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On Contradictory Action: Addictive Behavior and the Bourgeois Self

When understanding addiction and addictive behaviors, we have to understand the psychological reproduction of addictive thinking in an individual.

Addiction can span beyond the use of substances. There is food addiction, adrenaline addiction, co-dependency AKA addiction to an unhealthy relationship with another person, etc., etc. Some people may assume that the root of addiction lies within one’s dependency on a substance or feeling. While this plays a major part in keeping one addicted, this is not the primary root or cause of addiction; in fact, addiction is a way of thinking that informs one’s actions and thereby actually reproduces itself in one’s thinking.

Why is this important to communists?

Of course there are the obvious reasons for communists to want to understand addiction in order to be able to fight it in ourselves, our comrades, and in the masses who have been affected by or are under the spell of addiction.

However the bigger benefit to communists in understanding addiction lies within grasping the truth of its primary cause: the effect it has on one’s thinking and how this pattern of thinking informs one’s action (practice). This is important to us because this is something that we hope to address when we utilize criticism and self-criticism. The goal is to, much like addicts fighting an addiction, break the patterns of thinking that keep us sick or hold us back from becoming better communists. Through the application of dialectical materialism we can understand addictive thinking and behavioral patterns better in order to break and fight them.

Addiction and incontinence

Aristotle distinguishes between 4 types of human actions: virtuous action, continent action, incontinent action, and vicious action.

Virtuous action is when a person both rationally approves of what is good and desires what is good, and therefore does what is good. Continent action is when a person rationally approves of what is good, desires what is bad, yet following reason does what is good. Incontinent action is when a person rationally approves of what is good, desires what is bad, but follows desire and appetites and does what is bad. Vicious action is when a person rationally approves of what is bad (i.e., perceives it as good) desires bad, and therefore does what is bad.

Although that analysis relies on a vague and individualized morality, there is a lot of truth within it, especially as it pertains to addicts. We all have a set of principles, personal morals, or ethics that inform our decision-making every day. Taking Aristotle’s examples of those types of actions helps us understand what type of thinking an addict has at any given point in their addiction. The main difference between vicious action and the other three types of actions is the lack of the internal contradiction between virtue and indulgence. The vicious action has been rationalized so thoroughly that there is no objection in one’s mind between actions and thinking. This does not make a vicious pattern of behavior incapable of being corrected, but the likeliness of the individual becoming conscious of their errors by themselves is slim. Vicious actions have a better chance of being rectified through continued criticism from another individual or the collective. While many addictive behaviors can fall in any one of those action patterns, the addict is most conscious of their addiction when they are in the stage of incontinent action. Here the contradiction is the sharpest. There is the contradictory battle of virtue versus indulgence. With incontinent action, indulgence wins the struggle between the two and actions are made to indulge one’s desire. This is evident in addicts who vow over and over again they will quit, or even actually quit only to fall back into their old behavior.

So how does this relate to criticism and self-criticism?

We all must strive to be better communists in order to serve revolution, the party, and the people. Understanding that we all have been born under bourgeois hegemony that outfits the superstructure and produces and reproduces itself in our own thinking, we must seek to consciously change our thinking to that of a Marxist. Self-criticism serves as our weapon against this pattern of thinking, first by making us aware of it, and second, by forcing us to combat it. As with addiction, this initial stage of self-criticism where we are made aware of our errors in thinking is the incontinent stage. At this point we are aware of our error and the nature of our contradiction. Of course, if we are to understand dialectical materialism in its in entirety—as you cannot understand it any other way seeing as how that is the very essence of it—we understand that there are many different internal contradictions that arise when we are made aware of errors in our thinking. But suffice it to say that the primary contradiction lies between our theory and our practice—that is, our revolutionary theory versus our bourgeois thinking that has informed our actions. This is what Aristotle defined as the tension between virtue and indulgence. In this case, virtue is our revolutionary objective and indulgence is our bourgeois thinking. At this incontinent stage, our goal is to move forward in our rectification campaign to continent action. Continent action is when we are made aware of our indulgent desires and actually make decisions that deprive that desire. To feed our indulgent desire is to give it more power and a greater influence in our thinking and actions. When we deprive it, we watch it slowly dwindle away into nothingness, leading us to our next stage in correcting that error, which is virtuous actions. Now of course we know that nothing is permanent and we are subject to slip back into our old ways of thinking if we aren’t ever vigilant and don’t combat every small instance of the reemergence of our old thinking in order to avoid all of the small quantitative changes that evolve into a massive break with our progress or a complete return to old thinking. In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, this was understood as “combating your inner bourgeois self.”

AA, NA, dialectical materialism in action, and group therapy

As previously mentioned, we communists understand that a relapse into old thinking is the result of small, quantitative reemergence of old thinking that has gone unchecked. AA and NA also take this understanding and apply it to their program. In the “How lt Works” literature of NA, it is stated in reference to correcting addictive behaviors, “This sounds like a big order, and we can’t do it all at once. We didn’t become addicted in one day, so remember—easy does it.” This is an example of the dialectical process of accumulative change being practically understood and applied to changing one’s addictive behavior and thinking. This is the reasoning given by NA and AA to encourage members to “keep coming back” in order to make sure that addicts are constantly making an effort to fight addictive thoughts and behaviors as they arrive.

These 12-step programs also heavily rely on their own model of group therapy. In these programs it is customary for addicts/alcoholics to “share” with the group about things they have been going through and instances of them finding themselves slipping into old patterns or even instances of having noticed small progress in breaking with addictive thinking. The group therapy of these 12-step programs allows members to identify where they have noticed a slip in their progress in recovering from addiction and then refer to the 12 steps to find a practical method of correction. They also offer a support group of folks who are working toward a common goal through similar means—to fight addiction using the program. In these “shares” they are able to vocalize their deepest, innermost struggles with the understanding that they are not alone in this struggle and that others have or have had similar problems and have familiarity with using the 12 steps to combat these arising issues. This is an example of the success of group therapy and how it unknowingly utilizes dialectical materialism to offer real solutions to breaking thinking patterns of folks who are at the incontinent action stage in their lives. The goal of these addicts is to make it to a point where they no longer indulge these undesired behaviors and get to a point of continent action and eventually virtuous action. This brings us to the next point, contradictory/continent action.

In recovery programs such as AA, NA, CA, and FA, there is a lot of talk about contradictory action and how it can change one’s way of thinking. Continent and contradictory actions are interchangeable as it pertains to this subject. Contradictory action means that the addict is consciously taking actions to contradict their indulgent desires, for example by choosing to go to sober spaces where they haven’t tended to go instead of going to spaces where substance abuse or alcohol consumption are going on. By choosing to take a radically different course of action, the addict is consciously taking actions to deprive the once-dominant patterns of thinking that were psychologically set in motion by repetitive indulgent actions. Though the facts of a material situation may stay the same, our consciousness is subject to change as we approach situations from different angles. With repetitive contradictory action, the addict has physically outmaneuvered their previous pattern of thinking. Decisions that had once been second nature become more and more alien to them, and as they continue on this new pattern the thinking that had been the impetus for these behaviors starts to wane. At this point in their struggle, the nature of their desires starts to change, as they familiarize themselves with a new set of actions that do not come into contradiction with their virtuous desires. Eventually, they find themselves taking actions that are in accordance with their desire without much internal conflict. This explains how a radical change in thought can occur through changing one’s physical actions. On the surface this can seem to be metaphysical, but with a serious understanding of the material aspect of dialectical materialism, we understand how this is an actual material solution for a seemingly metaphysical problem. Often, once the addict comes to the realization that they are an addict, there arises the contradiction of wanting to break with their current thought process while not having developed a new thought process to replace it. Our consciousness is determined by our material conditions. Using this understanding, we can see how changing your material conditions—that is, by breaking with old behaviors and trading unhealthy environments for healthy ones—can lead to a change in one’s thought. This is how contradictory action can work as a vessel for thought reconstruction or thought reform.

In conclusion

Understanding how our thinking informs our practice and vice versa, we can come to the conclusion that criticism and self-criticism are absolutely essential for our growth as communists when combating our inner bourgeois selves. Applying dialectical materialism to Aristotle’s analysis of the 4 types of actions, we can see how and why self-criticism is such a powerful tool. We can look at it as somewhat of a formula:

First, we become aware of our errors. This is the initial self-criticism stage. This can also come in the form of a criticism from another individual or by writing repeated confessions.

Second, we identify the contradiction in our error. We understand which thoughts are virtuous and which are indulgent—that is, our communist principles versus our habitual bourgeois behavior, thinking, and practice.

Third, we identify the pattern of our error in thinking and where it manifests in our actions.

Fourth, we take contradictory action to fight the stagnation and indulgence, thus raising our consciousness even further and bringing us closer to our virtue, in our case our ideology and communist principles.

Fifth, we remain ever vigilant of moments when these thoughts and behavior start to reemerge and repeat step 4.

Capitalism and capitalist ideology promote self-indulgence at the disservice of us and the people, while revolutionary China was able to offer steps to true liberation through the eradication of these inner bourgeois thoughts. Thought reform including criticism and self-criticism was the preferred method for turning around both addicts and reactionaries. This process, we would argue, is necessary for the vast majority of communists who operate in the centers of imperialism, cleaning our brains of the bourgeois inner self and other destructive forces that come into contradiction with our revolutionary project.

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This is important for communists because virtue ethics-
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#4
That's the evil dragon god, Tiamat. And yes. She's real.
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#6
im at the incontinent stage and i use DiaMats everywhere
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evil dragon queen?
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#9
There's NO way I'm reading an article describing the 12 steps but in marxospeak. I will not do it. Never.
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#12

tpaine posted:

what game that is nigga



i see you were a nintendo kid like myself. but you have to also sample the greats from the other side tpaine! that's from phantasy star (idk which one, maybe 3). the whole phantasy star series had monomate/dimate/trimates as their potion equivalents

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#14
this article claims you should beat your severe alcoholism and pill dependency by instead becoming insanely invested in tiny maoist cults. i think thats actually probably worse for your mental health than anything you can get addicted to. i see this shared on fb by all the weirdo maoists like "this helped me stop smoking cigarettes "
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#16
the 12 step program is based on replacing an addiction with zealous uncritical devotion to a community of believers. it isn't healthy, and it isn't marxist self critique. neither is all the virtue ethics slosh permeating that article for whatever reason.

dialectical behavior therapy is a much better and much more marxist way of confronting an addiction, directly confronting ones own factual actions instead of substituting fanaticism.

additionally, marxist practice is interested in the material results of action, not a bougie obsession with perfectionist self-actualization and histrionic health paranoia centered in horror of the perceived "excesses" of the dirty proles. drinking may be killing us, but in proper practice it also serves as relief from the stress of organizing and a vehicle for camaraderie.

in conclusion, the screenshot above is from phantasy star iv, a game i enjoyed greatly as a child. cheers.
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I played Final Fantasy Legend II for GameBoy, and Shadowrun for Super Nintendo. And Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics for the Computer. Those are all the RPGs I think. I'm 35 now though so I'm too busy working on my career and building a family obviously.
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#23
Wow, I guess this guy hasn't seen this meme that justifies drinking

Edited by walkinginonit ()

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shriekingviolet posted:

dialectical behavior therapy is a much better and much more marxist way of confronting an addiction, directly confronting ones own factual actions instead of substituting fanaticism.



what is this

#26

shriekingviolet posted:

the 12 step program is based on replacing an addiction with zealous uncritical devotion to a community of believers. it isn't healthy, and it isn't marxist self critique. neither is all the virtue ethics slosh permeating that article for whatever reason.

dialectical behavior therapy is a much better and much more marxist way of confronting an addiction, directly confronting ones own factual actions instead of substituting fanaticism.

additionally, marxist practice is interested in the material results of action, not a bougie obsession with perfectionist self-actualization and histrionic health paranoia centered in horror of the perceived "excesses" of the dirty proles. drinking may be killing us, but in proper practice it also serves as relief from the stress of organizing and a vehicle for camaraderie.

in conclusion, the screenshot above is from phantasy star iv, a game i enjoyed greatly as a child. cheers.


i have been aware of dbt for years and years and only just now made the link of dialectical (psychology) = dialectical (marxist), for some reason. mind minorly blown

and p.s. i love phantasy star's world design and aesthetic and everything, even though playing them wasn't great (also i had to get mom to rent a genesis which meant we had to go to the weird video store that had them and they had wood shelves and it smelled funny. but they gave you photocopied 300 page hint books with your rental of mega hard rpgs. it felt like getting some kind of eldritch powers, but just for five days)

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#28

Urbandale posted:

shriekingviolet posted:
dialectical behavior therapy is a much better and much more marxist way of confronting an addiction, directly confronting ones own factual actions instead of substituting fanaticism.


what is this




it's a dialectical approach to, or development on, CBT/cognitive behavioral therapy (which SUCKS, btw), formulated by a woman named Marsha M. Linehan who may have or have had BPD/borderline personality disorder, which from what i can tell is usually the subject when DBT is the object.
http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm

ideally, the dialectics (criticism/self-criticism) come in by having a person or party with whom total honesty about your mistakes (trying to stay away from "virtue ethics" ways of putting it, but addictions, negative habitual behavior, etc. fundamentally consist of ritual mistake, and "virtue" is another way of saying "value" anyway) is rendered a possibility by the openness & understanding & helpfulness of the person/party you have. which would probably come in the form of a psycho-/behavioral-therapist or someone else who takes a role like that. so you might be able to get an idea of how the therapy progresses from there; personal background is explored, self-examination & methods of adapting without quitting are encouraged, etc., all in a process toward positively changing behavioral patterns.
however, it's probably not sufficient in really tackling Thought-Behavior-Thought'. (yes, that's right, Thought-Incontinence gets reinvested and circulated. i guess that's basically liberalism but explained in a way where people are more than just machinelike idea-carriers. well anyway welcome to hell . but if it's a thing that is SERIOUSLY worrying a group of supposed professional revolutionaries then that is hilarious. this type of thing will manifest in backward homes & poor communities before it will manifest in a political organization, i promise you lol.)
and it is precisely because of the over-individualistic factor to the forms of mental health services available in bourgeois societies of all types that DBT alone isn't sufficient. because it doesn't account for the "bigger picture" (relations of production).
which would be where a "materialist" method of DBT would help i think, you know, professionals actually grasping that relationships between all persons play the big factor in how "fucked up" they are individually, but that's kinda wishful thinking on my part isn't it! because which/how many psychotherapists at the moment are radical/ized enough to care, or even think about People in such a manner? which, how many, understand that alienation & exploitation basically underpin society and find it as a potential explanation for a person's addiction, dependency, anxiety, impulsivity, etc.? as far as i know that's not even an idea borrowed from Marxism that has much influence in the dominant social sciences that would in turn influence psychology & psychiatry.
so: at the very least, we can be mindful of and sensitive to the potential origins of psychobehavioral issues of the Incontinent type that delay productivity. and hell i didn't even explicitly mention patriarchy or anything else like that!

and to sum up another end: i think that the Aristotelian Virtue approach in OP has a bit of truth to it, but goes too far toward the idealistic moralism, which others in the thread have commented on ('so i guess the solution to alcoholism would be to join a maoist cult lol'), and which itself succumbs to a kind of "ultra-leftism", which is sorta a form of individualism anyway. is that up for disagreement here? i assume that's one of the basic criticisms of ultra-leftism. regardless, moralistic individualism definitely factors here, and it impedes on certain important values that'd help with a Communist Critique Of Addiction like, oh i don't know, Proletarian Compassion? and that's not even taking into consideration the context-bungling of it!!! it's acting like we can draw lessons from how the Russian or Chinese revolutions etc. affected revolutionary discipline only to immediately stamp them over our own, current lives and situations.
like, i think self-criticism is great!!! but what will many many times appear as major emphasis by Criticism upon Lack Of Self-Criticism & Taking Personal Responsibility, may in actuality be a step backward toward moralistic individualism, sanctimony, and impatience. i really, really think that it's a projection, illusion, of Revolutionary Ceaseless Austerity, more than it is an actual IRL organizational concern.

context is important and people aren't machines, but also death to capitalism in all its stages & forms/class society and all that.

also i will be writing my thesis on Dialectical Materialist Behavioral Therapy in about four years.

Edited by GlobalSouthPaceyWitter ()

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Keven posted:

That's the evil dragon god, Tiamat. And yes. She's real.



upvoted for not misgendering.

#30
what's up with CBT because i've heard people describe it as the best thing ever and don't you dare disparage it which kinda does seem like programming

Edited by aerdil ()

#31
CBT, or Cock and Ball Torture, is a therapy method that attempts to make the subject view themselves from the "outside" or a "different angle." It uses a number of common thought exercises / thought tools to help the user do this. It has become the main stream / most common form of therapy at this time, and positive attitudes towards it are generally related to this perception of it as the best tool. It is probably the most taught method at this point tho & In My Opinion psychology is indoctrinating as hell regardless of your focus. I'm sure a poster who's in the field or who has used it in therapy (I know get fisical has posted about it in the past) could give you more detail, as I'm a strong-ass man's man and I don't do therapy.
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You are probably generally already aware of many of the tools and philosophy of CBT as it's become pop-psy as hell over the last 10 ish years.
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the short version of what I know is that CBT is essentially symptom treatment -- do you have a negative thought? well just notice it and try not to have it, you'll be more functional that way. the goal of CBT seems to just be 'functionality' i.e. being able to meaningfully participate in Having A Job. i've never done it myself but someone close to me has & reported it being a dismally useless and depressing piece of shit
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Yeah the main things that differ it from older methods are 1. it's "results based" or "problem based" meaning there's no effort to find a root cause or unconscious meaning or whatever. It's kind of like the old joke:

Man: Doctor, it hurts when ever I move my arm like this.
Doctor: So don't move your arm like that.

And 2. It does this not by directly considering your feelings or emotions or whatever, but by essentially an internal fake it till you make it program. When you think negative thoughts you are supposed to assess them as if they were another person's thoughts and decide from that perspective if they're rational, and if not you discard them. Most of the exercises and tools they do are to assist you in this process.

Again I'm probably butchering the details but I think that's a reasonably fair overview.
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patient: doctor im depressed, life is a nightmare.
doctor: do you hear voices in your head?
patient: no.
doctor: would you like to?
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#37
when i want to help someone with substance abuse problems i just ring up baby huey p newton for some dialectics. boom.
#38
As a self nominated representative of DYTD I would like to point out that the founder of AA was cured of alcoholism by LSD and advocated its use in treatment of substance addiction.

And also that we in DYTD are not necessarily alcoholics, but alcohol abusers. Alcoholics are addicts, they're helpless. As alcohol abusers we just knowingly chose to drink too much. It's a completely different thing.
#39
CBT is behaviorism with the premise that cognition - sensation, perception and emotion - is a kind of behavior. Saying that CBT is a form of indoctrination is like saying that TNT is a form of warfare. Compared to the alternatives like psychoanalysis and trait theory, CBT is great. Done properly it's goals-oriented and patient-led and avoids theorizing about internal states. CBT based exposure therapy is the most reliable way to treat phobias for example.

The idea that it's about identifying "negative thoughts" and correcting them is wrong. If the goal is to overcome anxiety, for example, the thoughts identified are thoughts that promote anxiety; through counterconditioning they are replaced with thoughts that reduce anxiety. If an anxious person is having anxiety "it's just going to get worse, I can't handle this" the therapist can ask the person to pay attention to their anxious sensations and actions to show that they subside on their own, reminding them that in fact, they are handling the anxiety, moment to moment, without collapsing, dying, panicking...

On the behaviorism side, this trains the patient to countercondition away their anxiety by doing behaviors physically incompatible with the behavior of anxiety. In a dog, we might countercondition against anxiety by teaching it a series of tricks in a place where it does not feel anxiety. Then we get the dog to go through this routine, while introducing a very mild anxiety-causing stimulus. The dog can't feel anxious because it doesn't have a chance to act anxious, even though it will notice the stimulus, the dog is already acting out confidence and happiness as part of its interaction with the trainer. Because the dog never gets the chance to act anxious, its anxious responses begin to go extinct.

In the same way, good CBT is going to get the person to do things that are not compatible with anxiety, then present the things that make the person anxious while keeping them focused on their cognition. Because of language we have edge that allows this process to move much faster than it can in a dog. Many of the tools of CBT are just a logical discussion of thoughts. For example If someone is saying "I can't handle this" to a therapist, the therapist can get them to elaborate on what is "this" - what are the component parts of what they can't handle? You can make yourself take deep breaths, adrenaline does not keep pumping without new stimulus, the situation does not deteriorate.

A more abstracted, but very human approach is to discuss the "locus of control" in cognition. So if someone says "I'll never make it as a writer," "I can't control my anger," "I'm not a people person," "Why did this happen to me?" the therapist might explain that they don't know the future, that craft is a muscle, that "making it" is subjective and needs to be self-defined, that simply by daring to write they are a writer, and that a more productive statement might be, "My writing needs practice," or some might try to subvert the thought: "I'll never make it as a writer if I don't set aside a couple hours this evening for writing." Likewise, "I get angry for reasons I can predict," "It can take time to be comfortable with new people," "I can help others avoid this happening to them" and so on. (I resisted plagiarizing better examples bc I love the rules). People are usually deluded thinking everything is beyond their control and that their actions are a result of stable traits, not changeable habits, but by getting the patient to focus on the control they do have over their lives, the patient can overcome feelings of helplessness.

The point of these and other tactics is to interrupt the "negative thought" (this isn't about like "I don't enjoy consuming bottled drinks" okay, I would say "I'm a failure" is a negative thought that should be prevented. This can happen from an anti-capitalist approach by talking with the patient about where they get this concept of "failure.") and gives the person something practical to do, based on their sense of control and directed toward what they want out of life.

So I'm probably going to watch exposure therapy videos all day now because they're a very uplifting portrayal of how the kindly doctor can get me to do unhealthy things like climb into a tiny box or touch a venomous animal under the guise of self-actualization

Edited by swampman ()

#40

glomper_stomper posted:

what the fuck is up with red guards austin and words?

why won't they stop writing like assholes?



you ever been to austin? you need something to do on your phone while driving down 5 mph frontage roads to get to fake dive bars.