this area are not to be underestimated. Important to note, it is possible to reason away from an undesirable conclusion without consciously naming that conclusion. Such is the case when the alcoholic is pre-denial and genuinely believed that his drinking or related behavior is not problematic. Oh, the web of lies! Somehow we are able to weave it subconsciously and robustly enough to survive the denial that is sure to come. This is what I see when people seem to subconsciously avoid challenging their own society’s foundational beliefs. 

Effective action on addiction at a personal level can only be achieved by people who have, to some degree, overcome their own blindness and paralysis. For most of us, overcoming blindness and paralysis does not begin with academic study, but with reflection on the struggles with addiction that we observe in family members and friends or in ourselves. Recognizing that the highly publicised suffering of junkies and alcoholics is essentially the same as the addictive miseries that we observe in our personal worlds can begin this reflection. The next step may be simply overcoming the denial that shields an intimate’s or one’s own drug or alcohol addiction from conscious understanding. More likely, however, the next step requires the more complex recognition of addictive dynamics that are not connected to drugs and alcohol and thus are camouflaged in free-market society [4] p. 339)

For me it was about overcoming the denial, but doing so required a visceral emotional signal that was far too strong to ignore or explain away. It happened when the fear of continued drinking outweighed the fear of stopping. I knew that stopping would require concerted effort, lots of help, and a significant life change. Having heard the stories, and having witnessed my father’s and my brother’s versions of recovery, I was not looking forward to it. On the other hand, I hadn’t lost everything yet, but I was about to. One Ph.D. down the drain, but I’d still have the debt. By the way, my student loan debt is fucking ridiculous! I’ve accepted that I’ll probably have it until I die, but I haven’t let go of the shame. It was my loan debt that did it. I had projected a certain amount that I was comfortable with, but on that tax prep day in February, I saw that it was double that amount. I wasn’t graduated yet, and I was broke. Shit! I’ve been sweeping this under the rug for a while! Double shit! Drinking. Triple shit! I’m alcoholic. In that bitter kitchen moment, it finally happened. My fears battled it out. An immovable object met an unstoppable force, and something had to give. That something was me, on my knees, dripping in anxiety and tears, begging to an estranged god. 

Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you! [9]

That’s how the world feels to me now. Not that acute, but present. That same sort of panic is in the air. In conversation, it takes no time to reveal the anger and frustration lurking just below the surface. After my alcoholic denial was overcome…ok, after competing fears pounded it into dust…something unexpected happened. I’d become the fish who’d learned to see the water I was swimming in. That is to say, addiction was my society’s M.O. How sober could I possible be in this?!? I have to be sober, and swim in this water. Fuck me!

In all my years in recovery, I have learned through the collective experience of all my friends and colleagues that there is not one single American who isn’t touched by addiction. That is to say, if it ain’t you, then you know somebody. The awakening necessary for remediation comes when we all truly realize that each and every one of us is participating in a culture whose foundational beliefs help make all this addiction happen. Addiction isn’t the problem in and of itself; it is a symptom that has become a problem. Furthermore, the foundational beliefs that created that symptom are ill-equipped to remedy it. Therefore, the foundational beliefs must change. This is the deep truth of recovery. In order to recover from an addiction, at least some of the foundational beliefs the individual carries about himself and his relationship to the world have to change. But first, these beliefs have to be made visible, and we’ll get to this in Step 4.

Facing up to one’s own addiction and dislocation can be excruciating, but it does not need to provoke incapacitating despair. It can provoke action instead. Addictive problems in one’s personal world need not provoke despair because they are not manifestations of mental illness or malice, but of a struggle to survive. Nor are they abnormal. Many, perhaps most, of our compatriots in the new global civilisation live with addictive dynamics of some degree. Like us, they are neither diseased nor evil at heart. Like us, they find themselves unable to endure the lack of psychosocial integration without becoming, at times, overwhelmingly involved with habits that partially substitute for it. Like us, they sometimes act badly, wastefully, recklessly, but without evil intent. There is no reason for despair over dislocation either, because it does not grow from a lack of personal worth or human appeal, but from a fragmented society. Becoming aware of one’s own addictive dynamics and dislocation, and those of one’s intimates, can be an enormous personal relief. It brings the joy of discovering a common humanity with others who bear similar burdens [4] p. 340).

There are tricks to this. We do it one day at a time. We “fake it until we make it,” which really means that changing behavior is much easier than changing beliefs, and sustained behavioral change will result in belief change. You may not know what the new belief is, but you can learn to recognize and denounce the old one. We get to get help in every step along the way. We get to give help as soon as we are but one step in front of the next person. We learn that the rewards of our efforts are ample, as we find our eyes for them. 

Alexander explains in great detail how dislocation has manifested throughout history, and he illuminates many of the ways that free-market capitalism is causing dislocation today. Admittedly, free-market capitalism is not the only culprit; however, we can no longer afford to explain it away. It’s gotten too big and far too dangerous. Undoubtedly, you have already witnessed dislocation’s many manifestations in others and probably yourself as well.

A quick side note on one of our cultural norms. We downplay our fears, and we do it all the time as a matter of course, a social norm that presents a less-fearful-than-I-am visage. Listen, no matter what you’re afraid of, in the moment or long-term, real or fancied, fear is scary! My fear is an existential terror-former, ready and willing to change the landscape of my entire life. I think that we all need to own that and be open about it. Call that spade the spade that it is. We have all sorts of words we use to disguise fear, and that’s one way we downplay it. Fuck that! Imagine, if each and every one of us could have moments when we get to share and witness in others that sometimes, sometimes this life as a human being thing is super scary! 

Save the Canaries excerpt -- What we want and what we need

 WHAT WE NEED AND WHAT WE WANT

After many years of experience and lots of research, I’ve boiled it down to an idea somebody had a long time ago. Here is what we want and need. 

                We need a sense of autonomy and a sense of belonging. 

                We want reliable ways to get both every day.

In the past 15 or so years of my intentional spiritual journey and all the years of accidental spiritual journey before that, I’d begun to hone in on these two. In men’s work I learned that being heard (seen, recognized, accepted) was huge! So huge that I judged it to be a need every bit as fundamental as food and shelter. I was also learning that a sense of belonging was critical for a student to learn in a classroom [11,12,13]. I was feeling this as well—this need for belonging and the pain of its absence. At the same time, even though individualism had gone way too far in American culture, it had some fundamental value to it. Our pursuing that path seemed primally motivated. I was sensing a dual that appeared contradictory, but didn’t have to be. Then I read a book by Bruce Alexander[14], and in it he referenced Charles Darwin with lengthy quotes. After much re-reading on my part, I refer to Alexander’s interpretations.

Human beings must satisfy both their need for individual autonomy and their need for social belonging. There is no adequate substitute for either one. ([14] p. 251)

We need both. Great!

Another way to say this is that the urge for social belonging is just as essential to human well-being as the urge to individual competition, and the two instinctive, but conflicting, motives exist for the same reason—evolution. It follows that individuals must always experience a conflict between one set of motives that impels them towards individual competition and another that impels them towards social integration and cooperation. ([14] p. 224)

This quote brings in a subtle, but important difference. The terms changes from autonomy and belonging to individual competition and social cooperation. Certainly both are alive in the United States, but in my judgment at least, we have emphasized individual competition over cooperation. Do your own work, gotta look out for number one, your retirement is up to you, that stuff. The individual competition imperative is a story we leverage when businesses punish dissent and discourage labor unions. Unionization is somehow cast as a betrayal of our individuality and the ongoing mythos of the ‘self-made man’. On the other hand, cooperation contains within it some implicit goal or outcome that we are working towards. We compete as individuals and cooperate as groups. Fine. In this sense, they are contradictory imperatives. The problem is that both avenues are commonly construed as pathways to the thing. I’m gonna get mine before you get yours, and somehow if you get yours, I’m less likely to get mine. But if we cooperate as a group, we’ll get ours before your group gets yours. (Even as I type, these sentences seem silly.) Perhaps that’s because this zero-sum pursuit is stupid. Honestly, I don’t want to spare any more words on it. Suffice to say, individual competition and social cooperation isn’t where I think our focus should lie.

Instead, I want us to focus on a sense of autonomy and a sense of belonging. In fact, play with those word pairings for a bit. Competition:Cooperation::Autonomy: Belonging. How does each pair feel to you? What images and memories does each pair conjure up? Personally, I favor autonomy and belonging. They feel safer to me, and are way less corrupted. Next step, I want us all to realize that this two are not in conflict. In fact, in some hard to explain, deeply human way, they must go together.

Important to realize is that not everyone’s sense of autonomy and belonging are the same. My flavor and yours won’t be the same, and they may not stay the same throughout our lives. Knowing what my flavor is—how those needs get fulfilled for me—is part of my own journey of life long learning. If you were to come with me on this journey, we can learn from each other. We can learn more quickly, help each other remain open to unforeseen possibilities, and we can learn to make better mistakes. 

Save the Canaries excerpt -- Let's talk about competition

 WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT COMPETITION

Sport is a microcosm of society. It's also a magnifier at the same time. So when we say  sport reflects what goes on in society, we’d be right, and a lot of what goes on in society is not so wholesome. It's not very good. It's exclusionary. The tale that wags the dog is sport. We've even built a culture in America, where our sport programs are predicated on high performance activities that limit the opportunities for people to play. It's not open unless, oh, let's all participate in some activity to get healthy or to build relationships or to learn something about ourselves and to develop character. No, it's like how good are you? We wanna win and if you're really good, we're gonna eliminate everybody who's not and turn them from participants to spectators. And what matters is the size of the arena. How many fans can fit in? How do we market the sport? How do we promote it? –Lee Ellis [13]

Just with sports teams that take competition too seriously, we live in a society in which our worth, our value as a person, is based on how much we can contribute to the economy. And so,

        The social utility of a job is inversely proportional to its salary. 

                                                                            –Frank Dabba-Smith

Canaries, point of discussion: who gets screwed and how? …and why? Focus on the small things.

Education has become coupled with sport. Financially speaking, many universities and large high schools are inseparably bound to their athletic programs. While this has advantage, it is remains a problematic relationship. Today, both sport and education are both, somehow, all about winning.

How do [schools] get fundraising and use sport as the vehicle to do that? In the process of doing this, we've set up a structure of basically these cards that are all leaning up against each other on a very fragile foundation. And Covid pulled a couple of those cards out, and now you've got, at least in our country [U.S.A.], you've got educational institutions that are on the precipice of going out of business because their sports programs might not be able to operate this fall. Holy come ole, we've completely messed things up! –Ellis

While this education/sport can of worms is great fodder for our society’s 4th step, I don’t want to get into it here. Just consider that when winning is the thing, we put our own children at risk.

Now, having said all that, sport is probably the most wonderful activity that we could be engaged in if you think about all the ways that it influences us and can influence us in positive, in a positive manner. If coaches decided, for instance, that they weren't autocrats, but they actually servant leaders, that they were doing this because they wanted to—that they wanted to give the athletes the opportunity to grow and develop in the ways that they wanted, how great would that be? But of course, you've got the scoreboard hanging over everything. -Ellis

If sport is indeed a microcosm for society, what might this shift in perspective do for all of us? But then, that scoreboard. All those metrics we strive for, from grades and test scores, to the right name on top of the diploma, from the resumé game (experience required) to the quarterly reports, from credit score to GDP. All those scoreboards have something in common. We think they are telling us when we are winning. I tell you, they are not. They are only indicators that vaguely point to what we actually care about. When we focus too much on the indicators, the metrics, what we care about gets lost in the mud, or stands dejected on the sidelines. We have been following the wrong indicators for too long. We have to learn to see that…in the small things, where it counts.

Some of the things that I'll say will make it sound as if I'm not interested in winning. Are you kidding? I wanna win everything. I'm just not so concerned about the one thing that everyone talks about, which is the scoreboard. I figure the scoreboard will take care of itself if the kids are having fun, if the kids are learning, if the kids are growing and developing their skills in the sport and their skills and relationship with each other, they learn communication and leadership. You know what? The scoreboard takes care of itself. -Ellis

I remember you saying to me one time, you’d gotten into recovery, and you’re doing steps, and AA stuff, and you said to me, “You mean to tell me that if I focus my energies on helping these other people getting sober and helping addicts get into recovery, that my business is gonna get taken care of? Seriously?!?” And then you found that’s exactly what happened. “Yes, great clients started calling me out of the blue. Old clients were making new referrals, and lots of little things were falling into place. I don’t recall making any of that happen, but it did.” –Conversation between myself and Alan G. [13]

When studying and working in education, I saw this happen many times. When teachers did not ‘teach to the test,’ but instead taught as they knew was right—for understanding and for personal and communal development—students usually did better on those tests. Sadly though, in many cases, the fear took over, and the school retreated to the fearful ways of teaching to the test. This speaks to the trust that is called for in Steps 2 & 3. Active trust and ‘doing the next right thing’ really does let the scoreboard take care of itself. Step 4 is when we begin to learn how our fear turns into control. When we’ll do anything do ‘win,’ whatever that may mean at the time. That pathway is slightly different for each of us, and it takes experience, guidance, and insight to see it. The alcoholic knows just how badly seizing control out of fear can go. I wonder, how much of the planet need be destroyed, and how many people have to die for us to see it too?

Canaries, how have you witnessed the ‘scoreboard taking care of itself’?

The war metaphor of sport

Virtue is the attitude that you take when you go into the contest. So is it a war or is it a partnership. -Ellis

A Constellation of Addiction or Recovery

 A CONSTELLATION OF ADDICTION AND RECOVERY IS VISIBLE 

…if you can see it

(Note: Because proper indention of long quotes is more than I want to fool with, all quotes are in italics.)

After the bullet hit me between the eyes and I saw that I was living inside the belly of an addict, many things become much more clear to me. Addiction was everywhere. Not merely the wake of the opioid scourge, it had become a way of life, accepted without question, cleverly justified as being something else, and of course, taught to our children. Turns out, I’d been seeing this for a while, but until I passed through my own addiction/recovery crucible, I didn’t know what to call it.

Now I do, and what’s under the hoods of both addiction and recovery needs to become common knowledge. The peculiarities of addiction that you don’t see until you pass through them, and the sublime truths of recovery which can’t be learned, but have to be experienced. That’s what I want to share with you. They form an experience, a practice, a language, and a knowledge that makes getting along with each other at a deeper level a whole lot easier. I wish I could package up 15 years worth of experience, all those shares from all those perspectives. Those times when I heard a stranger articulate their truth and know that they were speaking my truth better than I could. Such relief! I know in my head that I’m not alone, but in those moments, I could really feel it. I want you to feel that…but you gotta do the work. I want you to know what your work is and know why it’s worth doing. A pluralism of a voices, stars in a clear night sky showing a constellation that you must see with your own eyes. I want you to tell me what you see because it’s not what I see, and you will teach me. 

Here we go. Because the message is everywhere, I’ve curated a collection of quotes that will help get the constellation started.

I grew up feeling as if I was the only thing keeping my family together. This, compounded by the fear of not being good enough, was a lot of pressure for a little girl. Everything changed with my first drink at the age of sixteen. All the fear, shyness, and disease evaporated with that first burning swallow of bourbon straight from the bottle during a liquor cabinet raid at a slumber party. I got drunk, blacked out, threw up, had dry heaves, was sick to death the next day, and I knew I would do it again. For the first time, I felt part of a group without having to be perfect to get approval.

AA Big Book 4th ed, p. 328, via Kent Dunnington

 

I felt part of a group without having to be perfect to get approval

Reflect on that a moment. All the things we do and masks we wear to get approval—in school, in work, out on the town, with neighbors, peers, family, and friends, even ourselves. We hope and hope the mask looks perfect, when we know what’s underneath is far from it. If they could see what I see, they would not want me. Oh, no! I’m gonna get found out this time for sure!

7 primary markers of addiction

1. tolerance

2. withdrawal

3. craving

    a. physical

    b. psychological

4. ambivalence

5. relapse under ambivalence

6. obsession

7. denial

    a. deception of others

    b. self-deception

Kent Dunnington

Stretch beyond the individual. Society demonstrates these markers as well.

It's the equation we all lived by, every single alcoholic I know:

Discomfort + Drink = No Discomfort

Fear + Drink = Bravery

Repression + Drink = Openness

Pain + Drink = Self-Obliteration

Caroline Knapp, via Kent Dunnington

As humans, I think we all need a +something to help us transform these kinds of uncomfortable feelings or states of being. When the same +something works really well for all cases, why not keep using it? When it's the only +something you know about, or the only one that has ever worked, of course keep using it! If the +something works for other or my peers, why not try it? 

The problem does not lie in the +something. The problems come when we demand too much from it, when we apply it even though it isn’t fit for purpose.

What you just said to me struck a chord in a few ways—that people living with addiction have something to teach, or that “normies” have something to learn. I was just talking with my therapist about this, and it was something I just posted last night, and what I tell people is that what we’re coming to understand about addiction is that it’s a disease of isolation. Now, what do we mean by that? Robin Peyson

Robin goes on to describe the “Rat Park” study conducted by Bruce Alexander, and others, with published results in 1978. Since the results of this study are pretty central to the heart of this book, I’m taking the liberty to describe it to you myself. 

Starting around the mid-twentieth century, there were lots of rat studies on the effects of certain drugs like morphine. Typically, the animal was kept in a cage, called a Skinner Box, and offered a choice of water or water+morphine. Almost without fail, the rats became addicted to the morphine water. This result led researchers to conclude that the drug itself contained chemical "hooks" that caused the addiction--a result that would become the dominant narrative for decades and would spread itself well beyond drug use.

Now ask yourself, if you were kept in a cage and given a choice between water and water+morphine, which would you take? I know what my answer would be! Alexander wanted to know how much effect the cage--the rat's current environment--had on it's addiction. Rats are social creatures. Would they consume the morphine addictively if it were offered it in their normal environment? Hanging with the rats didn't seem plausible, so Alexander build a "rat park" in his garage. It was large enough for several rats to interact, nest, roam, eat, and do what rats do. In it he placed several rats along with the usual choice of water or water+morphine. The rats did not choose the morphine water regularly or addictively. They did take it occasionally, however. Later Alexander introduced rats that had already become addicted to morphine via the usual cage method. After a few days, these "addicted" rats also began taking the morphine water only occasionally. 

What does this imply for us? Genetic proximity notwithstanding, we are not rats, so what can we learn from this?  Well, is implies two things. 1) Simply taking  substance isn't enough for one to become addicted. There are other key factors. 2) The environment one finds one's self in is one of those key factors. This can be seen in real life in the case of U.S. Vietnam War vets. Many used heroin addictively in the battlefields, yet only about 10% of those kept using once they got home.  The demon drug alone cannot explain this, but a change in environment might. For decades however, and to this day, the Demon Drug Myth has been wrongly and widely applied. 

Alexander comments on this myth on his website shortly after a New York Times review of Johan Hari's book, Chasing the Scream. A review that included character assassinations of three of Hari's main informants, including Alexander. 

[P]eople who I have found clinging tightly to the Demon Drug Myth are some recovering people who are aware that their drug addiction has not been really overcome….It is comforting for them to believe that they are victims of an inexorable brain process, rather worrying about how much they have to share responsibility with their fragmented society for their continuing vulnerability to self-destructive behaviour. Again, their protective thinking is easy to understand in a sympathetic way. However, the larger number of people who have recovered completely from addictions to drug and other habits know from their own lived experience that the incurable brain disease of Demon Drug Myth and the Official View do not exist.

I also imagine that the mega-corporation executives whose relentlessly addictive profit-seeking is wrecking the earth’s environment might support an automatized view of addiction, like the Demon Drug mythology, as a way of softening their understanding of their own destructive addictions. Likewise, habitual consumers of the products of these megacorporations, might prefer to feel that their addictive consumption is a results of their brains spinning out of control as a result of all the advertising to which they have been subjected. 

                                                                        Bruce Alexander

There are lots of reasons for wanting to blame the Demon Drug. If it’s not the drug, it’s my parenting. If it’s not the products and ads, it’s my relationship to myself and my environment. And my favorite, “It’s not personal; it’s just business.” All of these dichotomies are false. All of these dichotomies are false. All of these dichotomies are false. These and other like them set the stage where myths like the Demon Drug get attention. 

Know this,  "The object of the addiction is much less important than the impetus behind it." Russel Brand

Denying the impetus leads to a particularly dangerous genre of storytelling.

Oh, yeah, you can make up really destructive things and use them in an instigated and malicious way for your own ends. And that’s the other thing that we really know about stories, and going back as far as we can with the written record, that, among other things, those are the kinds of stories we find. So why were people so horrified by Odysseus? He made up these lies. He made up stories. He made up ruses. He made up deceptions. He’s tricky.

So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive, too. But we do it more elaborately, and we do it with stories. Other animals go in for camouflage and deception, but we were able to go in for camouflage and deception using words. And we can, for instance, make up false stories about our enemies to get other people to dislike them and turn against them. And if you go into the history of propaganda in wartime, you will find a lot of clever inventions about stuff that wasn’t true, done for the purposes of deceiving. So we are a species that deceives. Other species deceive, too. But we do it more elaborately, and we do it with stories.             Margaret Atwood

 

Sometimes stories we tell make it appear that things have always been that way. The truth though is that unless you limit your view to a fixed window of time, nothing has always been that way. Here's a fun example that relates to our thread and Atwood's insight.

There's some stuff [in a book he read] about the propaganda from the 30 years war in particular, and it has to do with the printing press and the asymmetric capacity for distributing information that those who owned the printing press had,  and they were very clever cuz not everyone could read. So they would make these complex pictures and caricatures.

So it was very visceral in grabbing and of course pulling on the religious ideology and  hell in particular, became an object of deepening propaganda. Because you have Protestants and Catholics waring basically, each one threatening the other with worse versions of hell. And so Christian hell in particular got a lot more scary over the course of the 30 years were as a result of competing propaganda campaigns.                    Zak Stein

 Not even Hell was always the gut wrenching horror show we envision today! To what other stories are you granting permanence where it doesn’t belong?

This interview with Stein is mostly about a man named Comenius, who, while witnessing the breakdown of feudalism, had a vision of education that largely describes what we know school to be today. And he was a good guy. Our typical notion of what school is was big step forward, compared to what he was seeing. Comenius essentially invented the children's picture book and the textbook. Over the years, his vision of school has become entwined with capitalism. Today, as capitalism is breaking down, his vision of school must (or simply will) go with it, and we need a new one.

Now some very well considered thoughts on history. These are important, and I’ll be referring to these definitions later.

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth.

The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs.

For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination – it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.

The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.

Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

The imagined order shapes our desires.

Yuval Noah Harari

 

Joseph: I think about all the TV shows and movies where this so-and-so doesn't want to tell this person because they don't want to hurt their feelings, or they're hiding something. It turns out to be this huge thing, and at the end, you know, everything gets clear, and you shouldn't have lied in the first place, and you know. What if...? These are the things we are learning as a society--how to miscommunicate with each other. 

Bill: Screens have been such a big part of our lives, that it's hard to tell if I saw something on TV or if I saw it in life. One is, let's assume that in life, I'm seeing a person’s agency, but the other is directed behavior for the sake of the show.

Joseph: Those contribute to the messages we internalize. If we start to look at what's on the screen in general, we start to see what our belief systems are as a country and a culture. So, of course we have eating disorder; of course, we're over-eating; of course, we have body shame. All this stuff because it's right there on screen. Over and over again. 

Bill: The old fogies who hated the TV when it first came out. I think they were right. 

Joseph: Oh, no, absolutely!

Joseph Sanchez (with Bill McKenna)

Screens today are a ubiquitous and continuous reminder of the imagined order. This is not new, but thanks to touch screens and on-demand content, we have more agency over what we see than ever. Or do we? Behind these screens are people working hard to use what’s on that screen to maximize your dopamine response. This is especially true for social media, but it is by no means exclusively their domain. Not every single thing you watch, but a lot. (REFS: 60minutes, social dilemma). Tinkering, or really overwhelming our brain’s natural dopamine pathway is how we get addicted to drugs, neurobiologically speaking. After a while, that system simply won’t work properly without the drug. What better way to preserve the imagined order than to get people addicted to it? 

Our technology has brought us a new manifestation of an old conundrum. Between people and screens we see the same relationship as between people and drugs. Nobody forced that drink down your gullet, and blaming you for becoming addicted demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the dynamic at play. Likewise, nobody is forcing you to interact with those screens, yet your impetus to do so isn’t entirely self-generated. The screens we use to connect with each other or the world in general also behave very much like a drug. Sadly, much of this is by design. Perhaps this is one reason why our technology for connecting isn’t quite the magical connector we were hoping for.

Then there’s work, and how we work.

Basically, that in the name of productivity, in the name of efficiency, our workplaces, our managers, are pushing us into ways of working that actually rob us of our productivity, that we’ve created this entire culture that builds on itself around performing productivity instead of actually being productive.

And I was literally told by one of my managers, if you want to advance at this company, you can’t stop working before midnight. And if you’re going to stop working before midnight, make sure to delay sending your emails to make it look like you were up past midnight. And I remember just being so mind blown, the fact that this was literally supposed to be the bastion of productivity, and yet so much of the way we were being evaluated was based on this kind of performance.

Rogé Karma

Yet time and again, I have fallen into the trap of believing that success and its accompaniments would fulfill me. On my 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainly accomplishments only a wonk could want: writing books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to give lectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were good and noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would be satisfied.

I found that list nine years ago, when I was 48, and realized that I had achieved every item on it. I had been a tenured professor, then the president of a think tank. I was giving frequent speeches, had written some books that had sold well, and was writing columns for The New York Times. But none of that had brought me the lasting joy I’d envisioned. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder.

I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs. I was still devoting my life to climbing—beavering away 60 to 80 hours a week to accomplish the next thing, all the while terrified of losing the last thing. The costs of that kind of existence are exceedingly obvious, but it was only when I looked back at my list that I genuinely began to question the benefits—and to think seriously about the path I was walking.

The unending race against the headwinds of homeostasis has a name: the “hedonic treadmill.” 

Arthur Brooks

 

You gotta get ahead in this world, and you mustn’t fall behind. What a belief that is! It’s shown up in my life in so many ways and so many places, it’s presence has become all but inescapable to me. And it’s in me, like a bad song I can’t stop hearing. Perhaps before I die, I can be rid of it entirely! And I wonder. On this spinning planet, we are literally running around in circles, part of a solar system that is spiraling its way through the galaxy, destination unknown. Who precisely do we think we’re getting ahead of?

Addiction treatment is particularly instructive here because our patients have seen the limits of the hedonic treadmill, that is, the ongoing and futile attempt to grasp after pleasure or relief, and are sincerely asking for help to escape the vicious cycles of pain and addiction. It calls two questions to mind: 

(1) When does our attachment to holding onto pleasure and avoiding pain become a problem? 

(2) Where are the lines between pleasant, liking, wanting, and the craving that leads to further suffering? 

Addiction is a great metaphor for how we suffer. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain are natural and hard-wired into the primitive part of our brain so that we can survive as a species and procreate. However, as human beings, we have the mental capacity to vastly complicate our physical, instinctual, and emotional experience with our thinking mind which cognizes all of the real and perceived data, evaluates, judges, compares, concludes, and reacts to its own productions as if they were true. Then, because our lives can be so difficult, overwhelming, and despairing, we become attached to food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, shopping, entertainment, and an infinite array of misused behaviors, thought patterns, and means of protection to make our lives more tolerable or workable. 

Peltz & Black

How the thinking mind cognizes or interprets pain and pleasure signals has a lot to do with the stories we hold as true, both subjectively (as an individual) and inter-subjectively (as a society). Awash with information, we have lots things to compare to, even if they are a bit vague, potentially irrelevant, or seem to come from nowhere. It’s easy to get confused. It’s easy to mistake how our simplest, but very real needs actually get met (pleasure) or why they are left unmet (pain). The stories are compelling, and we defer to the imagined order out of habit because that’s what’s supposed to help make all this more tolerable. We could pay better attention to those needs—what the signals really mean and how our needs do and don’t get met—but we don’t. Instead, we indoctrinate our children.

The kids seem to know that school is a game. I wonder if they realize how dangerous it is to play.

Parents, teachers, politicians and researchers tirelessly warn today's youths about the unforgiving job market that awaits them. If they want to succeed in tomorrow's economy, they can't just coast through school. They have to soak up precious knowledge like a sponge. But even as adulthood approaches, students rarely heed this advice. Most treat high school and college like a game, not an opportunity to build lifelong skills.

Is it possible that students are on to something? There is a massive gap between school and work, between learning and earning. While the labor market rewards good grades and fancy degrees, most of the subjects schools require simply aren't relevant on the job. Literacy and numeracy are vital, but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages after graduation.  The main reason firms reward education is because it certifies (or "signals") brains, work ethic and conformity.

It's therefore sensible, if unseemly, for students to focus more on going through the motions than acquiring knowledge.

Bryan Caplan

And it’s all about the Benjamins.

The clearest examples of the education commodity proposition involve those who invest in educational processes, such as governments, philanthropies, and venture capital. Simply put, if the amount of education you are getting for your investment is represented (only or predominately) by the numbers generated on tests, then moving these numbers becomes the only way to “see” those changes in the value of the educational process, which is the intended result of the investment. If you do not measure it you cannot monetize it, and if you cannot monetize something then you cannot technically “see” if an economic investment has worked. This summarizes the main problem facing governments that invest tax dollars in public education and are then required to demonstrate that this public money was well spent. The watchword here is “accountability.” 

 

The education commodity proposition also frames the decision-making of those who are responsible for organizing educational institutions. It impacts the thinking of school leaders who are concerned about their own budgets and the effectiveness and efficiency of their internal policies. For example, the value of a new math curriculum is easily turned into a question about the relationship between its cost and the test-score gains that result. If the math curriculum that produces the best scores is too expensive, then the next best affordable option will be chosen, often irrespective of other salient differences between the two curriculums.  

The role of student-as-consumer undermines the role of student-as-learner. When a consumer has taken out a loan to make their purchase, they tend to be quite concerned about their return on investment and will often pull “the customer is always right” card. This blurring of the distinction between student and consumer is the root of some difficulties on college campuses, where students are increasingly seeking to censor the ideas they disagree with. They are aware that each moment they are on campus is costing them future income and freedom; they are consumers going into debt to be in school. They are thus entitled to “have it their way,” as they would when purchasing any other commodity. Where the consumer is always right, the learner is actually interested in being proven wrong and in benefiting from that experience. Because education is presented as a commodity (and not as a basic right) some students understand themselves merely as consumers of educational goods. 

Zak Stein

In short, we keep trying to measure educational outcomes such that we can “see” them through our economic lens. This shows up in different, but related ways through investors, educators, and students. From my perspective, this is really bad juju! Human learning is fundamental human. It only relates to money because we say it should. Underneath the education commodity proposition lies a cosmetic understanding of what education is and why we do it.

Need help playing the game? There’s a drug for that!

By the mid-2000s, adults were the fastest-growing group receiving the drug. In 2012, roughly 16 million Adderall prescriptions were written for adults between ages 20 and 39, according to QuintilesIMS, an information-and-technology-services company that gathers health-care-related data. Adderall has now become ubiquitous on college campuses, widely taken by students both with and without a prescription. Black markets have sprung up at many, if not most, schools. Casey Schwartz

A nasty parallel...and here's another.

The instances of ADHD have risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.   Sir Ken Robinson

Just like with drug addiction, there is no one to blame. All attempts to eradicate the drug addiction problem through blame and the elimination of perpetrators have failed. Just so, there’s no deep, dark cabal making our world this way. Yes, some people have a lot more influence over public policy and the flow of money and information, and some of them hide very well, but they too are but characters in the play. In the same sense, there are no saviors either. No one is coming who will make it all better. All of it, for better or worse, is people living by stories because that’s how people do. The question is, what stories are you following, and do you even know? 

Woof! And where does all this leave me?

It kind of reminds me of something I’ve thought about, that if you see the world really clearly, you’re actually depressed — this idea of depressive realism. One of the problems with people who are depressed is that they’re just seeing things too clearly. They realize they’re going to die. They realize the world is getting worse every day. Their families are going to get sick. Why not be depressed? And so that, to be healthy, requires some significant degree of hiding the reality of your world.

And so the people that Larissa  writes about are seeing the world quite clearly. Why not do that? That is the logical response. But it’s like that clarity feels threatening and extreme and dangerous and problematic in all sorts of ways, because they’re not operating according to the illusions that people have agreed to operate according to in order to live in a way that’s tolerable. Rachel Aviv

 

There are many kinds of addiction, but they all come with a story. Even if the object of the addiction is completely removed, the story and the impetus remain, and they can be every bit as addictive as the object was. This is what addiction does to people: it distorts, squelches, and seeks to erase all connection--to self, to others, to nature, to magic. It mutes intuition and creativity.  It lies, pretends to be our friend, and acts as if it’s always been there. It is a secret that we cannot afford to keep. It happens when the addict is you, and it happens when your just surrounded by it. It is a vampire we invite into our homes, and we welcome our personal succubus because we can't see better options. Well, there are better options, and we all know it, deep down, we know it! This too is a secret we cannot afford to keep!

While I'm here, I'm reminded of similar realization I had in grad school. It happened when I read the following sentence.

Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Paul Lockhart

Yep, that was me too! Now, my math education was actually pretty good by comparison. I enjoyed it, I was able to geek out on it, and I was good at it. Yet, as I later learned, rarely was I given opportunities to bring my creativity to the table. I don't recall ever hearing about mathematical intuition--something we all have, if it's nurtured. I was rewarded for being clever within the instructions, but I was robbed of something much more precious. I don't blame my teachers. I doubt they understood this either. Here too, there is a better way! 

I'll finish on a more hopeful note. A Reader's Digest story about one mathematician teacher who used her mathematical skills and intuition for a greater purpose.

Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her.

And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. 

She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who can’t think of anyone to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had a million friends last week and none this week?

You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying.

As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper.

And what this mathematician has learned while using this system is something she really already knew: that everything—even love, even belonging—has a pattern to it. She finds the patterns, and through those lists she breaks the codes of disconnection. Then she gets lonely kids the help they need. It’s math to her. It’s math.

All is love—even math. Amazing.

What a way to spend a life: looking for patterns of love and loneliness. Stepping in, every single day, and altering the trajectory of our world. Glennon Doyle Melton

These are few of the stars I see in the constellations of addiction or recovery. 

Citations

Alexander, Bruce. “Rat Park versus The New York Times.” Accessed October 16, 2022. https://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/281-rat-park-versus-the-new-york-times.

Brain Hacking, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAMTQZmvPE.

Brooks, Arthur C. “How to Want Less.” The Atlantic, February 8, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/why-we-are-never-satisfied-happiness/621304/.

Caplan, Bryan. “What Students Know That Experts Don’t: School Is All about Signaling, Not Skill-Building.” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2018. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caplan-education-credentials-20180211-story.html.

Doyle, Glennon. “One Teacher’s Brilliant Strategy to Stop Future School Shootings.” Reader’s Digest (blog), November 14, 2019. https://www.rd.com/article/stop-bullying-strategy/.

Dunnington, Kent. “Addiction - The Perilous Gift (Part 1) [Talbot Chapel].” July 10, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGW35iAiXCE.

Education Must Make History Again, with Zak Stein(1): What Matters Most in a Pre-Figurative Culture?, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8O0JnMG8pk.

Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. United Kingdom: Harvill Secker, 2014.

Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Lockhart, Paul. A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009.

Mandery, Evan. “University of Hypocrisy.” The Atlantic, October 2, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/college-admissions-wealth-ivy-league-meritocracy/671618/.

Peltz, Lawrence, and David S. Black. “The Thinking Mind as Addiction: Mindfulness as Antidote.” Substance Use & Misuse 49 (2014): 605–7. https://doi.org/10.3109/10826084.2014.852803.

Peyson, Robin. Save the Canaries Interview, December 11, 2018.

Robinson, Ken, Sir. (2013). Changing Education Paradigms, Sep 5, 2013. Retrieved: Feb 18, 2023,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dUNWW2D3BM

Sanchez, Joseph. Save the Canaries Interview, January 3, 2019.

Schwartz, Casey. “Generation Adderall.” The New York Times, October 12, 2016, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-adderall-addiction.html.

Stein, Zak. “Invited Editorial: The Education Commodity Proposition.” Dr. Zachary Stein, May 24, 2019. http://www.zakstein.org/invited-editorial-the-education-commodity-proposition/.

The New York Times. “The Office Is Dying. It’s Time to Rethink How We Work.,” August 16, 2022, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anne-helen-petersen-charlie-warzel.html.

The New York Times. “Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Margaret Atwood,” March 25, 2022, sec. Podcasts. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-margaret-atwood.html.

The New York Times. “Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Rachel Aviv,” October 4, 2022, sec. Podcasts. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-rachel-aviv.html.