244. Narcotic Attractions

For the mug­gles its cig­a­rettes and booze. The wannabe urban cool-kats go for crys­tal, crack or smack with an entree of pot. On the down­ward age esca­la­tor from 30 to pear-shaped to hairy-wrin­kled, teem­ing masses of lazy human pro­to­plasm engage medicos in a dizzy­ing mutual econ­omy of  so-called pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion, really a pan­demic of life-long drug addic­tion. Sex addic­tion? Dress it up and call it love to be respectable if nec­es­sary, but this the the addic­tion that can do no wrong. With flights of intel­lec­tual curi­ousity and unusual self-con­trol, some indi­vid­u­als in the human species occa­sion­ally escape our chimp and bonobo cousins’ addic­tion to fuck­ing the days away, but its always a brief flight, some­times tan­gled in reli­gion, nowa­days lured back to heavy breath­ing by the breath­less promises of pornog­ra­phy and adver­tiz­ing wiz­ardry. Money addic­tion? The inven­tion and his­tory of money proves that sec­ondary con­di­tion­ing works for the addic­tive per­son­al­ity even bet­ter than pri­mary stuff like glut­tony and sleaze. Kudos to the despised behav­iourists. Money addic­tion sucks ’em all in. From CEOs to stamp lick­ers, from Tim­buktu to New York, it’s a rare humanoid who won’t sell their soul and their brief life for the smell of money. What to do with the stuff? After food and shel­ter, that almost becomes an after­thought. Betray your best friend, tor­ture a refugee, cheat your way into some two-bit job … and all for what? To buy a sec­ond iPad for your bed­room or take a two week hol­i­day in a 4.5 star hotel?  Nah, it’s pin­ning the money itself to your triple-bypass chest wall that brings the thrill. And then there’s the addic­tion spun by that ring to bind them all, power. Now this one is pri­mary, even deep enough in the DNA switch­board to have its evo­lu­tion­ary antag­o­nist. You can’t have dom­i­nance with­out sub­mis­sion, and it seems that many of the human type, and per­haps espe­cially some of the female per­sua­sion, get a deep sat­is­fac­tion out of utter sub­mis­sion. That’s sure good for bed­rooms, dic­ta­tors and the god busi­ness. But give your aver­age  politi­cian, or mer­chant banker, or drudge sol­dier, or cardi­gan wear­ing, blink­ing office clerk, or life-defeated clean­ing lady a small taste of power. Wow. The addic­tion power is instant and incur­able. If even money palls and sex reduces to sticky exhaus­tion from a short thrill, when it comes to the power nar­cotic its rav­en­ous appetite is never exhausted.