Agency vs. Addiction
Are we the puppets of others?
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic focuses on Personal Agency as an antidote to an Addiction Economy. I’ve been contemplating this one for a while, unsure how to write it but knowing it needed to be written. We’ll explore addiction, agency, and how many efforts to regulate behavior just don’t work as well as applying our own personal agency.
Introduction
The concept of an Addiction Economy was brought front and center this past year through Hilary Sutcliffe on LinkedIn. I understand her frustrations but the more I’ve been exposed to her suggestions, the less I can accept them. This essay is not a personal attack on Hilary in any way but grappling with the ideas. I’ll first attempt to Steelman her argument.
The main threat Hilary pulls is that we have an addiction economy. She uses the UK NHS definition of addiction as: “not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you.”
I think she’s onto something here. We know that social media’s goal is to keep your eyes glued with just enough of a dopamine hit to not let you put your phone down. We also know that food companies target adverts and prepare food in ways that elicit an addictive response in our minds. Even things like shopping, clothing, and more are sold in ways that trigger addictive properties.
I reached out to Hillary with a draft of this essay and she clarified that they’re attempting to add to the three common academic models of addiction - the Social, Biological, and Psychological. She’s proposing a fourth Economic model in the hopes of providing “a useful framing to inspire and motivate policymakers, regulators, campaigners, health professionals, and citizens to see addiction not as a matter of personal choice or biological determinism, but the natural conclusion of a series of orchestrated strategies by commercial actors at the expense of individuals and society.”
I agree with Hilary’s main point. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements and social pressure that are run by highly skilled marketing organizations run more like a CIA psychological operation than we’d like to admit. The thing that I just cannot accept, and is evidenced in Hilary’s Addiction Economy Tagline:
“It’s not you, it’s them.”
She extended this line of argument in a recent LinkedIn post stating:
“So back to addiction. We argue that it is neither a moral failing nor a disease in the traditional sense, but primarily a function of out control elites (sic) - particularly companies and business systems. Various industries are not just preying on the disadvantaged communities who are particularly vulnerable to addiction, but complicit in contributing to the disadvantage in the first place and perpetuating it.” (emphasis mine) (she’s also summarizing a quote from Daniel Hoyer’s Essay in The Conversation)
She’s right here too. There are elites and those who run companies and business systems whose only goal is control and/or profit and who target communities they feel can provide that goal.
For example, Purdue Pharmaceuticals intentionally targeted distressed communities in Appalachia which was a perfect place to push their opioid pain pills. A great book capturing this problem is Demon Copperhead, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
However, putting all the onus on these elites and pushing us to look for regulations and rules has a history of failure as well as missing the power we hold with our personal agency. But first, let’s talk about addiction.
Addiction
Let’s step back and find out why things might be addictive
“… when you’re becoming addicted to a substance, that normal hardwiring of helpful brain processes can begin to work against you. Drugs or alcohol can hijack the pleasure/reward circuits in your brain and hook you into wanting more and more.”- NIH - Bilogy of Addiction
With this re-wiring, addiction can become a chronic dysfunction of the brain system that involves reward, motivation, and memory. It’s about the way your body craves a substance or behavior, especially if it causes a compulsive or obsessive pursuit of “reward” and a lack of concern over consequences.
We normally think about addiction when it comes to the very negative outcomes. The word evokes ideas like alcoholism, cigarettes, meth, porn, and more. We view these as morally as well as legally problematic.
Did you know you can also be equally addicted to things people generally view as positive? There are people with negative outcomes from addictions to exercise, relationships, sex, and even love! (One negative manifestation is the archetype of the devouring mother.) These generally positive items can become as pathologically negative as drugs and alcohol and can damage relationships, health, and more.
So can moral posturing. If you ever doubt this just go on social media where millions are looking for that same dopamine response in their social justice, religious adherence, or, like Hilary, moral campaigns. Their tireless efforts are feeding the same pleasure/reward circuitry that drugs like heroin do.
Now, how do you break addiction?
“The brain actually changes with addiction, and it takes a good deal of work to get it back to its normal state. ” - NIH - Bilogy of Addiction
Simply put, the more addictive the material you’ve consumed or the more value you place in that reward system, the more rewiring you’ll need. Thankfully, we know how to rewire the brain. As we explored in What’s in a Brain, just like it was malleable to program the addiction, so too can you reprogram it.
Personal Agency
The definition of Personal Agency is:
“the sense that I am the one who is causing or generating an action.”1 “A person with a sense of personal agency perceives himself/herself as the subject influencing his/her own actions and life circumstances.”2
“According to social cognitive theory approach, personal agency is comprised of four properties: Intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.”3
Humans, more than other animals, can resist the influence of external forces and can independently generate their actions. We can look up and see what’s happening and say “No” long before we become addicted. Even if we find ourselves in that dark place, agency is still the only thing that helps people successfully emerge.
This is a core element of many philosophies over the centuries, the preeminent one being Stoicism. This philosophy is defined by Wikipedia as:
The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four virtues in everyday life: wisdom, courage, temperance or moderation, and justice, and living in accordance with nature.
Simply put humans have Agency which includes Intention, Self-reflection, and Moderation each of which is germane to the conversation.
Even more simply put, humans can say “No.”
It doesn’t matter what’s being sold, who’s trying to sell it, what sort of societal pressures exist, nor how addicting something can be. We can, and we have ample evidence that it works, say “No, not me.” Each step into addiction was a choice and each step back out is also a choice.
Back to Demon Copperhead, the protagonist breaks the cycle by exerting their own choice and reclaiming their agency even though they are the victim of very bad life circumstances in a vulnerable population. In her post, Hilary states, “As inequality takes root and conflict among elites ramps up, it usually ends up hampering society’s ability to right the ship.” However, Demon, in the book, comes from that level of inequality in spades. Yet he exerted his agency and righted his own ship.
Regulation
Despite this personal agency, there is a drive, as Hilary appears to lean toward, to prevent, through regulation, the availability of these addictive entities. This drive joins legion attempts throughout history by religions and governments to do just this.
The problem is that it just doesn’t work. A few notable failures include:
Puritans: This religious sect has attempted to regulate everything that could be considered amoral, largely clustered around what they viewed as vices, or distractions from their faith that largely revolved around what we consider addictive behaviors. They were rigid and dogmatic and still affect many U.S. laws and regulations both positively and otherwise.
They questioned the ability of their followers to have agency and regulated, with severe punishments, their form of morality. It never worked. From sex to drinking to anything else, they constantly were finding violations and meting out punishments.Prohibition: This ill-fated regulation was a complete failure out of the gate. Not only did the consumption of alcohol not go down but it empowered the Mafia crime families which became a plague on our society for decades afterwards.
Even crazier, the rumors of moonshine making you go blind were because the FBI was poisoning barrels with formaldehyde in an attempt to dissuade illegal consumption. So the attempt to make people healthier backfired completely.The War on Drugs: This has been one of the most catastrophic failures in regulation. Worse, the war on drugs lumped items like marijuana and psychedelics in with heroin as worse than cocaine making criminals out of millions. Yet states that have legalized marijuana have seen a reduction in the use of more illicit drugs.
More shocking is that psychedelics are one of the most powerful tools to help break addiction as studied by Johns Hopkins and captured in the wonderful book by Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind.
Prescription opioids were eventually regulated much more rigorously which is what Hilary describes wanting for other addictions. Yet the use of illegal drugs has since exploded into black-market drugs like heroin, fentanyl, and more. Regulation didn’t work. It turned legal users into felons.
I could fill multiple essays with the failure of regulation to establish moral or health outcomes whether it be through criminalization, barriers to production, or even societal dictates but I want to focus on the most dangerous aspect of relying on this mechanism; Regulatory Capture. This is where those very same elites and corporations spend millions of dollars to sway regulations, elections, and politicians to protect themselves.
It is happening more and more over the years as powerful interests are prioritized over the general interests of the public. Given that these same powerful people Hilary suggests are behind the addiction economy also means they are already working with regulatory impunity that more regulations won’t fix.
But we still have Agency.
Applying Agency
When it comes to the addiction economy, no one is forcing any of us to do anything. It takes a personal choice to say “Yes.” Whether it’s fashion, makeup, processed food, alcohol, social media, drugs, exercise, love, moral crusades, or any other potentially addictive item, they all start by saying “Yes.”
“Yes” is also a form of Agency that can start an addiction path. We listened to the adverts, to the manipulators, to the algorithms, to the social signals and we chose to accept what they said and we agreed with it and took the first step.
Personal Agency recognizes those steps and includes the most powerful word in our English language; “No.” You do not have to continue the path. You do not have to continue allowing people to manipulate your emotions, your dopamine, and your brain.
It’s not an easy path to pull back from and anyone who is recovering from addiction will quickly tell you that getting out is significantly harder than getting in. Unlike regulation with its litany of failures, Agency, even with its difficulty, has a long track record of success. (Even the Puritans understood this as well!)
It starts by saying “I own me and it is me.” I can let others manipulate me and hope that someone else saves me or I can start to take steps to change my behaviors.
Imagine if more people started saying “No” to the marketing, the adverts, and the manipulators. If it stopped working, they’d lose their control. Same with the politicians we want to write logical regulations. We can step away from the addiction pushers, hold the regulators accountable and reclaim control. Control we gave them, to begin with. It’s time we cut our own strings.
writing has a pile of examples where we can regain control of our lives through the application of agency:Building Resilience in the Workplace: Strategies for Coping with Change
Breaking the Habit: What the news does to you and what to do about it
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Further Reading from Authors I really appreciate
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Gallagher, S. (2000). Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 14–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01417-5.
Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00011.x.
Bandura, A. (2006). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 164–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00011.x.
I think I would be willing to play Hilary’s hand here. She is saying that there are drivers within the culture that are creating pathways to “happiness,” or at least, guiding the human experience. For illustration, I would compare and contrast two decades in US cultural history, the 1950’s and the 1980’s. In both resources for the people were plentiful, and at this point I won’t venture into what people did with their spare time and money. But some have argued that the 1980’s was a much more destructive period. The rise of advertising and glamor and how it affected people were unprecedented. Of course, not everyone fell prey to it, but many did. But this shift made fashion companies rich practically overnight. NatGeo had a program called “80’s, The Decade that Made Us.” There was a quote by a journalist that summed up the era perfectly. She said, “This is when we went as a nation from ‘We the people’ to ‘Me the person.” I don’t feel that the 50’s saw this type of cultural shift, though elements were beginning which facilitated the coming of the 80’s. For both eras, people followed their passions, as diverse as they were. But in both cases, or throughout human history, the definition of the proper human experience has yet eluded proper examination.
Thanks for a thoughtful post. Your thesis - that we have agency, that we can just say no -- runs counter to a lot of widely accepted thinking in the 12 step community. There whole thing is about accepting the idea that willpower is of little use against "cunning, baffling" addiction and that the only way out is to turn, not to ourselves, but to a higher power.
Do you disagree with this approach?