Recently
I have seen many articles in the newspapers about the growing use of more
serious drugs (like heroin and methamphetamine) in the United States. And not just among poor people who one could
simply write off as people who live in so much despair that drugs become a way
of redirecting their consciousness. Heroin
and methamphetamine are being used by all sectors of the population. And what
makes these two drugs such a cause for concern is that they are so physically addictive. They both can get a person addicted the first
time he uses them. And in both cases,
the addiction can be lethal.
So
why are people risking their lives to achieve the altered mental states created
by these drugs. Ordinary middle class
people are doing them. It seems to me
that these drugs are part of a larger problem that has been previously
discussed in this column. People today
are suffering the effects of the technological transformation of their
environment. Technology has created
living environments that have patches or aspects that are overstimulating and
vast areas that are understimulating. In
the past, I have used the name “vacuum and tension-pocket environments”. Human beings have searched to find ways to
use technology to create safe frictionless living environments that exist above
and apart from the organic perishability of nature. In the process, they create waste products
like crowded noisy polluted urban spaces.
As a result of these sensorily distorted living spaces, people feel
alternately numb from understimulation and jaded from overstimulation. They experience themselves as floating in an
experiential vacuum filled with pockets of abrasive static stimuli. People have lost their grounding in nature
and in more traditional organic living environments like villages, and, as a
result, they have lost their grounding in themselves. They have little or nothing to hold onto in
themselves to help them form and maintain coherent organic senses of self. Loss of grounding leads to a loss of feeling,
leading to the search for experiences that heighten and focus their sensations
with what is commonly called kicks.
Heroin and methamphetamine may ultimately kill people, but while they
are being used, they pull people out of what they experience as the living
death of sensory distortion.
Concerned
people today focus major attention on heroin and methamphetamine, because they
are so obviously physically and psychologically destructive. But there are many different kinds of
addiction that have evolved to help people survive their loss of grounding in
their vacuum and tension-pocket living environments. Often the word habituation is used today in
discussing many psychological dependencies.
Yet in other situations, people do talk about addiction to gambling and
to sex. So for the purposes of this
article, which is to show some common causes for many disparate forms of
behavior, I am going to use the word addiction even for psychological dependencies.
To deal with many of these
addictions, one approach has been to develop programs which are modeled after Alcoholics
Anonymous. Apart from alcoholics and
drug addicts, there are programs for gamblers, sexaholics and overeaters among
others. Gambling like alcohol can be
done in moderation without causing any harm to the people who engage in it. But for people who are addicted, both
gambling and alcohol can be eliminated from their lives without any harmful
side effects. Gambling is such a
destructive addiction, because people can end up financially depleted and
families can be destroyed. Alcohol, in
sustained excess, causes serious health problems.
Sexaholism
is at least partly caused by the general approval of sexual freedom in modern
technological society. Having many
partners is encouraged among young people by modern culture. It is supposedly part of exploring one’s
sexuality and learning about oneself. It
is also, as has been discussed previously in this column, a way of getting
organic sensory variety to compensate for the lack of organic sensory variety
in modern technological living environments.
In effect, free love becomes a substitute for nature and traditional
architecture. Sex becomes an addiction
when one needs a constant kick from it to pull oneself out of the loss of
feeling that is generated by the sensory distortion that is a part of modern
technological living environments. This
need, of course, impedes the development of a sustained intimate relationship
with a partner that can give meaningful emotional grounding and that can
provide the foundation for creating a family.
Or if a sexaholic does get married, the condition can eventually lead to
the damaging or destruction of the marriage.
A sexaholic can also have problems focusing when he is at work. Finally, sexaholics are predisposed to
getting venereal diseases and sexaholic women are predisposed to having
unwanted pregnancies. However, apart
from venereal disease and pregnancy, which don’t affect everybody with this
addiction, most of the problems that sexaholics experience are more subtle than
those of a drug addict, an alcoholic or a gambler. Nevertheless, they are problems that can
leave him feeling frighteningly alone, living in an emotional experiential
vacuum.
Overeating
is an excess of something that is needed in order to physically survive. It is based on internalizing the experiential
vacuum and tension-pocket living environment in order to gain control over it
and get rid of it. One gets rid of the
internal vacuum and tension-pocket environment by filling up the stomach with
food and drink and thus trying to give oneself internal grounding. The problem is that the emptiness of the
stomach is not the real problem. It is
rather the sensory distortion of the external living environment which has been
internalized. The person is empty of the
experiential grounding that is needed, in the same way food and drink are
needed by the human body. And because
the external living environment is so vast, one can never eat enough food to
effectively fill up the internalized version of it. Which is why the person suffering from overeating
keeps eating and eating and gets fat.
The mass of fat is a defense against the sensory distortion the person
is experiencing.
But
then a person who develops a defense against the sensory distortion can develop
defenses against the defense. One
defense against overeating is to develop bulimia and to start forcing oneself
to throw up his food. Another defense is
to start eating very, very little and become anorexic.
And
then there are other emotional states that are not normally considered
addictions to the extent of the conditions that we have just been talking
about. Does the accumulation of things
constitute an addiction? It doesn’t
affect a person’s health the way drugs, excess alcohol and overeating do. It doesn’t usually lead to total impoverishment
or the destruction of families the way that gambling does. It doesn’t directly lead to deficient
relationships the way that being a sexaholic does. And yet we can say that certain kinds of
relentless accumulation of things can indicate emotional problems. A symptom of such a problem is if a person
can only obtain a brief sense of pleasure from an acquisition and then returns
to feeling empty from being in an experiential vacuum. The person jumps from acquisition to
acquisition looking for a new island of grounding in his vacuum and
tension-pocket field of experience and always being disappointed. And each failed attempt at grounding with a
new possession leaves a person feeling emptier than before the acquisition, because
he lets down his defense of numbness to embrace the new acquisition.
Sometimes
the accumulation is a generalized accumulation of lots of different
things. Sometimes it focuses on one kind
of item. Clothes, jewelry, art objects,
books, or cars. The accumulation of one
kind of thing leads to the formation of a collection. Not all collections can be called the
foundation for an addiction. If a person
can obtain a sustained pleasure from his whole collection, and if individual
items within the collection can continue to provide pleasure over time, then we
can say that the collection does provide a kind of surrogate grounding, a
miniaturized grounding that acts as an attempt to substitute for a real
grounding in a more natural living environment, and is not a true
addiction. It is only when a person
jumps from one acquisition to another, building up his collection, and yet not
sustaining his interest and pleasure in individual items enough to have a
sustained interest in his group of objects as a collection, that we can say
that the person has a kind of addiction.
And, in truth, because there is not enough sustained interest in his
collection as a whole, we can say that the person does not fully experience his
collection as a collection. Because the
person cannot sustain interest in individual objects or his collection over
time, the person has a desperate need to fill his internal vacuum and
tension-pocket living environment by buying more and more new objects. Sometimes, the person runs out of room for
his objects in his residence.
Another
perspective on this relates to the kind of value a person places on what he
acquires. If a person acquires something
and truly values that object for its intrinsic merits, then that object can be
a part of a surrogate grounding for the person.
If the person acquires an object primarily because of an immediate rush
of stimulation that it gives, a rush that can quickly dissipate, then that
object can be part of an acquisition addiction.
The latter kind of object is acquired for its instrumental value, for
its immediate effect on the acquirer, rather than for its intrinsic value, for
a sustained appreciation of the object.
Instrumental
value acquisitions are, among other things, the basis of conspicuous consumption
in modern technological society. One
buys clothes, for example, not merely because of a true sustained appreciation
of them, but because of the status that is acquired as a result of wearing the
clothing of certain styles and certain labels.
But because what constitutes fashion is so ephemeral, and clothing
acquisitions can go out of style quickly, a person can become addicted to
constantly buying new clothing to stay in fashion. There is little sustained intrinsic value in most
fashion items.
The
conspicuous consumer has the delusion that by buying the right objects, he will
gain status and acceptance and grounding with the group of people of which he
wants to be a part. But it can never be
a stable grounding, because one always has to buy new fashionable objects, in
particular, clothes, in order to demonstrate that he still deserves to be
considered a part of the group. The
so-called grounding is so shallow that missteps, particularly with the clothing,
can lead to being frozen out of the group.
And
then there is the addiction that all capitalist societies seem to encourage to
some extent and that is an addiction to money.
Without a certain amount of money, one can’t be a conspicuous
consumer. However, money is by no means
necessarily intrinsically a basis for addiction. It is the medium by which people in modern
societies conduct their economic transactions.
But it becomes an addiction for many people in modern society who see it
as a means for defending themselves against the sensory distortion of the
vacuum and tension-pocket living environment in which they reside. For such people, they can never have enough
money, even when they are already wealthy.
For them, it is not only using that money to buy more and more new
products and services. It is having that
money as something to which they can cling, something tangible that they can
try to use as grounding to defend themselves against the sensory distortion
they experience.
In
truth, we can say that the loss of organic grounding created by modern
technological society predisposes the development of all kinds of addictions
and not just the obvious ones of drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, and
overeating. Granted that the well-known
addictions are the most obviously destructive, but conspicuous consumption and
an addiction to money are harmful to the extent that they leave a person
stressed, anxious and depressed, because he isn’t addressing the real need of
which he needs to take care – the need for organic grounding.
(c) 2015 Laurence Mesirow
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