During the 3-Month-Experiment we have worked a lot with the topic of addiction in the definition we've reached at thus far.
To summarize our assumptions always seemed difficult, and the chapter we're writing on about it is one of the challenges of the growing book.
The more joyful I am to just have come across the shortest definition from an author I highly recommend:
"… far from being an aberrant condition, addiction is the standard state for human beings, who are habitually enslaved into reactive and repetitive behaviours by frozen images (of themselves and the world). Freedom … is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions …"
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2009
Regrettably, Fisher seems to have seen "no alternative". He describes the state of affairs and how it came about in an almost brutal clarity that I have hardly seen anywhere else. Yet how to "apprehend the real causes of our actions" to achieve freedom, he has no suggestions whatsoever.
I wish I had had the chance to contact him before he committed suicide in January this year.
Having said that, please note that the King's Card Game is on offer in seminars as a tool for "Community Building" by people who actually never played it, neither with us, nor amongst themselves.
We believe playing the game without background and expertise just creates more complex roles, more being "habitually enslaved into reactive and repetitive behaviours by frozen images", thereby being rather counterproductive, if not outright harmful.
We strongly advise against this, for more details click here.