Get A Rat And Put It In A Cage And Give It Two Water Bottles. One Is Just Water, And One Is Water Laced

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, 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, and Rat Park 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. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and 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. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So 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. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. 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—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

—

Johann Hari,

Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

(via bigfatsun)

Twitter (2020) VS the Hays code (1930)

Wait what's a buildings fire evacuation plan if you aren't supposed to use the elevator to get down

I Don’t Want to Die

My name is Maysara, and I am a heart patient in need of open-heart surgery due to a hole in my heart. I managed to escape the war and reach Egypt just one day before the border closed, but not without great loss and pain. I lost my mother just days before October 7th, and I was also injured in Rafah.

Your support has been my lifeline, enabling me to flee to Egypt. But now, as I face this critical surgery, I am filled with fear. I don’t want to die. I want to live, to honor the memory of my mother, and to embrace the life that your generosity has given me a chance to hold onto.

Please keep me in your thoughts and prayers as I undergo this life-saving procedure. Your kindness gives me strength, and I hope to emerge from this with a renewed heart and spirit.

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Donate to There is no time left to save Maysara's life, organized by Mahmoud Shaqura

My brother Maisara Shaqoura is in the prime of his life. He was b… Mahmoud Shaqura needs your support for There is no time left to s

children are starving at the fastest rate that the world has ever known