Before my son was born I was asked what I most wanted for him. “I want him to know who he is and where he belongs,” I said.
Maybe that sounds more strict- father wannabe than liberal columnist. But I’ve come to believe that what sociologists call dislocation—essentially the loss of a sense of belonging—is the worst of the 21st-century plagues. It is making millions of people very sick and making us all very dangerous to all life on Earth.
Almost a decade ago, a Simon Fraser psych prof named Bruce Alexander published a brilliant paper on the subject called The Roots of Addiction in a Free Market Society (recently expanded into The Globalization of Addiction: A study in the poverty of the spirit). Alexander argued that all addictions—to drugs, violence, gambling, junk food, work, consumer products—are predicated on dislocation.
People who lose connection to family, clan, community, nation and custom often create a “substitute lifestyle,” whether it be that of a workaholic banker or back-alley junkie. In each of these examples there is a community of sorts, a shared culture of self-destructive behaviour.
Populations that have suffered mass dislocation—aboriginals and African- Americans, for example—tend to have high rates of addiction as a result. Addictive substances were commonly used on this land long before the Europeans arrived, yet there is no evidence of addiction before they took the land and systematically attacked First Nations’ cultures.
Alexander’s most provocative argument is that “as free market globalizations speeds up, so does the spread of dislocation and addiction. That’s because, by definition, free markets force us out of our most identity-forming connections—those of family, clan, custom, community and even nation. Free market economics requires us to sacrifice these things in pursuit of jobs, money, power, goods and services. That is the ‘free hand.'”
Free-market economics tend to develop individualistic, rather than collectivist, cultures. In other words, rather than live and work together in extended communities, we organize ourselves in increasingly smaller family units, with limited connectivity, more likely to compete for survival than co- operate for mutual gain.
We make small talk with our neighbours rather than build barns and hold dances together. Via social networking we have more “friends” than ever before and shallower connections to them. We don’t sweat with them, we bitch; we don’t laugh with them, we lol. And so, any fracture in the nuclear family unit can send its members flying out of control with nothing and no one to hang onto, desperate to replace lost connections.
Some will work through it. Very few will become crackheads. In fact, many more will become, as Alexander puts it, “money and power addicts in the financial district, workaholics in the offices, cybersex and video game addicts at the monitors…television addicts on the couches, food addicts at the convenience stores, celebrity addicts in the theatres…religious fanatics spreading the Word.” Goddamn.
Most, if not all, of these addictions have colossal environmental impacts. They are products moving freely in a free-market system, using energy, emitting greenhouse gasses, making increasingly chaotic weather, dislocating more refugees and creating more addicts.
It’s a system in crisis and traditional responses of jailing junkies and dealers (themselves dislocated and seeking connectedness via crime) only compounds the problem by creating more dislocation, more isolation. Even the more progressive solutions of harm reduction and rehab treatment don’t address the root causes of addiction or look at the majority of addicts who don’t even use hard drugs—the consumer-product junkies and the work junkies.
As Alexander put it, “Addiction to a wide variety of pursuits is not the pathological state of a few, but to a greater or lesser degree, the general condition in western society.” And now, “mass addiction is being globalized along with the English language, the internet and Mickey Mouse.”
There’s only one escape from our collective downward spiral—only one way we can kick our habits. We need to acknowledge its root cause and re-create genuine connections via family, community, clan and culture. So that our children know who they are and where they belong.
Chris Benjamin is the author of Drive-by Saviours, a novel.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.
love it! best article ive read in a long time. this is exactly how i feel, and im a tv and computer junkie, no doubt. it really is all about connections and interaction. and weirdly, i was listening to this song the entire time i was reading this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2V9w9W6aY…
thanks!
Great article. You are so right, as was Bruce Alexander in his paper nearly A DECADE AGO. Thanks for bringing his ideas back up into the light of day. There’s no question that the systems are sick and like junkies we are apparently powerless to change things entirely within our power: It is frustrating to read articles about the lack of funding for outreach projects, for the homeless, for anyone or anything that matters next to articles about the new convention centre. The municipality needs an intervention – Addicted to the glamorous promise of success, denying the real sickness at the core. Keep up the good work.
Hello.
This feeling a sense of aloneness and not belonging is what people teach each other in any society and is not just a product of a free market society.
Yes, belonging to a grouping is a good thing, but choosing to be in that group and not being forced into it out of fear or a learned need is better.
How many times has a loner been considered an evil thing? And yet, what each parent tells (lies about to) their children is for them to be themselves, do what they want, feel what they want, dress as they want and act as they want as long as they are not directly/purposely hurting others. In essence; be a singular individual, loner or alone, without a NEED for to belong to anything/FEELING of being alone.
The lies are proven by attacks on those who chose to live by those very things they tell their children to do. By making fun of, insulting or physically attacking someone who doesn’t [i]appear[/i] to belong to any thing or grouping. By having those in positions of power condone (by doing so themselves) attacks on those who don’t have a NEED of belonging and what might just be a self-understanding of themselves as to who and what they are as people, they show proof to the ones they are telling these things to that to be themselves, do what they want, feel what they want, dress as they want and act as they want as long as they are not directly/purposely hurting others is wrong and shouldn’t be done.
So they are told by those they respect that it should be their choice if they want to belong to a group or not and then, they see the respected make attacks on those who choose not to belong or be different.
Confusion reigns in their minds and then, something comes along which gives them that sense of belonging, but with a small sense of independence, because they believe it is by their own choice that they do these things. Not thinking about what they are doing or addicted to ceases the confusion and in their own minds they have a small sense of peace.
Do we all have addictions? Yes. Having the ability to self-honestly admit that you have it and achieving control over it, without it controlling you and your life would show that you have believed, learned and achieved what you have been lied to about.
Later,
futrethink.
The symptoms are true enough, although I’m not sure free market capitalism caused all the problems, or even most of them. Technological advances haven’t been caused by capitalism, and it’s communications advances and mobility advances (aka the automobile) that have disrupted the social fabric badly. It’s not like people have to live in a different county or province or country either – it’s sufficient that instead of most of your crowd being in a neighbourhood, now everyone is spread out from Tantallon to Elmsdale to Lawrencetown, and points in-between…suburban sprawl is death on social cohesiveness.
Other technological advances, not free market economics per se, have seriously weakened the link that many people once had to resource production – agriculture, fisheries, forestry, mining, and also the link that many people once had to manufacturing. It wasn’t capitalism in and of itself that blew away Cape Breton, wiping out fishing, steelmaking and coal-mining, among other things. Again, this loosened ties to community.
Along with the above we’ve gotten much greater mobility with work; many of us now have five or ten or more major jobs throughout our career. I’m not convinced that this phenomenon is completely to be laid at the door of capitalism either. But jobs are where a person establishes many, if not most, of their personal relationships, and you tend to lose them slowly when moving to a different job.
It might be more accurate to say that affluence caused by technological progress put us in this state. On average we are much, much wealthier now than we were a century ago. And look at what we have now technologically compared to a century ago. It wasn’t capitalism that made this happen, although a free market surely accelerated the pace of change.
I don’t think there’s much to be done. I think you can probably make the case that an affluent, mobile, tech-savvy society will have exactly these pathologies, and poor, relatively immobile, technologically-backward societies won’t. There’s an obvious answer to the problem, and maybe the coming scarcity of oil will take care of some matters for us.
Everybody is addicted to something, if you think about it. There are the addictions that are considered bad — drugs, booze, nicotine, food, computer games — but people also get equally addicted to things society considers good. Look at the legions of folk who religiously go to the gym, run (from what, I wonder?), post liberal articles on websites like this, whatever… I am making the point that the whole premise of addiction is that it is considered as a bad thing, but you can consider anything that is pursued with vigor to be an addiction, even perhaps an addiction to the author’s mystical community beliefs.
What really needs to be explored is what determines good versus bad addictions. It is not as self-evident as one might think.
“Everybody is addicted to something, if you think about it,” writes Bo Gus. But Chris Benjamin is not writing about addiction to “something.” He specifically mentions addictions to “drugs, violence, gambling, junk food, work, consumer products.”
Benjamin clearly means harmful addictions, the kind referred to in this Dictionary.com definition: “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.” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/add…
We all know that words have multiple meanings. “I’m addicted to Aunt Fanny’s butter tarts,” carries a much different meaning than the one Chris intends in this thoughtful column. So too, does Bo Gus’s trite reference to the addiction of “legions of folk who religiously go to the gym.”
A central principle of logic is that arguments must be founded on clear definitions. Chris Benjamin has clearly defined the kinds of addictions he is writing about. Bo Gus, on the other hand, muddies the waters by defining everything as a potential addiction including, presumably, Aunt Fanny’s butter tarts. He ends with the solemn, pseudo-intellectual assertion that “What really needs to be explored is what determines good versus bad addictions.”
I’d say that Bo Gus should attempt to answer Chris Benjamin’s argument before lecturing us on what he thinks “really needs to be explored.”
But, Bruce Wark, you contradict the whole premise of Benjamin’s article by your own pseudo-superior response. “Severe trauma” is not caused by the cessation — or for that matter, the continuation — of things that Benjamin is writing about, despite what he contends. Exercise addicts are more likely to flip out if they cannot exercise than is a “celebrity addict” if they cannot get their latest issue of Us Magazine. Is one really more worthy than the other? I don’t believe that question is so easily answered as you condescendingly believe. As a result, you totally miss the point of my comment. Sorry to bust your balloon, but Benjamin’s basic premise is extremely weak.
Hey Bo Gus: Sorry if I hurt your feelings by seeming to be “pseudo-superior.” In all humility though, I’d suggest that you read Lionel Ruby’s books on logic, namely, “The Art of Making Sense: A Guide to Logical Thinking” and his earlier tome, “Logic, An Introduction.” Both are available at the Dal Killam Library.
Ruby cites the rule that in attempting to mount a logical argument, “he who asserts, must prove.” You assert that “Benjamin’s basic premise is extremely weak.” But nowhere do you say what you take his “basic premise” to be. Nor do you attempt to prove it wrong. Instead, you try to shift the argument to the question of what determines “good versus bad addictions”. This may wash in locker room at your local gym, but it won’t pass muster with anyone who has studied the rules of logic.
C’mon, Bo Gus. Do the hard intellectual work and tell us why Chris Benjamin’s basic premise is “extremely weak.”
‘Addictive substances were commonly used on this land long before the Europeans arrived, yet there is no evidence of addiction before they took the land and systematically attacked First Nations’ cultures.”
Cite your sources? No recorded or discovered evidence is not the same as none at all. First Nations people were not happy hippies(if you want to bring violence to addiction into that, I think several Jesuit priests to start with would like to have a word. Gambling? There’s plenty of evidence for gaming). I AM a native and I’m so tired of this. They came, they won, they kicked our asses. It doesn’t make my ancestors magic red people with no vices. Addiction is a human condition, ffs.
Swamp Donkey, it isn’t my intention to romanticize pre-Columbus aboriginal peoples. Likely they were equipped with all the same foibles and character flaws as the rest of us.
But as far as anyone can tell, it’s true that these societies lacked addictions. They are absent from descriptions of these cultures by anthropologists, historians, European settlers, and from their own narratives. Gaming, sure. Drugs, plenty. But from all available accounts these things were not abused the way they are now.
The difference isn’t that they were better people than your average 2010 North American resident. It’s that they hadn’t yet been dislocated from their cultures, customs, communities, nations or lands. There was no hole that an addiction needed to fill.