Addiction's Tipping Point-Part III

PART III: ADDICTION’S TIPPING POINT

Download the Addiction’s Tipping Point Mini E-Book Here

Through the “tolerant” removal of domain pushback against APAs, we are helping America reach a cataclysmic addictive “tipping point.” The term “tipping point,” taken from the book of the same title written by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, describes the moment of major societal change or manifestation through a product, idea or system having started in relative obscurity and exploding unexpectedly. In his powerful and profound work, Gladwell dissects this phenomenon by deconstructing the powerful sway and spread of viral epidemics. A case in point, Gladwell evaluates the three factors leading to a staggering 500% increase in Syphilis cases in the population of Baltimore during the single year period of 1995 and 1996. The increase was so significant and drew such societal attention that nearly every facet of local government and academia was commissioned to determine the cause of the viral explosion. One of the three factors, Gladwell revealed, was that in the lower class urban neighborhoods, the public clinics had suffered major financial setbacks: “... the number of physicians went from three to essentially nobody.” (2) Patient visits dropped from thirty-six thousand in 1990-91 to twenty-one thousand five years later. Malcolm’s own words describe what happened next:

“It (syphilis) used to be an acute infection, something that most people could get treated fairly quickly before they had a chance to infect many others. But with the cutbacks, syphilis increasingly became a chronic disease, and the disease carriers had three or four or five times longer to pass on their infection. In other words, because the protection mechanism was weakened, a dangerous epidemic was unleashed faster and with more fury, because it was able to propagate unhindered for longer periods of time.” (3)

The removal of the pushback mechanisms, in this case, the public clinics providing quick antidotal treatment, allowed the infected human carriers to continue unhindered, thereby spreading the disease to far greater numbers than would have normally been infected had the standard pushback systems remained in place. In a profound statement, Gladwell states:

“Epidemics… also sometimes tip when something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.” (4)

In our “free-thinking” humanistic quest for individual tolerance, we are allowing actions leading to addiction to propagate unhindered and unchecked for longer periods of time… causing them to more frequently evolve from personal actions to physical/psychological addictions… and causing the individual to more regularly tip from having an addiction to becoming their addiction. Moreover, as addictions reach their “tipping point,” the greatest cataclysmic aftermath damage fractures the rest of the domains, regardless of whether or not those addicted are either fully consumed or seek rehabilitative help.

THE SECULAR DISCONNECT

“And it was magic at first, but it let everyone down, now this world is gonna hurt…”
Jack Johnson – lyrics: Cookie Jar

To the secular world, peering through a worldview lens of random existence and evolutionary chance, the aftermath addictions of “freedom” oriented actions are both an enigma and a stumbling block. These actions in themselves are immensely pleasurable, even though occasionally they appear to produce addictive tendencies. Permissive extramarital sex is euphoric and immensely enjoyable, alcohol produces a mood altering high in its partakers, pornography physiologically stimulates the sexual body, drugs produce supernatural biological and psychological sensations predominantly unavailable to the average individual through natural means. The most logical secular conclusion becomes “don’t throw the baby (permissive sexual freedom, pornography, gambling, drugs and alcohol, massively-multiplayer online gaming, etc) out with the bathwater (the seemingly sporadic tragic and unfortunate aftermath addictions). In its quest to embrace the baby, the secular world expends mammoth fiscal and educational resources to find “cures” and “solutions” to this tragic and puzzling aftermath. Therapy groups, pharmaceutical solutions, seminars and self help gurus clamber over each other with their proprietary attempts at remedying the unfortunate byproducts of some of secular society’s most tangible APA “pleasures.” Leaving mankind riddled with the consequences of addiction’s “tipping point.”

THE CHURCH’S DISCONNECT AND DEGRADATION

But we the church, as God’s ambassadors, have furthered failed humanity – all of those bearing God’s image. While the secular focus remains on the tolerant acceptance of the “baby,” so ours is the attack of the baby strictly as “immoral.” Under this “immoral baby” mindset, we vehemently assail those that enjoy the baby and/or produce baby-related products and mechanisms. In a world wrought with despair, fear and nihilism, we attempt to take away the only remaining pleasurable escape mechanisms the secular world has to cling to. And the church, in its futile attempt to disconnect the secular world from its very nature, offers little else in return based on its current lack of separation from the world’s statistics on divorce, drug use, pornography etc.

This has led to a two-fold tragedy for the church. First, it has degraded the perception of the Christian, or those bearing Christ’s namesake on the earth, in the wholesale eye of the populous, relegating the Christian to little more than a self-righteous, disconnected-from-reality hypocrite. But worse, it has encouraged the spread of addiction without governmental hindrance, since few want to be associated with any legislative mandates promoted by those “intolerant” restrictive and backward thinking, hypocritical Christians, since the focus of these mandates is their attack on the baby. And ultimately, it has distanced mankind from their very Creator, and His loving protection for all bearing His image.

A PROPER PARADIGM SHIFT

But, if we really understood our Bible, and the Creator of mankind, we would realize – it is all about the bathwater! It is not that addiction is the tragic and disconnected aftermath of some of the world’s greatest pleasures (engaged in at the wrong time), it’s that addiction is the primary goal and intent! We can unlock this strategy through the Biblical Worldview. The Bible asserts: “when sin is full grown it leads to death.” By clarifying what addiction is: ‘the willful death of all in the natural for that which cannot fulfill in the physical, and therefore must destroy again,’ we can use this verse to conclude:

“Sin is full grown when the person becomes their addiction.”

The natural impulse of human preservation prevents the willful and deliberate destruction of the body or even the society, so addiction first requires a mechanism. (Distorted) Pleasure serves as that mechanism. Though scripture may seem to warn of this impending catastrophe, proving its existential reality is quite logical. Ask any financially, socially or biologically devastated alcoholic, drug addict, AIDS patient, convicted rapist, or obsessive gambler if they would willingly subject themselves to the aftereffects of these actions – without first experiencing the primary pleasurable dividends (however debase they might be) of the initial action? The unanimous response would be that such a line of thinking is asinine, if not insensitive. But it is through these initial pleasures that one experiences these tragic byproducts.

A SHIFT IN WORLDVIEW

The holistic tenets of the Biblical Worldview align exactly to this diabolic strategy. To prove this point, I skipped the all too common moral aspect of the text and used the Biblical Worldview to get hyper-practical. The search for the strategies found in the first portion of this article, came out of expanding the following Biblical Worldview tenet (marked in bold):

Tenet 1. If there is an enemy of mankind seeking to see mankind destroyed, and “tipping” addictions is a powerful component to ushering in humanity’s erosion and destruction, would it not it not behoove that enemy to covertly encourage mankind to remove all domain pushback mechanisms, while shrouding the strategy in some sort of guise of evolutionary (the prideful ideology of man) freedom of action?

But it is a second Biblical Worldview tenet that can now unveil how intricate and ubiquitous this strategy has become:

Tenet 2. And if that enemy is forced to work through mankind’s historical technological progression, then would not a primary goal of that enemy be to coerce mankind to develop technological systems capable of eradicating all domain pushback mechanisms, allowing the addicted individual continual access to their addictions so that the “tipping point” between having and addiction and being the addiction would accelerate?

Through this tenet, we can unveil how a completely different domain is now turning addiction’s tipping point into a full-blown societal epidemic.

[go to part IV]

(2) Malcom Gladwell, “The Tipping Point,” page 16

(3) ibid, page 22

(4) ibid