Is ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Praying on Our Addicted Brains?
Or are we both predators and prey?
David T. Courtwright has written another fascinating book about addiction, but despite his extensive research into unrestrained consumption and the industries built around it, his framing of the subject ultimately only limits our understanding of it. Let us briefly examine how. He writes:
“Limbic capitalism refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organisations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction.”
This is an elaborate way of saying that in a free market businesses must use any advantage they can to coax consumers into choosing their product over that of the competition, including appealing to our unconscious emotional needs (which are tied to the limbic system in the mammalian brain). “They had begun to engineer, produce, and market potentially addictive products in ways calculated to increase demand and maximize profit.” You don’t say! Had Courtwright stopped here he would have been closer to the truth than he ends up, but he’s not satisfied with the observation that the selfish interests of consumers and capitalists in a free market produce both positive and negative effects. A good story must have a villain, and he goes on to decry the extensive lobbying, public relations campaigns and other immoral means by which the providers of pleasure resisted attempts to regulate them:
“They created, not merely an age of addiction, but an age of “addiction by design” that is both the hallmark of limbic capitalism and the clearest demonstration of its inversion of the forces of reason and science that made it possible.”
Consistent with the left-wing view of man as a product of society, Courtwright argues that this epidemic of addictions is driven primarily by the suppliers of pleasure, rather than by rising demand. He uses the word capitalism in the socialist sense, as a system of exploitation. According to this view, the consumer is governed by his primitive limbic system, but the capitalist acts out of cold, rational self-interest:
Civilized inventiveness weaponized pleasurable products and pastimes. The more rapid and intense the brain reward they imparted, the likelier they were to foster pathological learning and craving, particularly among socially and genetically vulnerable consumers.
In other words, only the capitalists have agency, and they prey on the vulnerable like rapacious wolves. But like the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, the relationship between the drug addict and the drug dealer isn’t one-sided. When will these well-meaning intellectuals understand that transferring all responsibility from the individual to society only reinforces the sense of powerlessness that drives people to addictions, crime, depression and poverty in the first place?
The subject of addiction was discussed more soberly by psychologist Jordan Peterson and author Warren Farrell, specifically in regards to pornography and gaming addiction among young men. Lacking the ability to postpone gratification, many young men find it very difficult to concentrate on achieving academic, athletic, professional and personal goals which inevitably require long, monotonous work. Dating also requires high tolerance for negative feelings such as uncertainty and rejection; maintaining a relationship requires much more. Unable to meet their own expectations, they develop a sense of shame, and find refuge in the imaginary world of video games and video porn. There they can be warriors, heroes and leaders. There they can defeat powerful enemies or conquer beautiful women, experiencing a sense of accomplishment without the risk and shame of failure.
Unlike real life, these forms of media are designed to offer an experience that is enjoyable throughout and will keep the user engaged for as long as possible. The skills they teach aren’t readily translated into the real world. Thus, the addict becomes trapped within himself, growing further and further detached from precisely the things he craves the most.
Addiction is driven primarily by repressed and unfulfilled desires. Video games satisfy our desire for risk, power and violence (one of the reasons why most gamers are men). Pornography satisfies our need for risk and domination, among other things. Narcotics simulate the elation of romantic love or a religious experience. As economist Thomas Sowell often says, when it comes to social problems there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Suppose the government stepped in to prevent video games designers from exploiting our natural tendencies. The gaming industry would cease to exist. Would such powerful mammalian instincts like male aggression find more productive outlets? Perhaps more young men would join their local mixed martial arts club. Perhaps more young men would shoot up their local campus. Simply eliminating the drug solves nothing.
How would we go about regulating man’s most powerful instincts? Alcohol prohibition, for example, did not reduce vice but increase it. As Michel Foucault describes in his History of Sexuality, Victorian Era attempts to repress sexuality produced quite the opposite result. And Nietzsche, in The Will to Power, observed that “any prohibition deteriorates the character of those who do not willingly submit to it, but are constrained thereto.” The addict chases his addiction long past the moment where it ceases to give him pleasure. Perhaps for many of us the death drive is the strongest instinct of them all. If Courtwright has any viable social remedies to offer, it would take a more careful reader to find them.
