Theory of Excess: The Rise of Addictive Behaviors

Theory of Excess: The Rise of Addictive Behaviors

Some time ago I absorbed certain ideas from evolutionary biology and psychology into my mental framework, and now they are almost second nature. It is what keeps me anchored in the conviction that there are some fixed aspects to human nature and we are not free-floating bundles of random impulses. I recognize that some people have an aversion to evolutionary hypotheses, which are usually educated guesses and can be used to shore up rigid views of human behavior. I see them as interesting ‘just-so’ stories, not hard and fast truths, but this essay is probably not for you.

Carrying these concepts around and mulling them over and testing them against what I see has led me to what I call a ‘theory of excess’ that I think explains much of contemporary human behavior. The gist of it is that our modern mastery of nature, the combination of science and technology with industrial capitalism, allows us to satisfy all manner of natural, evolutionary-determined drives and desires, far beyond what was possible in pre-modern times. What pre-modern societies could grant only to a few, or none, is now available to most of us. This is readily acknowledged for some basic needs like food and drink, where our hard-wired affinity for sweets, fats, and salt—all things that were rare and difficult to find for our forebears—is now easily and cheaply satisfied, leading to an explosion of obesity and diseases like diabetes. But the same is equally true for many social, emotional, and psychological needs ranging from music to gossip to sports.

This has many consequences, some of them already abundantly evident, some that are still playing themselves out. We are seeing the development of addictions or addictive-like behaviors associated with a wide variety of human drives.  My list includes Alcohol and Drugs, Sex, Music, Gossip and News, Stories, Humor, Shopping, Sports, Games, and Gambling.  If you read this I hope you will suggest more.

ALCOHOL and DRUGS. All types of wine, beer, and liquor can now be gotten cheaply and in abundance. Of course alcohol has been known and abused for millennia, but before the 1700s it was largely in the form of weak beers and wine. Making straight alcohol was expensive and time-consuming and largely done at home in small batches. Read accounts of the havoc wreaked in England in the 1700s by cheap gin—they are similar to modern descriptions of crack cocaine and meth: mothers abandoning their babies, fathers selling their daughters, to get another drink. Add rum from the Indies and suddenly inexpensive spirits make alcoholism a widespread illness of the poor. Since then the variety and quantity of alcohol has grown by leaps and bounds; it has become very cheap, with predictable negative consequences, made worse of course by driving.

What is true for alcohol is multiplied by the mass production of all manner of other drugs. Again, drugs of all types—stimulants, hallucinogens, depressants—were known to many pre-modern peoples and used for spiritual, medical and recreational purposes; but they were usually rare and expensive. Today entrepreneurs are busy making old drugs cheaper, and devising ever new and more addictive drugs, employing every type of modern agricultural and industrial practice. As with alcohol, attempts to stop this through law enforcement have been ineffective and had the unintended consequence of fostering powerful criminal organizations, funding terrorists, destabilizing much of Central America, ruining the lives of countless people engaged in victimless drug use, exploding our domestic prison population, and enabling corrupt dictators from Africa to Southeast Asia.

SEX. Pornography is a $100 billion global industry that the Internet has made cheaply available to almost everyone. For sale material has become more and more extreme as entrepreneurs try to compete with enthusiastic amateurs. Online matchmaking services help people find marriage partners as well as one-night hookups. Viagra is a household word. Sex tours ferry wealthy men to Thailand, Brazil and other destinations. “Sex addiction” is now a recognized psychological disorder requiring professional intervention.

Food, alcohol, drugs, sex—these are obvious physical drives exploited by modern industry. But many other fixations of modern life share the addictive characteristics that tell us they are manifestations of powerful drives.

MUSIC. There is no consensus on why, from an evolutionary perspective, music exerts such universal power and attraction. Theories include music’s role in creating social bonds, or as an emotional release, or, as Darwin surmised, in impressing potential mates.  Whatever the reason, today technology and cheap communications make it possible for much of the world’s population to listen to any type of music they want, as much as they want. And listen we do.

It is startling to think that only a little over a hundred years ago, if you wanted to hear music you had to make it yourself or go where someone was performing live. Today young people in particular latch onto music as an identity marker for themselves, their group, their generation; often they seem unable to function without constant musical access (not like the good old days when we had to feed our musical obsession by putting needles on delicate rotating discs:). Listening to music now often blends seamlessly into watching music, sharing music, talking about music, in short, being constantly absorbed with music. Like drugs, music exerts a direct appeal to the brain, bypassing our cortex, stimulating and satisfying our emotions. And like drugs, today’s capitalist driven technology makes constantly available something that used to be rare.

If music is only a harmless epiphenomenon, or the sublime and uplifting gateway to the soul (as posited by 19th century romantics), then there is nothing to worry about. But both are off the mark. Plato warned us that music is powerful for good and bad and a society that simply throws up its hands and encourages music of every kind, in any amount, can expect trouble. There is a powerful scene in the movie version of “Cabaret” where we hear a sweet German song and then watch as the camera slowly tracks from the glowing face of the singer to his brown Nazi Youth uniform.

It’s not clear what this does to us, but to me there are some disturbing aspects. Kept from music, constant listeners become disturbed and go through a kind of withdrawal. More and more musical availability can lead to a spiral where listeners need more intense and more exotic forms to repeat a musical ‘high.’ Appreciation for more complex music becomes drowned out by the need to move on to the next song, the next artist, the next playlist. Adored and emulated far beyond their worth, musicians become highly questionable role models.

GOSSIP and “NEWS”. Another characteristic of modern society is the preoccupation with high-level gossip, intently following the lives of the famous: famous politicians, athletes, movie stars, pop stars, and of course people famous for being famous. We inundate ourselves with this sort of information, I think because it links with a strong underlying evolutionary trait for all social animals, the need to pay attention to status and especially to the intentions of higher status members of the group. Knowing what those above you in the pecking order want, what they intend to do, anticipating their needs, emulating them, circumventing them—these were critical survival skills for our ancestors, and of course still are. Commoners have always been well-advised to pay attention to what their lords and kings are up to.

One of the most critical types of information about social superiors has to do with their mates, children, and relations, since power and resources often flow in kinship channels. I think this is why we see an obsessive interest in every rumor about the marriages, divorces, dalliances, affairs, courtships, pregnancies, breakups and so on of the celebrity class. These cravings are fed by a robust industry of gossipmongers, using all the tools of modern media and communications, from late-night television and its endless celebrity guest lists to magazines at the grocery checkout counter.

Further, there are many gossip creators who thrive on inventing and distorting rumors in order to attract more eyeballs and make money—or become famous themselves–from this human need. Of course this is harmless up to a point, but for many I think easy access to this information has turned into a craving, especially for people who are more sensitive to social hierarchy or more nervous about the risks of not being on top of the latest news. And for many this inborn need to focus on—and often to emulate—social superiors leads to an unhealthy preoccupation with unworthy and destructive models.

Information about violent threats would have been another critical category for our ancestors, hence the “if it bleeds it leads” approach taken by many news purveyors. News sources who are criticized for putting out an endless series of stories about car crashes, gang murders, and terrorist plots always say “that’s what the public wants!,” and of course they are right. We find it hard to stay away from stories that feature violence and warnings about violent threats. The steady diet of this information distorts our perception of the world and makes it hard to distinguish between the most sensational and graphic threats, such as terrorist shooting sprees, and more common or more serious—but less vivid–threats like climate change or the rising consumption of opioids.

Political gossip is an important and growing sub-category of news. In the US we have seen a steep growth in radio, TV, and online sources specializing in 24/7 political coverage and commentary, much of it highly partisan and argumentative: as a great Washington Post Magazine cover recently proclaimed, “We Have Reached Peak Punditry.” Why do many people find it compelling to listen to pundits argue and predict (“lightning round, you have 10 seconds!”) about current politics, even when they have no special knowledge and their track records are abysmal? I think it’s because political gossip combines multiple human drives: the ‘need to know’ of gossip generally, the love of competition characteristic of sports and games (see below), and the fascination with threats. The business model of much political gossipmongering and talk radio is to fuel anxiety by publicizing and exaggerating dangers. We are stimulated to keep paying attention to find out more (“don’t turn that dial”!).

STORIES. This is a category I am ambivalent about including, because I don’t want it to be true, but I think it is. We love stories and no human culture is without an extensive repertoire of tales, myths, histories, and people who specialize in making and telling them. Can it be overdone? I fear it can, and is. We have a huge storytelling industry that started with printing and literacy and has exploded with the arrival of radio and film and television and the internet.. Every time I turn on Netflix I see a dozen new series in every genre: dramas, comedies, fantasies, thrillers and new genres trying to combine elements of each. Some storytelling experts look for the blockbuster, the story that appeals to everyone, but today storytellers also seek the niche audience, the special demographic.

I think the reasons we like stories are complicated, and so are the effects of too much storytelling. Stories inform us about other people and other ways of life beyond our immediate grasp, and so challenge our parochialism and loneliness; they distill lessons about human action and how to be in the world; they bind us together by providing the common points of reference for our particular people, our community, and sometimes for humanity as a whole; they provide us the raw material for our own judgments and save us from having to learn everything through direct experience. And of course they amuse and distract us from the pain and boredom of everyday life.

All of these vital purposes can be distorted by the storytelling avalanche of our times. For instance, what stories anymore can bind us together when we are all reading and listening to and watching different stories? Every now and then a Harry Potter comes along and makes us all part of one big story-absorbing community, but those events are rarer and rarer.

Stories are about specific people and specific actions in a specific place and time (though we all recognize that some types of myths or tales are meant to go beyond the individual). The specificity and individuality are key to the story’s attraction, its power to engage the emotions and imagination, and to stick in memory. When we seek more general accounts we have left storytelling and moved into the world of history, philosophy, science. Drawing accurate and meaningful generalizations from the mix of our own experience and the stories we are told is hard, and human beings have always been prone to let the specifics of a good story or anecdote take precedence over abstractions. I’m not sure, but I wonder if the huge sea of stories that everyone now swims in is responsible for the surprising attraction of irrational explanations and the ease with which many people today dismiss scientific and expert judgments.

The dominance in the global marketplace of American stories, pumped out by our prolific and expert entertainment industry, has its own dangers. Our particular American take on life—our individualism, consumerism, love of violence, sexual informality, and so on—has often become the standard for other societies, or caused an intense backlash against America.

HUMOR. The other day I saw a reference to the “comedy industry.” What a strange formulation—humor as a commodity that gets designed, built, marketed, and sold like cars or anti-perspirant. But it seems to be successful; anyway, there is certainly a lot of comedy around these days, in movies, on TV, U-Tube, and of course in all the manifestations of ‘stand-up.’ Comics now seem to migrate seamlessly into other arenas, like news (The Daily Show) and every nook and cranny of television.

What exactly is the demand that the comedy industry is seeking to meet? Humor is present in every part of every society and seems vital to living together. Humor in many of its forms—satire, irony, black humor, dirty jokes—brings to the surface fears and anxieties that we have a hard time addressing head-on. Think of how “All in the Family” let Americans talk together about racism. Other variants give us perspective on our own problems, puncture pretensions, and I think make us feel more like members of the big and hopelessly dysfunctional human family. Humor is the great leveler. And humor is at bottom hopeful: comedies end in weddings, tragedies in funerals.

Too much of at least some kinds of comedy, however, is worrisome. I like Colbert and John Oliver, but their sarcastic take on politics, repeated night after night to an audience that probably gets no other take on public life, is corrosive and contributes to a growing distrust of every type of authority that is undermining democracy. The Comedy Central view of the world discourages engagement and reinforces a sense of unearned superiority.  Internet trolls–mostly young men living in their parent’s basements–who spread ridiculous pro-Trump lies in the recent campaign defended themselves by saying it was all for laughs.

Competing comics trying to find their niche in the industry move quickly to more extreme, more vulgar, more shocking material. Sex is funny, but it’s also tender, and mysterious, and needs privacy.  If everything is funny, nothing is.  Appreciating humor requires that some things not be funny, that some things not be overlaid with irony.

SHOPPING. I saw an ad the other day at the gas pump while I was filling up my car (another zone of privacy invaded by Madison Avenue) that featured a young woman extolling the gas company credit card for allowing her to pursue “my favorite hobby: shopping!” What on earth does that mean? How can shopping be a ‘hobby’? But it seems obvious that many of us get a lot of enjoyment from shopping, above and beyond the value of anything that is actually purchased. Comparing prices, going to stores, tracking sales, clipping coupons, bargaining with sellers, selling stuff ourselves on E-Bay and Craigslist—clearly the activity of buying and selling is compelling to many people. As Adam Smith said, there is a natural inclination to ‘truck, barter and exchange,’ and with more disposable income and more to choose from than ever, we are trucking at an amazing clip.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has gone to the mall, or wandered around Amazon, just because I was bored. Shopping for many these days is a ‘default’ activity, what you do when you don’t have anything else to do. At the far end of this spectrum are chronic ‘shopaholics’ and hoarders who can’t stop themselves from accumulating things far beyond any identifiable need. You can glimpse in this an ancestral drive under conditions of scarcity to get as many valuable things as possible to store up for the hard times to come.

Over-shopping is a major cause of debt and bankruptcy. It clogs our closets and basements and landfills with stuff we don’t need. We pay professional organizers to come into our homes and convince us to let go. But these efforts are dwarfed by the forces encouraging more shopping, not only the need of a million sellers to create new desires, but the conviction of economists and politicians that more consumer spending is needed to create jobs and growth.

SPORTS. All over the world we can’t seem to get enough spectator sports. Sporting events get top ratings on TV and radio, attract huge and loyal audiences on social media, are dissected and obsessed over around the clock by a phalanx of commentators and analysts. Why do we like to see people competing, individually and in teams? One reason is the chance to identify unreservedly with our tribe and our tribe’s representative—the Boston Red Sox, we can say, representing the collective identity of New England. Since sports are self-contained and (usually) have no off-the-field meaning, we can fully back them without the guilt or trade-offs involved in backing a political party, or my country versus others. It recreates the fundamental us vs. them of tribal life.

In the ancestral environment we were highly alarmed and frightened by real threats (from wild beasts, other tribes, natural dangers like storms and floods and famines and wildfires) on a regular basis, probably every day. We courted danger by hunting and gathering, and by raiding our neighbors. We developed complex physiological and psychological reactions: we had to decide when to remain calm, and when to run like hell; and we had to learn from these intense experiences and pass this knowledge on to our kin.

To capture game and conquer enemies we had to work together in small groups and came to value the intense social bonds associated with the hunt and the raid. So in a perverse way we have been designed to enjoy these situations of danger and stress and competition, maybe even seek them out. Further, because being successful in these high stress situations was essential for survival, those who excelled were celebrated and granted authority and status.

Human play teaches these same basic skills. As children we fight and compete and create groups to see who is faster, tougher, smarter, more skilled physically and socially. Through play we develop our personalities, find our comrades, identify our rivals and our enemies.

Watching competitive sports triggers fear and anxiety as we identify with the competitors, share their fear of losing and the shock of expected and unexpected threats, with many of the same attractions outlined above for horror movies and political debates. And through this we bond with the athletes and with fellow fans. The deep drives that this taps into can be seen in the behavior of soccer hooligans and other organized fan bases. A book that opened my eyes is Among the Thugs, about British soccer fans, where the author immerses himself in a culture of drinking and violence and describes the intense pleasure—which he explicitly compares to taking drugs–of allowing himself to disappear into the postgame mob.

GAMES. More people are playing sports as well as watching them, but today far more people satisfy themselves with video games. A new multi-billion industry has arisen to fill the gap between being a full participant and being a spectator. Using all the tools that technology and clever marketers can muster, games appeal to multiple audiences but especially young men. Many spend a large part of their life immersed in games, and the dangers of excess are now emerging—poor socialization, low impulse control, decreased sensitivity to violence, loss of interest in other activities, a need for more and more intense experiences. Video game addiction is being explored by the American Psychiatric Association for inclusion in the official list of psychiatric disorders.

GAMBLING. Video games appear to share some of the features of gambling, another activity widely practiced in most known human societies that has been greatly expanded by modern capitalism and technology. Huge enterprises and entire cities have been constructed to attract gamblers; slot machines and lotteries have been honed using sophisticated psychological research to maximize their addictive properties. Online systems allow people to gamble anywhere, anytime. Gambling, which some evolutionary theorists think draws on an innate attraction human beings have to situations where outcomes are closely balanced (because in an inherently unpredictable world we might not keep trying unless we ‘enjoyed’ a certain amount of risk) appears to produce the same dopamine-induced high as many drugs. Problem gambling is now classified as an addiction in the most recent DSM (5) of the American Psychiatric Association.

CONCLUSION. All of the underlying drives and desires described here have a positive, in some cases absolutely necessary, part in human life when pursued in moderation or at the right time for the right reasons. Making it easier and cheaper to satisfy them is what modernity is all about, and of course we can point to the many ways life has been improved over the past several hundred years. But a world in which millions and millions of the smartest people are spending all their time finding ways to feed your desires and make money off them has some clear downsides. This may be especially true now that (in the developed world at least) most straightforward needs have been addressed and much of this ingenuity is directed to stoking more problematic drives.

I am not thinking only of the clear dangers of over-consumption like climate change and resource depletion. We are at greater and greater risk of being manipulated in our most common and everyday decisions, as clever sellers study human behavior like hawks, seeking the slightest competitive advantage. More and more of our interactions are mediated by online systems that are trying to sell us things or set us up for advertisers, where the name of the game is to amass as much data as possible on each consumer and then deploy it to keep us shopping, gambling, gaming, and gossiping. The other day I heard a Freakonomics podcast describing the incredible effort that Facebook and Google put into keeping us on their sites for just an extra 10 minutes—thousands of hours of work by the smartest tech geniuses in the world, all aimed at seducing you and me. Not only does this seem like a sad waste of talent, it is dangerous for human privacy and autonomy. Their work feeds into the algorithms that determine what each user sees on-screen, so that we think we are getting an objective view of the news or our friend’s interests, but instead what we see is subtly manipulated to put us in the mood to buy.

Capitalists are not the only players. Politicians and political parties are doing the same thing, using the same research and the same core human drives to sell candidates. Modern campaigns assemble huge databases—often borrowed from market research–to reach each individual voter and figure out exactly what issues and interests will get him or her behind their candidate. Governments are not far behind. China is creating a “social credit” system to rate its subjects, using a “vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distills it into a single number ranking each citizen,” according to the BBC.

I think that our frequent sense of disorientation, of inauthenticity, is closely tied to these trends.  The things we want, the music we hum, the people we admire, the jokes we tell, the politics we obsess over–we sense that these are not really ours, that they have been foisted on us.  The drives and desires that used to serve us well are no longer trustworthy.

A bumper sticker I saw recently says “Do not believe everything you think,” which is excellent advice. We could add to it, “Do not desire everything you want.”