mass animal

There's a billboard on the streets that really sums Neptune's diffusion into Pisces, it goes something like, "hug a stranger. if you go back far enough, we're all related..." i really like this sentiment, and this new awareness of our interdependency, our inescapable involvement with each other purcolating to surface in the mass animal. In somewhat the same way, this article posits that if you scratch far enough down into a person, if you persist long enough to touch a naked irritant, people are capable of all the same things, everyone with their own trigger. Which behooves me to wonder, that being the case, should we not try to work for the best then? If you can call down the lowest form of hell and reactive affect out of others when you expect the worst, why not bring out the world's finer qualities?

"Drug use changes the brain. Primates that aren’t predisposed to addiction will become compulsive users of cocaine as the number of D2 receptors declines in their brains, Dr. Volkow noted. And one way to produce such a decline, she has found, is to place the animals in stressful social situations.

A stressful environment in which there is ready access to drugs can trump a low genetic risk of addiction in these animals. The same may be true for humans, too. And that’s a notion many find hard to believe: Just about anyone, regardless of baseline genetic risk, can become an addict under the right circumstances."

from "Who Succumbs to Addiction, and Who Is Left Unscathed?" By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
Published: August 1, 2011 in New York Times