Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Addiction

"At the core, an addiction is a way to keep ourselves from feeling. Thus, anything we do that keeps us from knowing ourselves and fully experiencing the world around us can become an addiction. Work, television, food, money, sex, sports, and other activities can all be addictive when we rely on them to avoid dealing with inner problems or deeper emotions. For every addiction there is a fix, an experience that we repeat over and over again, giving us the illusion that we are alive, while in fact numbing us to the real world and our real self, until it damages or destroys us.
The extension to corporate behavior is clear. We can become addicted to the deal, the power, the action, the excitement, the conflict, the aggression, the victories, the defeats, addicted even to the chaos and the stress, addicted to the point at which we feel empowered to do anything as long as it is legal (and perhaps not even legal), oblivious to many if not all of the effects of our actions on the environment, on society, or on ourselves."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "When an ethic is not an ethic").

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sur l'addiction, il y a des descriptions beaucoup plus proches de la physiologie et qui sont beaucoup plus satisfaisantes que celle présentée ici.
Je pense qu'une recherche Google te permettra de trouver aisément.
(c'est une distorsion du circuit chimique de la récompense, avec en jeu la dopamine et la sérotonine, voire aussi les endorphines).
Tout ça pour dire que l'addiction n'est pas un phénomène simple et pas réellement "sociétal" comme décrit dans cette citation.
Mais tout cela mérite sans doute une discussion plus approfondie ;-)