{"id":154323,"date":"2015-05-17T13:08:55","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T13:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/05\/17\/get-a-rat-and-put-it-in-a-cage-and-give-it-two\/"},"modified":"2015-05-17T13:08:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T13:08:55","slug":"get-a-rat-and-put-it-in-a-cage-and-give-it-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2015\/05\/17\/get-a-rat-and-put-it-in-a-cage-and-give-it-two\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
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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. It\u2019s our theory of addiction.<\/p>\n

Bruce comes along in the \u201970s and said, \u201cWell, hang on a minute. We\u2019re putting the rat in an empty cage. It\u2019s got nothing to do. Let\u2019s try this a little bit differently.\u201d So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it\u2019s got in Rat Park. It\u2019s got lovely food. It\u2019s got sex. It\u2019s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It\u2019s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they\u2019ve got both the water bottles. They\u2019ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here\u2019s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don\u2019t 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. There\u2019s a really interesting human example I\u2019ll 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 it\u2019s a moral failing, you\u2019re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it\u2019s not your morality, it\u2019s not your brain; it\u2019s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We\u2019ve 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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 you\u2019re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff\u2014in 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Johann Hari, <\/p>\n

Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?<\/a><\/p>\n

(via bigfatsun<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude28\ud83d\ude28\ud83d\ude28<\/p>\n

(via pinchd<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. … <\/p>\n

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