Addiction's Tipping Point-Part IV

PART IV: GHOSTS IN THE MACHINES

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Even though America’s secularized legislative proponents, through their progressive tolerant ideologies, may sanction and even encourage actions capable of producing addiction, in the past, the Family Domain still had the opportunity to pushback against addictive and potentially-damaging actions. Daddy taking an unannounced trip to Vegas for the weekend might put up some red flags, so too could the video tape rental receipts, or the mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night. The secular world, at least verbally concludes; “it’s up to the family to decide what is and isn’t acceptable for each individual (and certainly not the government or the church’s role).”

But the pushback of the family domain has been severely gelded through the rise of technologies allowing their users unprecedented “privacy,” or more succinctly, “secrecy.” The Internet is a prime example of a technology capable of squelching the family domain pushback paradigm. Addictive producing actions such as gambling, pornography, even sexual solicitation can propagate longer and “tip” more frequently, since this technology allows APAs to flourish privately, away from the knowledge or consent of the rest of the participants in the Family Domain. Worse, analysts and psychologists are discovering that the secrecy of the technology actually stimulates the addictive aspect of the action. Consider the following quote from Dr. Elizabeth Englander: “All kinds of deviant behavior pops up a little bit more on the internet because people feel as though what they do online doesn’t count.” (5) And an excerpt from a journal on allpsych.com states the following: “Sex addicts on the internet often experience a rapid progression of their addiction. They eventually move to more extreme behavior with taking greater risks…” (6)

Because of the privacy these new technologies afford, addictions can continue unhindered, until they cause so much damage that their effects, like Ray, become wholly evident in the visible realm. At such times, that which did not have the chance to push back against the addictive action (due to the lobbying efforts of the “tolerant” cohort and the advance in communication technology) is shattered. Considering the following excerpt from the Seattle Times:

“At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases. “This is clearly related to the Internet,” says Richard Barry, president of the association. “Pornography had an almost nonexistent role in divorce just seven or eight years ago.” (7)

It is important to note that the addictive aspect of pornography still existed a decade ago, but the confining limits of the technology (the medium of magazines and videotapes) served as its own pushback. The action was limited in location and frequency, and therefore with a limit to the action, there was also somewhat of a limit to the number of cases of individuals becoming their addictions.

TRAPPED IN CELLS AND PODS (THE ABRIDGED VERSION)

But even a mere five years ago, the limits of technology still forced the individual to “go to” the addictive producing action (the stationary computer), allowing a limited ability for domain pushback (“hey mom, dad, son, daughter, cousin Joe, etc., what are you doing in there?”). The static capacity of telephone and cable wires were in themselves a pushback, since the limit of the technology forced the user to a fixed location still capable of being monitored.

That is not about to change; it already has. Through the advancement of technology and communication, devices capable of eliminating nearly all aspects of domain pushback have not only been invented; they are already carried on the hips and in the purses and jackets of a large majority of the American populous. The cellphone and iPod, can broadcast addiction-producing products, such as pornography and digital gambling, to any individual at any place and at any time. The possibility for “tipping” addictions has expanded to every square inch of our human societal landscape, provided satellite and/or cellular coverage is available. Dare we prophecy what will occur in the next five years when the full domain pushback-removing force of these improvements in technology is statistically realized, if at the present time online internet porn, still kept in a somewhat fixed position, has seen such a dramatic rise in divorce and other serious consequences such as Human Trafficking, child kidnapping and pornography, sexual predators, etc.? Without pushback mechanisms, addictive actions will flourish unhindered… and more of the society will be bound, through the one-two punch of secular tolerance and technological progression.

GETTING SMARTER…

The Bible professes that “a wise man gives thought to his actions.” As Socrates professed, we must once again begin to weigh the consequence of any action against the action itself. The secular world, because of its dogmatic claims of the randomness of humanity and its erratic evolutionary systems, can merely observe and catalog the tragedies of addiction. But it can never make the strategic connections uncovered in this article. There is no way to reconcile this deliberate, multi-faceted strategy to their worldview, since there is no God for mankind and ultimately no enemy against mankind. But taking their conclusions to their logical conclusion, produces even greater despair. Based solely on their worldview, there can only be two conclusions to these calculated strategies leading to addictions “tipping point”: either evolution’s ultimate goal is the enslavement and eradication of its human evolutionary product: a cruel and ultimate survival of the fittest, with nature being the victor as C.S. Lewis mused. And if this is case, then man is the lowest form of animal and the least important life form in nature, since all other natural organisms continue in propagating the evolutionary cycle. Or, the secular worldview, unable to harmonize with the strategic reality of addiction’s tipping point, is a false system. But even more diabolical, based on the actuality of these strategies and the complexity of its ideological and technological mechanisms, the worldview has been deliberately crafted to cloak these strategies.

As vital to humanity as these questions and conclusions are, they are rarely ever pondered by the church. Instead of using the Word of God to uncover the strategic components of their own worldview and its value to mankind universal, the church has predominantly set their faces toward a strictly “moralistic” God. And in doing so, created an impasse of their unintentional own making between themselves and the rest of the world. Possibly out of fear that too much focus on the strategic might demean the holy. But in reality the exact opposite occurs. If the Biblical Worldview is true, logically we must presuppose the Creator of mankind, who made creation in His own image, developed a law structure and tenets for His creation, not out of some narcissistic desire to subjugate, but with the deliberate intent of providing the very best existence for His image. In fact, it is only because He created us in His image, as a Father to His children, that such a declaration can be asserted.

For what human father deliberately births children strictly for the sake of domination and oppression? Should one wish to dominate and oppress a people or group, one steps outside his or her own creation. Neither the plantation slave owners of the deep-south nor Nazi concentration camp soldiers enslaved their own children; they subjugated those outside of their own personal creation and protected those made in their own image. So a dominator seeks the domination of those outside his personal image and creation. God must be a God of love, for it’s His own image he would then hate, the height of illogicality. But the Biblical Worldview states that God has an enemy, the devil. A being fueled with absolute hatred to God, yet weaker and still subjected to his enemy. So then logically, if the devil cannot get at his more powerful enemy, where can he set his sights? On God’s image. And now that which was written in an “archaic and irrelevant book thousands of years ago” becomes immediately living and active. Through the dogmatic declarations in the Bible that assert man is made in the image of God, and God has an ultimate enemy, we can transcend the words on a page and uncover strategies playing themselves out through the societal landscape. Such is a principal core application of the Daniel Project.

IN CONCLUSION

We have all been focusing our attention on the wrong enemy. While the church attacks the liberal ideologues and the sinful products of technology makers, and the secular progressives and evolutionary scientists set their sights on the removal of puritanical and dogmatic, the real enemy of mankind flourishes unhindered, well cloaked inside both our secular and hyper-moralistic ideologies. At first, the secular world accused the church of burying its head in the sand and not allowing mankind to think. Not it appears that culpability for “mindless action” should shift back to those with the loudest “tolerant” bullhorns…

But regardless, there’s no time to place blame. There’s too much at stake. We must all begin to realize that despite the secular world’s hope in a self-determined existence, or the erroneous hyper-moral interpretation of God’s word, the strategies against mankind are real and objective. The “tipping point” of addiction will continue, and more like Ray will become statistics, unknown individually but wrecking aftermath consequence across the societal landscape. We must finally realize that mankind’s Creator and Father, is truly the loving Father of the Biblical Worldview. One wishing that “none should perish.” This should also be our response and our responsibility, not just spiritually, but physically, socially, psychologically and generationally. The Biblical Worldview gives us both the model to see the strategies and the mandate to address and remedy these issues. And we must. Because we are all made in God’s image.

“Then they will hammer their swords into plowshares And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they train for war.”
Micah 4:3

(5) http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=44120

(6) http://allpsych.com/journal/sexaddiction.html

(7) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2002516219_porn25.html