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#4625·Dennis HackethalOP, 6 days agoI’ve been developing a new research program toward a unified theory of creation: that of finding parallels between different creative processes such as the economy and the mind in hopes that such parallels may shed light on creation generally.
My own remarks in #4624 about the self-adversarial dynamic of addiction remind me of Ayn Rand’s thoughts on pressure groups in a mixed economy. I’m seeing parallels between a mixed economy and the addict’s mind:
A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship.
Similarly, I oppose the introduction of controls in the addict’s life, such as the various tricks people describe to stay off websites. Note also the parallel to the addict’s life being unstable, and having to either cure the addiction or collapse into self-destruction. Continuing in Rand’s text:
A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it.
Such is the dynamic between the warring preferences in an addict’s mind.
Such a system—or, more precisely, anti-system—breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands.
An addict’s mind is just such a jungle.
While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting—and draining—the productive elements of the country.
Similarly, addicts can appear to have a functioning life while quietly destroying themselves.
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.
This is exactly how I see the dynamic inside an addict’s mind. The conflicting preferences coerce each other repeatedly and fight for momentary control of the self.
In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.
Likewise, it is compromise, not common-preference finding, that dominates the addict’s life: he spends some of his time indulging in his addiction, and some of his time abstaining, being conflicted during both.
If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.
Likewise, the addicts’ actions are less guided by principle and more by the expediency of the immediate moment. As his addiction worsens, the harder it is for him to live his life long-range. If the conflicting preferences are part good and part bad, then the bad will drive out the good (see Rand’s essay ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’). This dynamic, along with the entrenchment of error, explains why addiction worsens automatically when left unaddressed.
The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.
Integrity describes a mind that is unconflicted.
As long as the conflict between an addict’s preferences remains, they act as pressure groups inside his mind. Just as the government of a mixed economy, the role of the addict’s self is reduced to that of arbiter between these pressure groups inside his mind. These pressure groups can at best temporarily get what they want, at the cost of the other, which will then clamor even louder to get what it wants, and so on, until the entrenchment is so severe, and error correction so hopeless, that this self-adversarial dynamic ends, as is the case for severe drug addictions, in prison or even death.
As Rand explain in ‘The Anatomy of Compromise’, this spiral can only be stopped by a reversal of basic principles: not compromising between conflicting preferences, or trying to live with that compromise, but instead viewing those preferences as individual actors with rights, who will (and should) only cooperate when they can get what they truly want.
Rand explains that each government control necessitates another, intensifying the war between pressure groups.
I think the same is true for addicts. They try to implement some control/restriction but it just makes things worse because the other part of them retaliates. So then they try to implement even stricter controls. All the while, the war between the pressure groups of the addict’s mind intensifies.
Rather than default to adding more controls, the addict should ask whether his life was already subject to too many controls at the beginning of his addiction, and whether that caused the addiction in the first place. He should consider removing controls to lessen the entrenchment.