There
is a lot of coverage in the news lately of an epidemic that is sweeping the
world, although its worst outbreak seems to be in the United States. It’s not an epidemic with a microorganism
that spreads with contagion from person to person. Rather, people spread the illness directly to
one another. And we are talking about a
very dangerous illness here.
What
is this illness that is being discussed so much on television and radio, and in
newspapers and magazines? Heroin
addiction. Upper middle class fifteen
year old teenagers are shooting up heroin.
In the U.S., government officials are declaring heroin addiction a
national emergency and are pushing to set up enough treatment centers to
adequately confront the problem.
Certainly, treatment centers are an important part of dealing with
heroin addiction. But another part that
is just as important, maybe more important, is trying to determine what is
causing this epidemic, and why is it occurring at this time in history.
Those
of you who have been steady readers of this column know that the problem of
drug use has appeared here several times.
So now may be a good time to review some of what has appeared
before. First of all, before we go into
what causes heroin addiction, I’d like to discuss different kinds of
causality. Most of us in the Western
world have been brought up to think that causality occurs when one kind of
defined discrete entity or phenomenon has an impact on another kind of defined
discrete entity or phenomenon. This is
what has been called figure causality in this column. It is a more measurable causality, because
both the causal agent and the consequences of the cause have defined discrete
boundaries. It is a causality that lends
itself to understanding through scientific experiments and scientific
observation. It is a causality, the
understanding of which gives humans a sense of control and dominion over
entities and phenomena in such a way that they are susceptible to scientific
understanding. This is why modern
technological humans like to believe that most processes in the universe can be
understood in terms of figure causality.
Figure causality allows people to believe that they can ultimately be
masters of almost everything they encounter.
The
problem is that there are many life situations that keep appearing where models
of understanding based on figure causality have not led to effective solutions
of problems. Certainly the epidemics of
drug use that have ravaged modern society have not been susceptible to
resolution by specific focused solutions up until now. Since when I was growing up in the 1960’s,
there have been waves of popularity of different drugs. But no matter what we have tried to implement
to combat drug use, nothing has really worked.
Now that heroin is becoming a drug of choice among all sectors of
society, it becomes important that we start to shift our thinking to consider
not only new previously unconsidered causes, but also new kinds of causes
entirely. Only when we can properly
identify a cause can we properly come up with a way of dealing with the
problem.
So perhaps
we have been focusing on the wrong kind of cause in assessing not only the
heroin epidemic, but also other kinds of drug epidemics that we have
experienced in modern society. Perhaps
the cause is not one particular focused entity or phenomenon, but rather a
whole living environment. A living environment
that has a configuration of stimuli that subtly impels people to take a drug
like heroin. Those of you who have read
this column for a while will be familiar with my discussions about how modern
technology has succeeded in creating living environments that are overly
frictionless, excessively understimulating in order to protect people from the
organic perishability found in more natural living environments. We have believed that making the world more
and more frictionless is what people need, is what people really want. But sustained frictionlessness, sustained
understimulation, makes people feel numb, not fully alive. Too numb to have rich vibrant lives, too numb
to make, receive and preserve organic imprints, too numb to properly prepare
for death with a surrogate immortality.
In
addition, making a living environment frictionless means creating a lot of
waste products as the friction-filled aspects of a living environment are
compressed and pushed aside. These
friction-filled phenomena can never be totally eliminated from a field of
experience and end up being experienced by humans as overstimulating stimuli,
abrasive friction that can’t be properly absorbed. Things like overcrowding, noise pollution,
air pollution, speeding vehicles, and stress from the accelerated rhythms of
modern work, where we have to act like machines.
In my
recent articles there has been a focus on the understimulating stimuli, or
frictionlessness, as a causal factor, because people have been concerned about
the negative effects of overstimulation for a long time, and understimulation
has always seemed like such a desirable experiential state. Nevertheless, one of the things that has been
pointed out in this column is that overstimulation and understimulation can form
a system and people can bounce back and forth between the two extreme states to
try to obtain the balance of stimuli that they would be more likely to have if
they still lived in a more natural living environment filled with organic
stimuli. Also, sometimes people may try
to drown out an understimulation that overwhelms them with an understimulation
they can control. So yoga, meditation
and calming drugs can be used to drown out numbness and boredom from a vacuum external
living environment filled with minimalist modern architecture, pavement and
asphalt covering over the ground and frictionless machines and computers that
create frictionless mini living environments in the forms of screen reality and
virtual reality. In addition, such
controlled vacuum living environments also can help people to withdraw from the
stress and tension created by an overstimulating patch of living environment, a
tension pocket, filled with abrasive friction.
Finally, selected controlled overstimulation such as dance clubs with
loud electronic music and strobe lights as well as loud motorcycles can also help
people to overcome undesired abrasive stress as well as numbness and boredom.
So
the sensory distortion created by modern technology results in complex
configurations of understimulation and overstimulation which, in turn, results
in vacuum and tension pocket living environments. And people confront these living environments
with their own particular defensive patterns of responses in order to
survive. Ultimately the most stable
mindset to adopt is that of becoming like a robot or an avatar in order to
become as impervious as possible to the sensory extremes with which one is
presented. But the problem is that there
are many people who are not successful in adopting this mindset. They are incapable of toughing it out that
much.
Many
of the people who are trying to deal with the sensory distortion that surrounds
them, resort to drugs. Heroin seems to
be a drug of choice today among suburbanites and residents of small towns in
rural areas. Affluent suburban youth use
heroin, because their lives have become so frictionless, so effortlessly
comfortable, that they can’t get any traction to go on living day to day. They are bored and they are numb, and they
need some explosive kicks to feel alive.
One would think that people in small towns who live close to nature
would feel some benefits from the resulting organic stimulation in their
surroundings. But even in rural areas,
the excessive involvement with modern machines and with screen reality –
movies, television, video games, computers, smartphones, and tablets – has
reconfigured people’s capacities to not only connect but also interact with
nature. The technology has supplanted
the natural surroundings as the actual living environment among which many
rural people live. Technology has also
made life frictionless for rural people, such that they no longer experience
the rich organic friction that comes from primary experience interaction with
natural surroundings.
This
sensory distortion from the vacuum and tension pocket living environments in
which people dwell today represents the nebulous inchoate grounding cause that
is creating the surge in heroin use.
When I was growing up, jazz musicians were considered decadent for using
this drug. But now upper-middle class
teenagers are also using it. We have to
find a way to introduce organic friction, to introduce traction from organic
surfaces in people’s fields of experiences.
Among other things, people have to be gradually weaned away from such an
excessive reliance on screen reality, which has become a very imperfect
substitute for a life narrative in the external world. The solution to the heroin epidemic is
long-term and complex and involves moving in a direction of awareness about
what we have become as human beings that most people today will find a great
deal of resistance in doing.
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