Recovery: it's not just for "addicts" anymore. It's not even just for persons, not when addictive processes permeate every social system we've got, from schools to churches to workplaces to governments.

We're up to our ears in addict-making processes, and we can't take two steps out of bed without running into them. Substance addictions. Substance addictions - alcohol, drugs, nicotine, food, caffeine - are just the surface, the outward and visible ways addictive processes come get us. And they do get us. Drugs (legal and illegal), alcohol, and tobacco constitute the world's biggest economic empire. Only the weapons industry rivals it. It seems we can't afford not to be substance-dependent; our economies certainly are.

Next in the line of killers are process addictions, "the ones society applauds": addiction to working, winning, high-stress, fast-track jobs, perfectionism, relationships, making money, spending and debting, gaining power, getting fame or notoriety, living out family dramas, or - brace yourself - shopping. Sex can be another process addiction, but it's not one society looks kindly on, however much advertising promotes insatiable and manipulative sex as the solution to life's challenges. Gambling is another old addiction, coming back now with a vengeance with all the state lotteries, especially among young people.

Even the most lauded activities - religion, science, academic inquiry, and government service - may take on classic addictive patterns. Religion turns into obsession. Science turns into dogma, as if collecting enough facts will make up for a narrow worldview. Academic inquiry becomes an in-your-head addiction - quibbling esoterica with rabid acrimony, fiddling while Rome burns. As for government service, it's power addiction from the bureaucrats who throw around their paper-pushing weight to the big-timers who become brokers for corporate conglomerates.

Process addictions are every bit as deadly, because they underlie substance addictions - as well as just about every social and global ill we've got. They're the invisible killers, the ones we don't suspect, but the ones that made millionaire Ivan Boesky raid savings and loans to become a billionaire, leaving in his wake thousands who saw their life-savings disappear. As Boesky was later to admit, "It's a sickness I have in the face of which I am helpless." Nor was Boesky alone in his sickness. Since the '80s, we've witnessed an army of greed-addicted corporate raiders, who made the jobs and pension funds of millions vanish overnight.

Process addictions aren't limited to movers and shakers, though. Ordinary folks following the right diet and taking the right exercise are dropping dead at age thirty-five from workaholism, relationship addiction, anxiety, and stress. If all these substance and process addictions don't afflict us, they nonetheless affect us. While addictions to drugs, food, alcohol, sex, or work hit us one by one, addictions to money, control, divisiveness, status, and official-think oppress us together. We can't have power-addicts running the world and not experience the consequences. Even when we try to claim it's business or government as usual, we find ourselves suffering from global plagues made invisible by their familiarity.

But a familiar plague is no less deadly. As Anne Wilson Schaef points out, a deadly virus is a deadly virus, even if the entire population has it. Alcoholics Anonymous holds that addiction is a "progressive, fatal disease." Schaef believes - and we agree - that this is true, no matter what form the addiction takes. Our lungs may give out from tar and nicotine, or our hearts may give out from stress. We may die from the greed that destroys the environment or from a nuclear chain reaction set off by a someone's power play. Addiction - substance or process, acted out privately or on the world stage - is a fatal illness that we ignore at our peril. Not that this is news. We can't read the papers or watch TV without wondering: What on earth is going on? We have the knowledge and technology. We have the resources, human and natural. We even have the desire. Why can't our social, economic, and environmental problems be solved? Why do we live from crisis to crisis?

Addict-making systems. Neither substance nor process addictions are limited to one race, sex, economic class, region, or occupation. Rich and poor, conservative and liberal, male and female, Hispanic, European, African, Asian, and Native Americans share the same disease.

When something so deadly cuts across society, we have to look at what we share: our social systems. In her 1987 ground-breaking book, When Society Becomes an Addict, Schaef suggests family dynamics, school rules, workplace policies and practices, corporate hierarchies, government workings, media messages, as well as cultural and religious belief-structures all operate in ways that set us up to behave addictively. In fact, society itself, Schaef writes, "is an addictive system."

That's a strong statement, yet the more we understand addiction, the more it seems like an understatement. Award-winning teacher John Taylor Gatto, for instance, pulls no punches about the messages schools send through their structure: "I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."

In When Money is the Drug, counselor and writer Donna Boundy sketches a similarly addict-making picture for corporations. The level of thinking-distortion that takes over people in these systems is astonishing.

What's going on? Why are systems betraying their service to us? Instead of performing their rightful functions of educating (schools), nurturing (families), promoting public good (governments), managing the shared household (businesses), and inspiring us to find and fulfill our life's purpose (religious institutions), they're abusing us and turning us into people we never wanted to be. Why?...

More: Trufax.Org - On The Reality of the "Paradigm Conspiracy"

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