The Addiction of Power and the Addicted Society · 对权力的成瘾与成瘾的社会

Current understanding · 当前理解

Maté takes his clinical definition of addiction — any behavior that brings short-term relief and long-term harm that one cannot give up — and turns it on the society that condemns the street addict. By that definition the addiction to oil, consumerism, profit, and power dwarfs the drug user’s habit; “we are all hungry ghosts in this society.” The most consequential form is the addiction of power itself: power-addiction, like every addiction, is an attempt to fill an inner emptiness from the outside, and history’s great conquerors fit the pattern of insecure outsiders driven to acquire. Because a profit-and-power-addicted culture rewards exactly the behavior it should restrain — possessing cocaine gets you arrested while destroying a rainforest gets you rewarded — Maté describes the result as “a society run by addictions,” in which the people most addicted to power are often among the emptiest. This is the social-scale companion to his individual theory of addiction; the personal “ask why the pain, not why the addiction” account lives in the addiction domain, while this page concerns what addiction looks like when a whole culture organizes itself around it.

马泰把他对成瘾的临床定义——任何能带来短期缓解、长期伤害、却无法戒除的行为——转而对准那个谴责街头瘾君子的社会。以此定义衡量，对石油、消费主义、利润与权力的成瘾，远远超过吸毒者的习惯；“在这个社会里，我们都是饿鬼”。其中后果最严重的，是”对权力的成瘾”本身：与一切成瘾一样，对权力的成瘾是试图从外部填补内心的空虚，而历史上的大征服者正符合这种”被驱迫去占有的不安全外来者”的模式。由于一个对利润与权力成瘾的文化，恰恰奖励它本应约束的行为——持有可卡因会被逮捕，破坏雨林却得到奖赏——马泰把结果称为”一个被各种成瘾所驱动的社会”，其中最成瘾于权力的人，往往是最空虚的一些人。这是他个体成瘾理论在社会尺度上的对应面；个人层面”问为何疼痛、而非为何成瘾”的论述属于成瘾域，而本页关注的是：当整个文化围绕成瘾来组织自身时，成瘾会是什么样子。

Core claims · 核心论点

• Society scorns the drug addict while injecting toxins into the atmosphere and oceans through its own addictions to oil and consumerism — so the real question is which addiction is greater; we scorn drug addicts precisely because they are just like us. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 社会一边鄙视吸毒者，一边通过自身对石油和消费主义的成瘾，向大气和海洋注入毒素——所以真正的问题是：哪一种成瘾更严重；我们鄙视吸毒者，恰恰因为他们和我们一模一样。

• “We are all hungry ghosts in this society” — the Buddhist image of a being who can never fill the emptiness inside generalizes from the drug user to a whole consumer culture. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 “在这个社会里，我们都是饿鬼”——佛教中那个永远填不满内心空虚的形象，从吸毒者扩展到整个消费文化。

• The addiction of power is always about an inner emptiness one tries to fill from the outside; history’s power-addicts (Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin) were physically small outsiders driven by insecurity, while Buddha and Jesus refused worldly power because they held power within. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 对权力的成瘾，永远关乎一个人试图从外部去填补的内心空虚；历史上对权力成瘾的人（亚历山大、拿破仑、希特勒、斯大林）都是身材矮小、被不安全感驱使的外来者，而佛陀与耶稣拒绝世俗权力，因为他们的力量在内心。

• The perpetrators of colonial harm are themselves addicted: those who took the land and dignity of the Guarani in Brazil and First Nations in Canada are addicted to power, wealth and acquisition, while the colonized peoples became heavily addicted because what they needed was taken from them. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 殖民伤害的施加者自己同样在成瘾：夺走巴西瓜拉尼人、加拿大原住民土地与尊严的人，成瘾于权力、财富与占有；而被殖民的民族之所以重度成瘾，是因为他们所需要的东西被夺走了。

• A society addicted to profit and power rewards the very behavior it should restrain — possessing cocaine gets you arrested while destroying the rainforest gets you rewarded — which is why Maté calls it “a society run by addictions,” tying climate denial and rainforest destruction directly to collective addiction. —— The Wisdom of Trauma: A Dialogue on the Past that Lives Inside Us 一个对利润与权力成瘾的社会，恰恰奖励它本应约束的行为——持有可卡因会被逮捕，破坏雨林却得到奖赏——这正是马泰称之为”一个被各种成瘾所驱动的社会”的原因，他由此把气候否认与雨林破坏直接系于集体成瘾。

• Do not wait for the powerful — often the emptiest people in the world — to heal the world; the remedy is to find the light within ourselves and our communities, because human nature is fundamentally cooperative and generous. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 不要指望掌权者——往往是这世上最空虚的一些人——去疗愈世界；解药是在我们自己和社群之中寻找那束光，因为人的本性从根本上是合作而慷慨的。

Tensions & open questions · 张力与未决问题

• Stretching the clinical definition of addiction to cover oil use, consumerism, profit and political power is rhetorically powerful but conceptually broad: by this measure almost any culturally rewarded acquisitive behavior counts as addiction, and the corpus does not mark where the analogy stops being literal. —— The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20 The Wisdom of Trauma: A Dialogue on the Past that Lives Inside Us把成瘾的临床定义扩展到涵盖石油使用、消费主义、利润与政治权力，在修辞上很有力，但在概念上很宽泛：以此衡量，几乎任何被文化奖励的占有性行为都算成瘾，而本语料并未标明这个类比在哪里不再是字面意义上的成瘾。

Related pages · 相关页面

• The Myth of Normal: A Toxic Culture as the Hidden Cause of Illness