Photo credit: R.M. Christie
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What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, especially if it causes them to be ‘disappeared.’ Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is closely involved when dehumanization Occurs. Categorization itself objectifies the phenomena to which it applies. And objectification of humans sets them apart from “us” as “others,” eliminating affinity and therefore empathy and compassion. That is the point where violence becomes acceptable.
Awhile back I read a lot about habit and their positive and negative effects. Some habits produce a lot of efficiency, especially when they are the extension of valuable skills. But then, we are all familiar with ‘bad habits,’ which are too often hard to break. So, are bad habits addictions, or just habits that we or someone else does not have the interest or will to change?
Conceptual Habits in an Unstable World
Most of us most of the time operate on what might be called cultural autopilot. I flew an airplane without an autopilot for many years. I knew exactly what an autopilot does, technically and conceptually. Despite knowing the technical details of how an autopilot works, however, I had never experienced actually using one to fly an airplane. But once I flew my new airplane which had an autopilot, I realized that I could not have imagined the difference without the experience.
An autopilot can diminish a pilot’s “cockpit workload” tremendously. Even though I had known that conceptually for decades, only the real-world experience allowed me to fully realize how that affects flying the airplane. One notable feature of the autopilot was that in moderate or minor turbulence, the autopilot could fly the airplane more accurately than I could. it responded to minor changes in wind speed, for example, by adjusting the controls with its servos faster than I could manually.
However, when erratic shifts in the wind or in high levels of turbulence occurred, I noticed that the autopilot was ‘chasing’ the conditions in attempting to keep the airplane on course and at the prescribed altitude setting. As it began to compensate for a downdraft, for example, another gust would hit us, forcing it to respond. It could not keep its adjustments in the controls—ailerons and rudder—up with rapidly changing conditions. Its algorithm could not respond to changing conditions before those conditions changed again. Turbulence at altitude can be extremely erratic, experienced in an airplane flying at 9000 feet and 130 knots. When that happened, I would turn off the autopilot and take control, working the conditions more slowly and steadily. With my slower control inputs and the intention to not overreact, I could fly the aircraft more smoothly than the autopilot could.
So, what, you may ask, does the behavior of an autopilot have to do with conceptual habits? Well, actually, they are very similar in their structure. Conceptual habits are social autopilots. They simplify ‘flying’ in society. Responses in conventional conversations as well as in ‘standard’ social conditions with which we are already familiar, can be ‘automated.’ Such responses make up much of our culture. However, when the turbulence of social change, climate change, and a destabilizing political economy becomes extreme, conventional habits of thought and behavior start failing to keep up. The conceptual autopilot must be overridden by new ideas that fit new conditions. The problem is that we too often fail to recognize that our habitual responses don’t work anymore.
Flaws in the Corporate Categorical Imaginaries
Almost every institution in any society operates on what we may call ‘cultural habits.’ Habits are meant to provide consistent responses to various categories of societal, political, economic, or interpersonal conditions. A great deal of our consciousness consists of habitual categories, each of which fits a particular common social situation.
We tend to conceptualize any situation we experience, in terms of imaginaries consisting of categorical habits we have used most of our lives. In the ‘olden days,’ that is, before the industrial revolution, categorical habits were consistent for long periods of time with the stable social conditions to which they were routinely applied. Today, not so much.
Conditions in which we live may change in any dimension. Sometimes it is the economy; other times it is politics, or even generate turbulence such as the infamous “culture wars” O course, the ‘culture wars’ mostly result from cultural tactics to manipulate political action by playing to the anxieties resulting from cultural turbulence. Today, cultural values, preferences, and practices have become ‘political footballs,’ used to generate fear and hatred, especially among those whose wellbeing has been threatened (in reality or in imaginaries generated by political hate speech). That does not end well, especially if the responses are generated by the cultural autopilot.
Categorical Constraints on Human Wellbeing
To take what might seem a minor example, the death of a young man whose asthma medicine, which he had taken for years, resulted from an arbitrary price change from around $60- per prescription to about $535- each. He simply did not have the money. He was not informed that much cheaper alternatives were available and nobody checked with is doctor. He was categorically excluded from the source of his wellbeing, and his survival.
Mostly due to my recent spinal neurosurgery and the new post-surgical prescriptions involved, I have experienced the categorical confusion of (mostly pain management) prescriptions in the U.S. so-called ‘health system.’ One of the features of what I think would more accurately be named the “illness and disease economic exploitation system,” is the corporate and government paternalism in the practice of “health maintenance” and disease treatment. The categorical habits (laws and regulations)
In part, this resulted from the opioid and designer drug crisis mostly among those who have experienced economic and status loss, or more interpersonal causes of anxiety and depression, and the consequent increase in institutional attempts to ‘control’ the distribution of categories of drugs designated as “controlled substances.” Laws and regulations often become attempts at putting social control on autopilot.
At the moment I am in the possession of two such pain management drugs, hydrocodone and oxycodone, which I avoid taking as prescribed unless the pain is more than I can bear, mainly because I do not like some of the “side effects” (a strange term, since all the effects are really front and center).
An interesting fact of categorization is that “Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime.” The government decided that instead of categorical controls on particular drugs to ‘control’ addiction, all such drugs were ‘legalized’ and made available without restriction, along with programs to help addicts break their addiction. Drug addiction went way down in Portugal. Well, Portugal may be a ‘special case,’ since the culture and politics of that nation put human wellbeing above corporate profits and monetary wealth creation, after a long period of authoritarian oppression. One could cite many examples of how the imaginaries of behavioral and other forms of categorization cause some folks’ consciousness of real things and experiences in the world to verge off into “The Realm of Hungry Ghosts,” as Gabor Maté put it. The objectification of our subjective experience can be very useful if both accurate and efficient under stable conditions, but what we too often consider normal is little more than myth, rendering our behavior severely off target. Empathy and compassion do not result from imaginaries (social categories) but from the affinity that emanates from recognizing our kinship with all sentient beings. Dehumanization often results when we apply habitual imaginaries that result from fear, anxiety, and hatred.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 