This is http://www.essayz.com/a8909111.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %INTELLECT RATIONAL ADDICT CODEPENDENT COLLUSION 890911 When society becomes an addict the full powers of the society are used to defend addictive and collusive behaviors. Through intellectual rationalizations the collusion's addictive and codependent behaviors are made to appear reasonable. Scholarship by professors and their codependent graduate students affirms addictive and codependent behavior through solicitation of respect and financial support for patterns of addictive and codependent behaviors. Affirmations are indirect and so not open to critical analysis. Critical analysis is reserved for the overt content of the scholarly work, critical analysis is deflected away from analysis of the addictive and codependent character of the scholarly workers and their work. The graduate schools rationalize the whole process. When society becomes an addict the religious institutions are used to defend addictive and collusive behaviors. Members of the community are trained to be dependent upon religious institutions as addicts and the religious institutions play codependent roles, or vice versa. It is not easy to tell which way the roles are cast. With the advent of T.V. evangelism the opportunities for the promotion of addiction to religious leaders and the growth of financial codependence of religious leaders are wonderful and profitable. Some religious scholars rationalize the whole process. When society become an addict the business institutions are used to defend addictive and collusive behaviors. It is profitable for businesses which have alcohol, tobacco, foods, nicotine, drugs, technology, sex, etc. for sale; to promote dependence upon whatever it is that they have for sale. If growth is good for business, intensification of addictions is good for business, and the spread of addictive behaviors is good for business. The economists rationalize the whole process. When society becomes an addict the military leaders promote addictive attitudes and perspectives to insure that citizens are addicted to military solutions to dilemmas of personal insecurity and lack of self esteem. Rather than promoting security as the freedom to be vulnerable, military leaders promote fears, ignorance, suspicion, paranoia and other characteristics of addicts; so that the addictive society will support the military codependents and their solutions to the problems which are promoted by the military leaders. The military leaders in cooperation with the scholarly technocrats make the whole process appear to be rational. Once all the rationalizations have been created and gained respectability, it is difficult to overcome the web of the addictive society without at the same time transcending all the rationalizations which were built up to defend the collusive behavior patterns of the powerful leading addicts and their supportive codependents. The behaviors of addicts and codependents do not exist in an intellectual vacuum. There are many intelligent and sophisticated people who have contributed to the sustenance of the addictive and codependent behavior patterns of the addictive society. The intellectual structures are part of the supporting system. Those intellectual structures cannot be ignored without paying a great cost. Recovery of health and integrity will involve transcendence of the intellectual structures which were created in the rationalization of the addictive society. Healthy behavioral examples which transcend the behavioral patterns of addicts, codependents and colluders are powerful and essential to recovery. Yet some people are so into the rationalizations, that they will not be able to let go of their addiction to the rationalizations without conversations on an intellectual level, which lay the foundations for conversions from the addictive rationalizations to integrative attitudes, thoughts, feelings, insights, etc. The conversion process of redemption and salvation involves heart, mind, body, spirit and community; it is essentially integrative and involves all essential aspects of a whole person. Neglect of any essential aspect of a whole person will cost greatly. The recovery process can be undermined by preconceptions, convictions, beliefs, rationalizations, institutional habits, communal traditions, reward structures, etc. which are adaptations to the needs of addicts and codependents. It is not enough for individuals as individuals to recover. The society as an addict needs to recover systematically, because the disease is a systemic disease, just as much as it is a disease of individuals. Just as an individual needs to go through a TWELVE STEP PROCESS, so also the addictive society as a society needs to go through a TWELVE STEP PROCESS in a way which is appropriate to the nature of a society as a whole. The two processes of recovery cannot be identical because the organisms which are addicted are not identical. There are, however, certain to be similarities between the two recovery processes. It will be essential to learn what can be learned from successful personal recoveries to provide light regarding the essential steps for systemic communal recovery towards both personal and communal integrity. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================