“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely!” - Lord Acton

Understanding why power, money, and esteem addicts are so dangerous starts with a crash course on how dopamine manipulates behavior.

Lesson One

Everything we do, we do to maintain dopamine flow.

Acknowledging that and how a powerful neurotransmitter manipulates behavior poses serious threats to dopamine flow. So much so even dopamine experts remain conveniently disinterested in considering the possibility they’re under the spell of the dopamine-induced addictions (to safety, acceptance, esteem, and money) behind every man-made problem.

If this sounds simplistic it’s because we inherited our addictive behaviors from aggressive simpletons who had more in common with chimpanzees (who also obsess over safety, acceptance, and esteem) than humans. Countless generations later, the same unconscious commitment to maintain dopamine flow, that kept Galileo’s adversaries oblivious to the obvious, prevents today’s would-be authorities from wanting to know how dopamine-induced ignorance is the reason they’re as clueless as their 16th century counterparts.

Lesson Two

Maintaining dopamine flow.

To protect dopamine flow:

Drug addicts stash.

Food addicts store.

Safety addicts blame.

Power addicts collude.

Acceptance addicts fawn.

Esteem addicts feign.

Religion addicts pray.

Money addicts save.

To trigger dopamine:

Drug addicts ingest, imbibe, inhale, inject.

Food addicts gorge.

Safety addicts flock.

Power addicts prey.

Acceptance addicts pledge.

Esteem addicts flaunt.

Religion addicts judge.

Money addicts work, cheat, connive, steal.

Lesson Three

Viewing behavior through a dopamine lens.

One way to gain valuable insights into how dopamine manipulates behavior and undermines free will is to start a dopamine diary. (See: Keeping a Dopamine Diary Can Make You Happier, Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser).

Few are capable of comprehending or admitting why they’re unlikely or unwilling to invest minutes a day maintaining something as potentially beneficial as a dopamine diary. Viewed through a dopamine lens, avoiding a minor effort offering major rewards is an excellent example of how DIMwits protect dopamine flow (against esteem deflating honesty).

A dopamine lens edifies how seemingly disparate and unrelated behaviors are, upon inspection, strikingly similar. For example, esteem addicts are a lot like junkies — only less honest. Both are driven to score the same neurotransmitter in their primitive brains, but while junkies tend to limit their destruction to themselves and a small circle of family, friends, and strangers, esteem addicts destroy environments, economies, and untold lives.

Lesson Four

Introduction to compound addictions.

Acceptance junkies are especially susceptible to compound addictions because the dopamine-induced deficiency need for approval predisposes the weak to addictions of peers whose approval they crave. Hence the profusion of acceptance/nicotine, acceptance/alcohol, and acceptance/religion addicts.

The number of addictive combinations fosters the esteem and dopamine triggering deception that human behavior is too complex to understand. In fact, a basic grasp of how dopamine manipulates behavior is is all it takes to distill most actions down to either protecting or triggering dopamine flow for a handful of reasons. (In upcoming posts I’ll cover how childhood traumas negatively impact on self-esteem and how esteem issues influence, and often determine, predictable addictive combinations.)

Esteem addiction combos are the most interesting and destructive because esteem addicts are extremely self-deceptive and excel at sidestepping dopamine-repellent facts while fabricating dopamine-appealing rationalizations to justify despicable behaviors. History books are filled with examples of petty and powerful miscreants who regularly ascribed high-minded, esteem inflating, dopamine-triggering ideals to lowly, illogical, irrational, and inhumane (dopamine-triggering) conduct.

For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on esteem addiction combinations that fall into three groups — amusing, dangerous, and disastrous.

Amusing Combinations:

Alcohol/esteem addicts who pretend drinking pricey booze makes them connoisseurs.

Nicotine/esteem addicts who puff on expensive stogies that help smoke fiends convince one another they’re aficionados.

Food/esteem addicts who consider themselves gourmets.

Safety/esteem addicts whose swagger betrays insecurities.

Power/esteem addicts whose boasts mask fears.

Acceptance/esteem addicts whose status symbols reveal neediness.

Money/esteem addicts who loathe their high-paying, high-status jobs.

Religion/esteem addicts who believe picking the one true savior connotes superiority.

Dangerous Combinations:

Drug/esteem addicts who flaunt excesses.

Safety/esteem addicts who wave guns.

Power/esteem addicts who browbeat and bully.

Acceptance/esteem addicts who grovel for approval.

Money/esteem addicts who worship profits.

Religion/esteem addicts who hate religion/esteem addicts.

Safety/acceptance/esteem addicts who ignore inconvenient truths rather than risk a dose of dopamine withdrawal.

Lesson Five

The most disastrous combination.

Power/money/esteem addicts are incredibly destructive because they will do anything to maintain dopamine flow. Protecting addictive interests keep avowed enemies joining forces, colluding, lying, cheating, stealing, bribing, corrupting, demeaning, persecuting, attacking, destroying, and/or crushing real and imagined threats to their authority, finances, status. To make matters worse, power and money addictions provide the resources that make it possible to ignore, obfuscate, and eliminate. It doesn’t help that insatiable dopamine cravings are the reason power/money/esteem addicts scramble for the degrees, power, and positions that allow them to define legalities, moralities, and addictions.

In a nutshell

Power/money/esteem addictions are responsible our species’ irrational flirtation with self-annihilation.

Meanwhile, safety/acceptance/esteem addictions ensure that few want to know.