Ten years ago, Reboot the Roots creative director Serge left the squats of Hackney and returned to Malaysia to facilitate and organise in solidarity with a community of recovering drug users, refugees, and people living with HIV. They blogged about their experience, and we wish to share highlights from their writings to highlight the origins of RtR as an arts-for-social-change organisation.
“To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity.”
– Aristotle
What is it that drives addictive behaviour? Why do some individuals succumb to the pressures and buckle, becoming reliant on substances and practices that become detrimental to their wellbeing, their happiness, their community, damaging their positive participation in community and society?
Working with Reboot The Roots, and the squatting community, has often lead me to this question. Be it heroin, alcohol, ganja, sexual habits, television, chocolate, fast food, or whatever, there appears to me to be a pattern of behaviour that eventually comes to dominate the psyche and conduct of the individual.
Commonly, it begins with curiosity, the thrill of illicit behaviour. It is foolish to deny that drugs, sex, video games, are fun, exciting, at least at first. But what is missing from a person’s life that leads them to seek fulfilment through these activities? And what eventually leads them to fall hopelessly under the thrall of that which once gave them release, pleasure, escape …?
Through numerous discussions, the idea of a void, an unfillable hunger, in the centre of the addict has emerged. This to me is the emptiness inside all of us, the terrifying nothingness, the unbeing that we perhaps all feel to different degrees within ourselves. Commonly, those with addiction issues are some of the most intelligent, most sensitive people I know. It almost seems at times that a mixture of curiosity, excitement, but also sensitivity to the environment around them, that leads to self-nullification, the will to cease to exist, through substance abuse.
They did studies of rats, getting them hooked on heroin in two different mazes. One was a veritable rodent’s paradise, where heroin was freely available with food, water, comfortable surroundings. The other was a Mengele-style ratty nightmare, complete with random shocks and filth.
The results showed that the rats in the crappy maze would use more and more heroin, whereas the ones in the utopian maze would maintain a relatively low level of use.
Conclusions from this – the environment seems to be key. Perhaps in society if we can create a nourishing environment where this emptiness is addressed and dealt with, we can reduce levels of addictive behaviour. This, for me, is one of the ultimate aims of Reboot The Roots, drawing on its background in 12 Steps and therapeutic community – to acknowledge and address the essential human dilemma of non-being through creative expression and artistic pursuits. When we create, we are essentially alive, present, and in being. Our expression mingles with that of other beings around us, and we find ways of connecting, communicating and exchanging, in a world where we are often made to feel that can be impossible.
Original post is here.
