The price of our oil addiction

The story

Addiction exposes the deepest forms of physical and psychological dependency. It is typically considered a personal affliction or an individual failing. But the deadly solicitations of any addictive substance -- cocaine, alcohol, nicotine -- rely upon a social, economic, and political infrastructure.

The great behavioral scientist Gregory Bateson, who studied addiction at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco during the 1950s, drew an analogy between the addict and a runaway car precisely to highlight the "system of addiction."

He wrote: "The panic of the alcoholic who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly finds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is. ... He has bankrupted the epistemology of 'self-control.'"




Here is the vidio of the story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/11/10/what.matters.niger/index.html