What addiction might really be caused by...

[Cynus]

This article is absolutely fascinating to me. I think this applies in more way than just drug addiction...

From the article:

"This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find - the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding'. A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

[Cynus]

Another excerpt:

"This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's - only connect. But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live - constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us."

[DesDownunder]

Another excerpt:

"This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's - only connect. But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live - constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us."

It's not only - only connect, or bonding with what we have or have not; neither is it just a matter of having, but is related to our being (rather than having).

We have replaced what we can be with what we have, or want to have, and the more we have, the more we regard ourselves as worthy. To have or to be, is really the question we are discouraged from asking by our cultures.

Even then we might regard the failure to connect as being the failure to recognise that we are really already connected. The free love hippies maintain that we are trees who can move, but our connection to our Earth, our environment is not obvious and so we think of ourselves as separate from the ground we walk upon. We think we are separate because we do not recognise, "we are all one." Om.

Seeing ourselves as part of the one is actually quite an old concept recognised in the original proposed motto of the U.S.

"E Pluribus Unum" was the motto proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. A latin phrase meaning "One from many."

Additionally many philosophies place an emphasis on the oneness of human existence; diverse, different though we may be our bonding does indeed form a union.

To finish on a lighter note; heroines might well be lesbian because of the desire to bond, which I guess means that heroes are all gay men, except of course when they are gods.

[JamesSavik]

he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

I think in looking for an answer to complex questions we want to find a simple one and be done with it.

Addiction is one of the most complex issues around.

I don't think there is a single, easy answer.

It is a complex question so by definition, there are several answers that are all correct.

I have no doubt that the adaptation theory has merit but it's not the only one. There are physical and biochemical processes at work too. There are different kinds and different levels of addiction. Opiate addiction, pharmaceutical addiction and alcoholism may all look alike, there are very specific differences physically and psychologically. Even genetics plays a role.

No matter how badly we would like to have a single silver bullet answer to the problem, it is simply not going to happen.