Hi, my name is Don, and I'm an addict. No, I am not addicted to drugs or alcohol. No, I'm not a gambler, a sex addict. But I'm not the only addict here today. I've spent most of my career working with people who have drug and alcohol addiction, so I have a fairly keen eye for recognizing addiction when I see it. And I see addiction active in this sanctuary. I also see it running rampant in our local area; in Valparaiso, Niceville, Fort Walton Beach, Destin, Crestview, and even outside Okaloosa County, in Navarre, Pensacola, Panama City. In fact, it's evident in our whole state, and yes, throughout our culture.
So what do I mean when I say addiction. Addiction is a type of habit. Addiction is defined by dictionary.com as follows:
"the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma."
In treating addiction, we don't address every habit a person has. Like everyone else on this planet, I have habits. I tend to go to sleep about the same time at night on the whole. And I tend to wake up more or less the same time every morning. I brush my teeth without really thinking about it, and I take the same route to work each day, sometimes not realizing what has occurred along the way. This is a good thing! If I had to continue to exert mental energy in paying close attention to every detail of driving the car and deciding when to take a left or right turn, in the same way I had to do while learning to drive, I would be a mental wreck by the time I made it to work each day.
A habit is something we do routinely, without a lot of conscious thought. It saves us time and energy. But sometimes we form unconscious habits that are not as good for us. But since they are habits, they keep repeating despite less than optimum results. For instance, there have been times I have mindlessly eaten a whole box of snacks while working at home. Sometimes I only become aware of this as I reach for one more cookie, and come up only with crumbs. I let out a big sigh, saying to myself, "you did it again!" The addiction recovery community has a word and definition for this: "Insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." That quote has also been attributed to Albert Einstein. Addiction is fundamentally about immediate gratification without thought or care as to the longer term consequences. Addiction is about "more" and "now." By its nature, addiction is about obsessive focus that takes life out of balance and moves that focus to the target or targets of the obsession.
So what I would like to address today is not drug and alcohol addiction, but other habits and obsessions (addictions) that our culture has developed, encouraged and enabled. I will present three areas of societal addiction which are disturbing to me. After I present these three areas, I will offer some ways we can "rehab" ourselves to bring our lives back into better balance and to make more choices and less reactions.
Media sensationalism
We'll start with an event which took place this year; my source here is the Southern California International Review. Over six months ago, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 lost contact with air traffic control and disappeared, triggering the most expansive search and rescue attempt in history.
The tragedy enshrouding the presumed loss of 227 passengers and 12 crew members sparked extensive media coverage, with CNN providing non-stop coverage for weeks at a time. Typical of American media, the vast majority of this coverage was rich in speculation and lacking in substance.
Let me quote the analysis of the Southern California International Review! "The traditional responsibility Of news media has historically been to report on facts and provide pertinent analysis. This traditional model of reporting, however, has been increasingly threatened by the media’s dependency on advertising revenue. In his book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky discusses this funding constraint as a serious impediment to unbiased, factual reporting. As a result, news channels – vying for increased viewership and advertisers – are more inclined to cater to sensationalism over substantiated and relevant news stories."
To continue with the SCIR's analysis, they further state, "From extensive discussions of the Bermuda triangle and theories of black holes, to calling on psychics as expert contributors, American reporting has deviated from this traditional model of reporting to instead propagate misinformation and speculation. Discussion of conspiracy theories piques human curiosity and galvanizes viewership, but there is no place for such unsubstantiated reporting on stations claiming to provide corroborated news and relevant analysis."
Robert W. McChesney in his book, Digital Disconnect states, "The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising -- all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism -- are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to. Sensationalist reporting is highly popular. Take CNN; their round-the-clock reporting effectively doubled their prime-time ratings, resulting in their viewership temporarily outpacing Fox News’ audience for a short duration."
What we get is a sensationalized version of the world, one that is biased toward negativity and fear. Why? Because invoking these emotions keeps us glued to the media, and it is profitable! So we watch continuous coverage of war like they're football games, and we watch football games like they're wars. And we keep doing it, even though it changes and distorts our view of the world, and this harms us.
Self-image and relationships
I want to switch to another area, not much different from the media's sensationalistic distortion of the world. That is, the distortion of what is within normal ranges for human bodies, behaviors, and relationships. Corporations fund a great deal of psychological research, motivated again to sell their products and services. To introduce this, allow me to quote some excerpts from the book Cultural Excess by Jay Slosar, Ph.D.
This is from a section on what Dr. Slosar calls Cultural Narcissism 2.0
Cultural Narcissism 2.0
"Cultural Narcissism 2.0 includes the assimilation of technology, screen media, and extreme capitalism. The second version of cultural narcissism has far greater impact on our society than when it was first observed. Cultural narcissism is played out daily in the marketplace. The definition of success and making it is determined by the new culture. Entrepreneurial activity is a coveted goal. Deregulation is a core pathway to success. Economic policy represents Cultural Narcissism 2.0 and defines what success is. Cultural Narcissism 2.0 operates in an intensely fast and dynamic environment. It is in this incredible fast-paced culture that we define ourselves and define "success." Yet success is attained by playing within a structure of marketplace mania."
And from a section on declining self control and impulsivity:
"The age of excess creates powerful forces that are gradually changing human development. The psychological damage caused by these forces is most evident in an impulsive society that has had a breakdown in self-control. This means that we take in more than we need, or engage in behavior without thinking it through, behavior that has undesirable consequences. Our boundaries for regulation and self control get stretched and even collapse, leading to rampant impulsivity."
I'll give you two quick and familiar examples. First there is a saturation of images depicting a so-called ideal body type for both men and women. These body types are not just unrealistic, but purposely so. By setting up difficult to attain ideals, consumers are driven to base their self-esteem and self-worth on how closely they match the presented ideal. Whole industries thrive on this concept, including the so-called fitness industry, diet supplements, make-up and cosmetics, and clothing industries, to name just a few. Again, people drive themselves to reach these ideals sometimes losing focus on what they would say are more important aspects of their lives, in more rational moments. This kind of obsession fits the definition of addiction. And indeed, changes in how neurotransmitters operate in the brain can be observed, just as you can observe the same type of changes with drug or alcohol addiction.
Secondly, there is an effort by commercialism to define success in a similarly unattainable way. We are all familiar with the "American Dream." The American Dream gets redefined by corporations who employ research based advertising to shape what is desirable. As Mick Jaggar noted decades ago in the song "Satisfaction," "he can't be a man, cause he doesn't smoke, the same cigarettes as me." So we find ourselves running and obsessing our whole lives to get that status symbol car, or house, and it turns out that if we pursue this path, Mick was right, you can't get no, satisfaction.
Food industry
And finally, my last exhibit of cultural addiction runs unfettered and rampant, our food industry. Alexander Heyne, in an article on how the food industry makes food as addictive as possible explains the problem better than I could. In the article he states,
"In studies done on mice, to find out how hard they are willing to work for certain foods (and thus measure their desire for it), the breaking point for foods high in sugar and fat were a step below cocaine. Animals are literally willing to work almost as hard to get either one."
He further states,
"Doesn’t the body naturally want to maintain it’s own weight? Aren’t there built in mechanisms to prevent over-eating, since it’s damaging to the body’s health long-term?
Yeah, but the system only works well when you eat real food.
But the food industry has cleverly exploited three things that haywire our biology: Sugar, Fat and Salt.
These three things take advantage of the reward system of the brain which, when triggered, stimulates us to keep eating – and eating – and eating – and eating."
This is disgraceful, in my opinion. We are being given food engineered as precisely as a designer drug in order to make corporate profits for what I call "the Food Cartels."
Solutions?
What can we do, to take back control of our lives, to make choices instead of reactions? In my opinion, the solution lies in developing certain life skills that may have become dormant, or in some cases never acquired. The first of these skills is awareness or mindfulness of our habits. Habits are repeated behaviors that are unconscious, that occur in reaction to situations or specific types of stimuli. By their very nature, we don't usually think and choose to repeat habitual behaviors. By nurturing the skill to slow down and think through our behaviors, we can begin to make choices. The psychologist and philosopher William James put it like this, "In between the stimulus and the response is a space. In that space lies your freedom to choose. In your choice lies your future growth and happiness."
But just having a space to make a choice is not enough. We need the skill of critical thinking. This was once a staple of our education system, which is currently focused on regurgitating standardized testing answers. This is one of the ways a UU RE program like ours can be useful to kids, in teaching these critical thinking skills. We don't tell kids what to believe. We expose them to a wide range of beliefs, and teach them how to reason through them for themselves, based on their own values.
And finally, I feel we need to be selective in what we allow ourselves and our children to be repeatedly exposed to. Are the constant barrages of expectations and negativity in the media, and the highly engineered substances produced by the Food Cartels consistent with your values, when you're thinking rationally? The choices are yours, but I ask you to make real choices, not just addictive reactions, because to simply react would be insanity!
