When Society Becomes an Addict

Rating:
Summary: Shows why addiction is so widespread in society
Review: Due to the pressures of modern life, many people are addicts of one kind or another.Anne Schaef shows how society as a whole behaves in addictive ways.We usually think of an addict as being someone addicted to a drug, but there are many kinds of addiction.There are substance addictions, such as to alcohol, drugs, nicotine, caffeine and food.Everyday activities can become process addictions,such as accumulating money,gambling, sex,work,religion and worry.Personal relationships can also be addictive.Many politicians behave like addicts,as they are hooked on control, promising things will get better(but they do not)denying problems and denying alternative ways of doing things.This all adds up to the Addictive System which is modern society.Schaef concludes that "we cannot allow anything to come between us and our spirituality, or between us and our living process.If we do, we shall destroy ourselves and those around us."This is a very worthwhile book, with penetrating insight into modern life.

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Summary: 12-step "logic" taken to its logical extreme
Review: I read this book years ago...or, rather, tried to. I'm sure there are better examples of the truism, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail," but not many.

If you're another 12-step 'bot who peppers your conversation and decals your bumper with slogans like "One Day at a Time," you'll probably really, really like _When Society Becomes an Addict_. I myself found it to be one of the worst self-help books I've ever seen ... and in a genre glutted with self-indulgence, pseudo-science, and hidden agendas, that's saying a lot.

If there is anything we emphatically do *not* need more of in politics, it's therapy. Lift your head out of your 12-step cocoon and look around you: We've got people using various and often spurious diagnoses to shirk responsibility for everything from proper child-rearing to murder. We've been bringing back censorship with a vengeance in the last few decades because of a misguided belief that the world must cater to the delicate psyches of the traumatized, the easily offended, the "oppressed," and, most of all, "da chyldrun." And no politician dares run for any major office without drawing lots of attention to his or her "sensitive side," often with short, sappy, pseudo-heartwarming "personal interest" films.

Schaef may indeed have claimed that men are no longer the problem, but obviously she still claims that we need to feminize American society more. Uh, when little boys are widely and heavily medicated just for acting like little boys, I think we've feminized society quite enough. And I'm a woman with a good many feminist sympathies.

Too bad it had to take September 11th to wake so many people up to the fact that we need more than consensus-seekers, empathizers, and nurturers -- we need leaders, individuals with the courage to make unpopular moral judgments, and warriors and heroes. Of both sexes.

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Summary: Book full of assumptions
Review: This book is full of assumptions and generalizations. Some information is distorted. According to the logic of the writer over 90% of the population should be already dead from "addiction". The writer assumes from the very beggining that any system that is centered around men is addictive and therefore harmful. It is possible, but the writer doesn't make any notes about the men and women centered systems. The only system that is good is the female system.

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Summary: Must reading to understand what's wrong in America today!
Review: This brilliantly innovative thinker throws back the curtains on our collective society's understanding of ourselves, and opens up possibilities for really positive solutions to what ails our society as a whole, and its individuals, in particular! Ms. Schaef addresses all forms of addiction, from chemical to behavioral, and sees within our society's gradual acceptance of its own corruptions the seven deadly sins of anger, covetousness, envy, gluttony, lust, pride and sloth. Perpetuating our malaise we see in our leaders the aspects of control, dishonesty and dualism (seeing only two alternative solutions to any problem.) It is shocking to face these at first, but once the truth of it dawns on the reader, he/she is led through the greatest assisting factors toward our collective "recovery": Process (the ideas used in the 12-step programs); Sobriety (fastest route to clear thinking); and Spirituality (not necessarily the dogmatic sort that keeps us in the submissive, non-living, non-aware state!) This book is not for the person too busy to have time to digest something wonderfully deep and enriching! Reading it is like taking a shower in the purest, cleansing water, and emerging to absorb its message like rays of powerful sunshine! It is empowering. A fantastic door opening to the possibilities of our becoming a truly free and healthy society of thinking, alive, deprogrammed individuals! Read this one before any of her other books! Her newly coined terms will become valuable assets in your vocabulary and liberated mind-set!

Rating:
Summary: Addiction Theory: Beyond Psychology to Social Root Causes
Review: This is a top book. It analyses the addiction patterns of individuals from the perspective of the addictive patterns in society as a whole. Ann Wilson Schaef goes beyond analysis of the "problem" of addiction to a very encouraging vision of another way of being alive, one that is mostly forgotten in our numb modern society. If you are looking for some ways out of the cycle of addiction, this may be an important roadmap for you.

Rating:
Summary: Addiction Theory: Beyond Psychology to Social Root Causes
Review: This is a top book. It analyses the addiction patterns of individuals from the perspective of the addictive patterns in society as a whole. Ann Wilson Schaef goes beyond analysis of the "problem" of addiction to a very encouraging vision of another way of being alive, one that is mostly forgotten in our numb modern society. If you are looking for some ways out of the cycle of addiction, this may be an important roadmap for you.

Rating:
Summary: excellent book
Review: When Society Becomes an Adict goes beyond the usual books on addiction, to consider why addiction is so common in present society. Ms Schaef's observation is that society as a whole acts like an addicted individual. She also observes that the way to cure society is for the individuals in it to cure themselves.

I must point out that the negative review by an ethics student must have been written after skimming the book. Had the student read more carefully, s/he would have seen that Ms Schaef admits that in an earlier book she had written that the flaws in society were basically the fault of the males in it. Since then, however, she has realized that addiction, not men, are to blame.