Addiction's Tipping Point-Part II

PART II: A FALSE SENSE OF FREEDOM

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Stepping away from the film, let’s suppose all of the domains just spoken of in the last chapter chose to accept and affirm the personal lifestyle choices of each societal individual, deliberately exhibiting no pushback against addiction-producing actions. The Governmental, Societal and even Family Domains recognized and accepted these actions as the free choice of the individual. When APAs become sanctioned and affirmed by these domains, the addictive aspect of the actions face no pushback. Logically, with no pushback, there is nothing to distance from. With nothing to distance from, actions are never qualified as being addictions but are merely the subjective and acceptable lifestyle choices of each individual. The alcoholic is not addicted, he merely parties more frequently than most, the sex addict is not addicted, he or she strictly enjoys continual physical pleasure, the porn addict is not addicted, he or she simply chooses to spend all their free time sitting on their computer looking at the beauty of the human form… But it doesn’t stop there.

For now matter how subjective and accepting a society becomes, the Psychological and Biological/Physical Domains are interdependent of any Societal, Governmental or Family domain sanctioning. The Psychological and Biological/Physical Domains cannot be succumbed to. All other domains can be classified, more or less, as relative. But the Psychological and Biological/Physical Domains are not relativistic; they are absolute. As Shakespeare said, “If I am cut, do I not bleed?” More than poetry, his statement affirms that mankind’s ultimate intolerant and absolutistic entity is not the puritanical and fundamentalist church – it’s the human body and brain.

Should a society fully sanction the participation in addiction-producing actions as an individual’s free and “personal” choice, an addicted individual never realizes they are addicted until the Psychological and Biological/Physical Domains are finally pushed against. Under the guise of personal “freedom,” the “accepting and compassionate” society actually creates a citizenship often only able to choose an alternate recourse against their personal addictions at the moment the addicted and the domain of pushback become one and the same. But at this point, the addicted is often the least of the concerns. For after the absolute domains are starkly pricked, and the person has gone from having an addiction to becoming the addiction, the bloodletting in the other domains is colossal…

THE AFTERMATH

If the individual, suffering from the final intolerant and absolute pushback of the Physical and/or Psychological Domains, chooses to fight their now embodied addiction, they must face the cataclysmic damage they have personally wrecked on the other domains. For every person in a rehabilitation center for a physical or psychological addiction, there are countless thousands and even millions suffering domain consequence brought on by the prior actions of the addicted. Consider the game and phenomena of, “Six Degrees of Separation,” stating every individual is within six generations of relationship with all other individuals on the planet. It’s a blast when you play it with Kevin Bacon as the starting point. It quickly loses its enjoyment when the starting point is a biologically or psychologically dependent addict having thrust irreparable carnage on the domains in which he or she rejected the pushbacks.

The family must endure the pain of possible deconstruction as its patriarch or matriarch is unable to function wholly in the parental role. The society loses considerable private sector funds from the individual “taken out” of the society due to medicinal, psychological or pathological reasons, and no longer able to transact and scatter their funds throughout the marketplace. Their places of employment suffer as one of their workers is now either partially incapable of completing their assigned and critical tasks, or is removed altogether during months of rehabilitation, etc. and etc. ad infinitum. Addiction not only destroys the addicted but also the countless individuals in the other domains the addicted associated and functioned in.

AND IT DOESN’T END THERE…

But even after a successful rehabilitation, many individuals deliberately end their lives as a direct result of the pressure and pain now endured from prior domains of pushback, such as family, career, church and social groups, etc. Just because the addicted chooses to get their life back, does not mean they can easily rebuild the fractured lives and broken relationships of those they have previously torn down. Worse, rehabilitation procedures can cause further damage to the physical individual, leading to new transplanted addictions, such as methodone treatment for Heroin addicts, often leading to methodone addiction itself. From a holistic point of view, the aftermath domain consequence brought on from the person having fought their addiction can be just as damaging as the individual having allowed their addiction to fully consume them. It is critically important that when we use the term “addict” to describe the actions of any individual, we must have a far broader scope of consequential thinking and far longer horizon of effect than merely the person being described.

SHORTSIDED “TOLERANT” THINKING

Our nation’s secular “progressive” ambassadors blissfully envision an American utopia where individuals are given full rights to engage in their own personal choices of action. Gargantuan lobbying mechanisms, brimming with “hopeful humanists,” prod and coerce America’s governmental and legal systems to remove any and all societal and even family domain pushback restrictions, in favor of an individual’s “personal” choices. Media centers are capitalized on, authors are commissioned and children’s programs are developed, all in an effort to promote this agenda. It goes by the name of “tolerance.” The word itself is wrapped in a relativistic and supposedly “freedom-based” morality: “Don’t judge another’s course of action, allow them to explore their own avenue to personal fulfillment unhindered, and certainly don’t thrust your archaic fundamental standard on our religiously diverse, morally enlightened and lifestyle relativistic society.” Such sentiment would be reminiscent of the following quote by ardent atheist Richard Dawkins:

“It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?” (1)

But in their quest to remove the “restrictive bonds” of all things absolute and fundamental, these secular champions fail to recognize what is and will transpire through the wholesale sanctioning of many of humanity’s addiction-producing actions. By dismantling the domain pushbacks against APAs, we are not building a “freer” and more liberalized society. Instead, we are actually constructing a society far more bound universally since the removal of domain pushbacks will cause far greater numbers of individuals to not just have addictions but instead become their addictions. In the name of “tolerance” we are shackling people to their courses of action, and then throwing away the key. But again, it is not merely the addicted that suffers, The longer the addiction-producing action continues unhindered and the more people become their addictions, the larger and more expansive the shockwave of societal aftermath. Addiction is reaching its “tipping point.”

[go to part III]

(1) Gary Wolf, “The Church of the Non-Believers,”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism_pr.html