Everyone's An Addict

My name is Ari, and I’m an addict. The details of my addition are moot, and not the point of this piece. Whatever specific substance, behavior, or situation causes a chemical reaction in the pleasure center of my brain such that I achieve a temporary pleasure which later is compulsively sought again and again is fodder for the grotesque and would distract from what I wish to accomplish here. Now, I understand that this public admission, bereft of details as it is, may not be sufficient to gain the trust of you, my dear reader. You are entitled to call me a coward or non-committal for not revealing the specifics, but it doesn't make any thing I'm about to say any less true.

Addiction has given me trouble for quite some time, in my daily life and conceptually. Many people I’ve encountered in my life have suffered from obvious and some much less obvious addictions and have candidly shared at least parts of those experiences. But I believe that there are many more people I know suffering silently with addiction, too ashamed to speak about it or ask for help. In writing this, I am attempting to transition from the silent sufferer to the open and honest addict because I believe that is where the solution lies.

An Attempt to Define Addiction

Paulo Zerbato - fineartamerica.com

As defined by the Medical Dictionary, addiction is: “a persistent, compulsive dependence on a behavior or substance.” It isn’t simply engaging with a particular vice. That's the first step, but eventually it develops into a psychological surrender into believe the substance or action has control of you instead of the other way around. In addition to the traditional usual suspects of substance addiction like illicit drugs, alcohol, and smoking, several other forms of addiction are just as prevalent and on the rise including: prescription drugs; internet, smart phone, and social media use; television; pornography; sex; video games; shopping; eating disorders (both over and under eating); gambling; sleep; working; making money; and broadly, ego elevation.

Modern Capitalism: How Is This Different Than a Ponzi Scheme?

Introduction: The Ponzi Scheme

If you Google “Ponzi Scheme” you will get this result:

“Ponzi scheme (n): A form of fraud in which belief in the success of a non-existent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors”

Running a Ponzi Scheme is illegal. It is illegal because it is considered a form of fraud, that the perpetrator of the scheme deceives investors with false statements about the nature of the business and what produces the returns. While the perpetrator may tell their clients that they are investing in a certain type of security, or financial product, or focused on some hot new industry sector, they are in fact just finding new investors to buy into the scheme, using the new investor's capital to pay returns to the original investors, which gives the illusion of investment returns. This process is repeated as long as possible, but it inevitably leads to a crash of the operation when the perpetrator cannot find enough new investors to pay back the old ones.

The man himself, Charles Ponzi. I trust him (image from biography.com)

Unfortunately when I , the cynic that I occasionally am, think of a the dominant economic philosophy of the Western world, I come up with pretty much the same description.

Fallacy of the Free Market - Greed Is Good?

The title of this article is taken from the 1987 film Wall Street, whose lasting legacy is a speech given by Michael Douglas' character, Gordon Gekko, at the shareholder meeting for a company he is trying to take over. Here is the crescendo of that speech:

“Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have spent the last two months analyzing what all these guys do, and I still can’t figure it out. One thing I do know is that our paper company lost 110 million dollars last year, and I’ll bet that half of that was spent in all the paperwork going back and forth between all these vice presidents. The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.”

Why You Should Vote, Even if You Don't Believe in the System

Perhaps this is too little, too late with US 2018 mid-term elections less than a week away. Many people aren't registered to vote and that window is now closed. Except it isn't!!! Fifteen states, including my home state of California, offer some form of voter registration on election day (check here to see if you qualify). For those of you already registered you still have a couple of days to decide to vote or not.

There are reasons to not vote, sure. The system is controlled by a bunch of rich old white men, none of whom represent you or your ideas (it's completely possible that most of my readers are in fact rich old white men. I don't actually have demographic data to disprove this). The whole system is corrupted by money. There are only two viable political parties, evil and slightly little less evil. One vote doesn't matter. This definitely doesn't look like the representative democracy praised in history text books. You participation in a broken system makes you complicit in its existence. I get all those reasons. Well, maybe I don't get them, but I've at least heard them, and I think they're half-baked.

Did you?

But if these factors make you ponder, “OK, I could vote, but really, why should I?” then, lovely reader, do I have the perfect article in store for you. My reasons to vote, presented here and now, ad free, in the only format acceptable for conveying more than one piece of information on the internet, a list! Or a slideshow of one slide if you prefer to think about it that way.

How We're Dying: A Sign of Progress

It's easy to follow the news and feel like we're living in the most extreme times in history. Democracies are devolving into right wing authoritarian regimes. Another gang, drug cartel, or run-of-the-mill psychopath has just gone on a killing spree. There's ongoing violence and unrest in the Middle East. Still. Some militaristic dictator has just killed a bunch of dissenters. Three people were murdered in a neighborhood near you. Politicians can't agree on an issue and people are upset. The planet is melting. And the Muslims... well I'm sure they're up to no good. I don't wish to trivialize any of those stories (the ones based in reality, anyway) which are tragic and almost always feature grave injustice. Even in mock form those headlines give the impression that things are generally terrible and probably couldn't get worse

But I wanted to see if there was any data to support or refute that idea. So I decided to look up some data on how people are actually dying. So join me for a couple of minutes, take a break from the news, and let's look at the bigger picture for a couple of minutes. When we do, we will see that things can get worse for humanity, and in fact they used to be much worse. Which might, I mean it's possible, that it could maybe indicate, that things are getting... better?

This next statement might not appear like a positive piece of news, but it is: More and more people these days are dying of good old fashioned age-related illness¹. That's is good news because it means that they aren't dying from other more discouraging things like violence and war, easily preventable diseases, or malnutrition. People are still dying from those things, but as a percentage of the world's population it is much less than it used to be. Here is a breakdown of how we collectively died in 2016 as a percentage of the total 54.7 million global deaths: