Beginning With Fire
The Story of Addiction, Human Nature, and Evolution
Chapter Sketches
Chapter Two — Wiring
The features of human nature that together lay the groundwork for the addictive solution include:
- » Longing, as distinguished from needs and appetites.
- » An understandable preference for using shortcuts when they can be found.
- » Many different centers within us make up our experience of “self” at a given moment.
- » Addictive solutions always enlist coalitions among the members of these “inner tribes.”
The biomechanics of addiction — the details of neurochemistry, genetics, etc., that gobble up countless millions of dollars of research money — are about how addiction happens, not why it happens. Human longing is center-stage in the drama of addiction, and human longing resists scientific delineation, calibration and manipulation.
