64

Introductory Text

some thoughts about addiction. who knows.
The Author's Narrative Part 06 64th Post Posted 22 May 2016 at 04:40:17 EDT Link to original

If you are horribly burned in a fire, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you shatter your spine, you can take drugs to relieve the pain. If you are addicted to drugs and your life has turned to utter and total shit, you can take drugs to relieve the pain.

And that's how the trap works.

Imagine if the only cure for burn pain was fire. Imagine if the cure for back pain was whacking yourself in the spine with a hammer. The drug addict is caught in an analogous situation. The only fast, reliable remedy for the psychological pain of drug addiction is drugs. There are other cures (a notable one is not doing drugs), but they are all slower and less reliable.

Somehow, the lure of feeling better now overrides the hope of feeling better later. This is the basic mechanism of addiction. The behavior of an addict is perfectly logical in the short term and perfectly illogical in the long term. Because life exists in the long term, addiction is illogical overall. What is surprising how easily addiction can ensnare people who are perfectly intelligent and self-disciplined.

You can go to certain parts of any sizable city in America and watch drugs addicts totter around. Looking at their blighted faces, their filthy clothes, their total lack of self-regard, you would be forgiven for thinking that they lack self-discipline. How could you think otherwise? When a person can't be bothered to shower, much less get a proper job or just stop smoking crack for more than a few hours, what else could you call it but a lack of self-discipline?

Imagine the Nazi troops at Stalingrad, encircled by the Soviet troops, fighting against total annihilation. Would you look at these troops, these underslept, unshaven men in stinking unwashed clothes, and accuse them of lacking self-discipline? Would you say, "Tut-tut, these Nazis are an undisciplined lot?" Of course not. You would understand that their shabby state is not from a lack of self-discipline, but rather because they are concerned with other things. Dire things.

While there are several notable differences between Nazi soldiers and crack heads, the same principle is in effect for both. For both, there has been a terrible reordering of priorities. The showering, the clean clothes, the job, all of these become secondary to fast access to the drug. If showering and clean clothes got them fast access to the drug, they would walk around looking like a detergent commercial. You would never see whites so white.

But they don't need clean clothes. They don't need showers. They need drugs. The drugs are the solution to everything.

Highly self-disciplined people are actually quite vulnerable to drug addiction. It is because they believe that they need to control their feelings. They often seek to simply eliminate bad feelings, just as they seek to eliminate underperformance from every other area of their lives. The demon of addiction looks at their grand self-discipline and giggles with glee. It knows that it will be precisely this self-discipline that will bring them to heel. They will self-discipline themselves right into total obedience to the drug.

As an example, look at Prince and Michael Jackson. Were they self-disciplined? Definitely. The world has hardly seen such self-discipline. They were obsessive workaholics, devoted to their careers, and they propelled themselves to the very pinnacle of professional success. They both knew the dangers of drug addiction and fastidiously avoided drugs. Keep in mind, avoiding drugs in 1980s Hollywood must have been like avoiding water in a swimming pool at the bottom of the fucking ocean. Yet they managed to do it for a while because they had self-discipline.

Now they are both dead. They were both destroyed by drug addiction. In the end, self-discipline was not enough to save them. Why not? Because self-discipline is just a talent, an accomplishment. And like any other talent or accomplishment, it can be turned and made to serve the dark master.

What then is our defense against this menace? What is the answer?