Get a rat & put it in a cage & give it 2 water bottles. 1 is just water, 1 is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water & almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within 2 weeks. It’s our theory of addiction Bruce in the ’70s said, “Hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, #RatPark is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want & they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water & the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. Bruce says that both the right-wing & left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection. The engine of our society is geared towards making us connect with things not people. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff - we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes & dreams & ambitions on things we can buy & consume, drug addiction is really a subset of that #brucekalexander https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc529cTKrml/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
