“The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it is connection.”
The recovery community is the all time leader in pithy sayings, but this one always struck me as particularly profound.
Understanding something by considering its opposite is possibly the oldest epistemological heuristic–without darkness there is no light, etc. Addiction and connection are spiritual, rather than literal, opposites. Connection is the antidote for the deep malaise that is caused by–and often the cause of–the disease of addiction. Sobriety is just a happy byproduct of the cure.
This revelation–that connection, not sobriety, is the true metaphysical antonym of addiction–transforms everything we know about addiction. It’s what drives us to respond with compassion and community, instead of punishment and judgment. It is the foundational power of peer support and recovery communities. Because we understand the importance of connection, we understand that “deaths of despair” are just lagging indicators of dying communities.
If you focus on sobriety, you miss the point. People use drugs for reasons; if you want to reduce use, focus on the reasons, not the drugs.
Consider some other concepts, and their spiritual opposites.
Agency, the opposite of loneliness
I was fortunate to recently find myself in a room with some brilliant and original thinkers who have been pondering the contours of our widely acknowledged crisis of loneliness. The literal opposite of loneliness is “accompanied.” If being alone is being by yourself, its opposite is being around other people. That doesn’t offer much insight into the fundamental nature of the problem. Everyone knows the feeling of being deeply lonely in a crowd–accompanied, but still alone.
This group offered another idea, which I think is exactly right: the spiritual opposite of loneliness is “agency.” Consider the distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is choosing to be alone. Loneliness is finding yourself alone because of factors outside of your control. The difference is choice, and the remedy is agency.
Policies cannot engineer more social connectivity, but they can make it easier for people to exercise their choice to seek connection.
Nihilism, the opposite of Solidarity
Sociologist and scholar James Davison Hunter argues that the cure for our profound civic and spiritual rupture is “solidarity,” a communitarian vision about rediscovering and restoring the shared cultural norms and ethics that make it possible for citizens of a diverse country to see themselves on the “same team.” Alarming indicators of polarization–like the fact that 40% of Americans see their political opposites as “evil”-are a consequence of the loss of a shared national story.
The literal opposite of solidarity is “fragmentation,” but Hunter argues that the spiritual opposite is “nihilism.” The problem isn’t just that we don’t believe the same things, it is that we have abandoned the entire idea of sharing objective and knowable truths. Something is good if it upsets our enemies; something is bad if it makes them happy. It blows right past being “Orwellian”-we simultaneously believe that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and that we are Eastasia, whatever is the opposite of what “they” think.
Believing in the same national story would be great, but we have to start by believing that a shared story is possible, and something that we want.
Forgiveness, the opposite of Tolerance
“Tolerance” was the cardinal virtue of my childhood. Children of the 90s intuitively understand that tolerating behaviors, beliefs, and values that are far from our own is the opposite of bigotry. We don’t judge, we tolerate. To be clear, tolerance is a virtue and a prerequisite for harmony in a pluralistic society. It is both the close cousin and spiritual opposite of the far superior virtue of forgiveness.
Tolerance is external-facing radical acceptance; forgiveness is the genuine internalization of the same idea. Forgiveness requires unflinchingly taking the full measure of the consequences of someone’s actions or words, and choosing to love and accept them anyway.
Forgiveness allows for accountability; tolerance does away with the notion entirely.
Anarchy, the opposite of freedom
There are two flavors of freedom: freedom from and freedom to; negative and positive rights, if you are legally or philosophically minded. Freedom from coercion or oppression is the bedrock of liberal democracy; the freedom to thrive emanating from positive rights like the right to housing or healthcare is a newer and more controversial concept. Libertarians argue that positive rights actually encroach upon negative ones because they are inherently coercive: one person’s right to housing means another person has an imposed obligation to pay for that housing.
Both flavors of freedom are meaningless without commensurate responsibility. Freedom from encroachment carries an implicit promise not to encroach; freedom to thrive requires someone to pull their own weight, to have as much skin in the game as they possibly can.
Freedom without obligation is anarchy, the true spiritual opposite of freedom.
Choosing scarcity, the opposite of abundance
Scarcity, of course, is the literal opposite of abundance, but not exactly its spiritual one. In every decision, we have a choice between abundance or scarcity. Genuinely zero-sum circumstances are vanishingly rare, but zero-sum thinking still predominates, because people are wired to choose scarcity. The spiritual opposite of abundance is the act of choosing a scarcity approach in any given situation.
Abundance is a choice: “yes, and” instead of “no, but.”
This article was originally posted on Jay’s Favorable Thriving Conditions.