Addictions
Addictions are wildly dangerous for cultures—and not just for obvious reasons. In addition to decreasing victims’ efficacy and lifespans, addictions create an opportunity for outside cultures to “poach” new members. A common means of combating addiction involves radically rewriting an individual’s self-narrative and some cultures like Alcoholics Anonymous and Scientology have learned they can use this vulnerability to build dependency and easily slurp up new members.
This strategy makes a lot of sense when one thinks about it—while converting people to a hard culture is generally close to impossible (from a statistical perspective), one of the few times in a person’s life where it is possible at scale is when they have hit rock bottom with an addiction. As such, a culture not fortified by mechanisms that protect its members from addiction is uniquely vulnerable.
Many cultures fight addiction by strictly forbidding potentially addictive things. Mormon prohibitions on coffee and Islam’s prohibition on alcohol present salient examples of this.
Having come from a family that oscillates between a generation of teetotalers and a generation of alcoholics, I (Malcolm) can nevertheless vouch for the shortcomings of this approach. A common joke from my family’s part of Texas goes: “Jews don’t recognize Jesus, Protestants don’t recognize the Pope, and Baptists don’t recognize one another in the liquor store.” Prohibitions against drinking work so badly they are a joke. (For clarification “Baptists” are assumed to be Primitive Baptists (a Calvinist sect—like the Puritans). The Calvinist stereotype of either being a teetotaler or alcoholic did not come out of nowhere.)
Worse, abstinence really doesn’t work for the most dangerous addiction of the modern world—online social Skinner boxes. If a rat is given a reward of food when it presses a lever, it will typically only press the lever when it is hungry. If, on the other hand, the rat is only randomly given a reward sometimes, it will press the lever until its paws bleed. This is a Skinner box, and its addictive quality is enhanced in social situations like those created by Facebook or TikTok. Were we to prohibit our kids from using these sorts of platforms, we would hurt their future and ability to build robust social networks (assuming we want them to have networks that include people beyond just members of our culture, which we do).
Coming from a family that is already prone to addiction, how will we equip our House cultivar to address addiction? First, we work with kids to run the Skinner box experiment themselves. We have built this into our school’s curriculum so it is top of mind when kids are being manipulated. We have even built a holiday around recognizing Skinner boxes (Future Day).
More importantly, our culture makes heavy use of naltrexone. Naltrexone is an opioid antagonist, which means that it blocks the chemical pathways that create addiction. If you do something that would normally make you addicted while on an opioid antagonist, the opposite effect occurs and you start disliking that thing. While we see naltrexone as a tool of last resort, it is a critical tool nonetheless in families that are highly vulnerable to addiction. Pharmacological tools can steer biology in a more efficacious direction.