David Courtwright's concept of limbic capitalism explains how uncertainty became profitable. What interests me is why some people appear more vulnerable to these digital closures than others. Perhaps the deeper question is developmental. A child's relationship with uncertainty is not purely cognitive; it is physiological. Children raised in environments that support reflection, recovery, and emotional regulation may develop a greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking relief through digital stimulation. If so, the challenge is not only reducing exposure to addictive technologies but also cultivating the conditions that make premature closure less necessary.
I agree. That is why spending money on disadvantaged children in the early years is a category error. Abandon this nonsense that childhood is about getting children school-ready. Educate the parents first.
I suspect this is a long-term problem, though. There's a bit of chicken and egg issue. Perhaps providing children an alternate reality while working to educate the parents?
The hard part is that a 35yo parent drowning in their phone screen isn't likely to change behavior.
Thanks for engaging. I think you are spot on. Social media is not the problem for children. I see it all the time: adults are no longer present while on their phones. And children have not been taught how to fall and recover.
I do think it gives the kids an advantage to make changes in the schools in spite of their parents, and I've seen evidence to support this. Children respond to adults who care, and they can learn about modern addictions in the classroom. Fyi, there are already schools that take the smart phones at the start of the day, and give them back when they get out.
I am reminded of the old story of kids learning, coming home, and talking about things their parents never heard of. Anybody can be given a chance at having greater perspective.
You are using moral language to describe an amoral biological process.
Biology does not care whether an outcome is admirable, destructive, noble, addictive, patriotic, faithful, or degenerate. Biology only “cares” whether a pathway is reinforced, repeated, and canalised.
Morality comes afterwards.
That is where I often think psychology gets itself into trouble. Once psychologists enter the room, science can go on holiday and ideology quietly takes its place. Behaviour is sorted into approved and disapproved categories, and then those categories are treated as though nature itself supplied them.
But nature does not distinguish between loyalty and vice.
It does not know whether repetition is discipline or compulsion.
It does not know whether belief is faith or delusion.
It does not know whether belonging is community or conformity.
Those distinctions matter to us. They should matter to us. But they are human judgments placed on top of biological mechanisms.
So no, I am not saying smartphones are harmless. Quite the opposite. I am saying they are dangerous precisely because they exploit the same ancient plasticity through which human beings have always been shaped.
The phone is not irrelevant.
The phone is the signal.
The deeper cause is the experience-expectant brain encountering an environment designed to capture it.
If we stop at “phones are bad,” we have not understood the problem. We have only named the latest object.
You say "morality" and "vice", so I have to assume you're responding to a comment I made elsewhere. Here is I think the key about vice. I had made the point of mentioning where one knows that they are shirking their own responsibilities, but doing it anyways - a key sign of addiction. I do not think that things like being loyal, or wanting to be like your parents is the same in the brain as being addicted to social media, porn, etc.
I wonder if we are mistaking the latest expression of a very old phenomenon for something fundamentally new.
"Limbic capitalism" suggests that corporations have discovered how to exploit human reward systems. But haven't societies always done exactly that?
Serfs were rewarded for obedience.
Soldiers were rewarded for loyalty.
Christians were rewarded for belief.
Citizens were rewarded for conformity.
Children were rewarded for fitting the norms of their culture.
The labels change. The mechanism remains remarkably constant.
The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by its environment. It becomes what it repeatedly does. It learns through reward, punishment, imitation, status, belonging, and repetition.
What has changed is not the existence of behavioural capture, but its scale, speed, and precision.
The smartphone is not the invention of human vulnerability. It is merely the latest technology for directing it.
Perhaps there is no Age of Addiction.
Perhaps there has only ever been an age of population control, each era wearing a different hat.
The deeper question is not whether human beings are being shaped. They always have been.
The deeper question is: who gets to decide what kind of humans the environment is shaping us into?
There's a great deal of difference in whether these things build people up or tear them down. To take one of your examples: soldiers are trained to be stronger, to make sound or at least shrewd decisions, to take initiative – so much so that, for good or ill, occassionally it has been the soldiers who took control over their government rather than the other way around. Cults in contrast operate by damaging their members' psychological ability to think or dissent, and on the flipside expelling the stubbornly mentally healthy (and demonizing them to keep the remaining members separated from them).
I might make a generalization about your examples: None of them, at a glance, scream addiction as the influence mechanism. Addiction isn't simply being rewarded for behavior. It's a breakdown in one's psychology and/or habits that causes the destructive behavior to be self-reinforcing. The fact that addiction can be achieved (at least in some victims) by weaponized manipulation of reward systems does not make all rewards like addiction nor does it make addiction just another use of rewards.
Of course, if you want to say, humans have always been influenced, even always been directed (or ruled, perhaps), I can't say I disagree with that. But I would qualify that different means of rule are as different as different ends and different rulers.
Then again, maybe we don't disagree – as you said, it matters what kind of humans are we being shaped into.
I think this is where we may be talking past each other slightly.
You describe soldiers as becoming stronger, more resilient, and more capable, whereas cults damage the ability to think and dissent. I understand the distinction, but I am not sure it is as objective as it first appears.
Stronger according to whom?
The soldier? The government? The enemy? The dissident? The historian writing fifty years later?
For much of history, those who challenged prevailing beliefs were regarded as psychologically damaged, immoral, dangerous, or irrational. Later generations often reinterpreted the same individuals as courageous, independent thinkers. The judgment changed. The behaviour did not.
The same question applies to cults. What separates a cult from a religion, a political movement, a nation, or even a culture? Is it size? Longevity? Legitimacy? Social approval? Every successful society rewards conformity around certain core beliefs and discourages dissent around others. Laws themselves are an expression of this process, and as moral norms change, so do the laws.
My point is not that all systems are equivalent. Clearly they are not. Nor am I arguing that addiction is identical to soldiering, religion, or citizenship.
What interests me is the underlying biological mechanism.
The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by reward, punishment, belonging, imitation, status, and repetition. Human beings become what their environments repeatedly reward. That process can produce discipline, faith, courage, conformity, addiction, patriotism, fanaticism, or wisdom.
Where I think we differ is that you are evaluating the outcomes through a moral lens, whereas I am trying to understand the mechanism through a biological one.
As an absurdist, I am wary of treating our moral conclusions as though they are embedded in nature itself. Nature does not tell us what is good or ill. Nature shapes. Human beings decide what the shaping means.
That is why I find the concept of limbic capitalism interesting, but not entirely new. Human societies have always shaped behaviour through systems of reward and punishment. What has changed is not the existence of behavioural capture, but its scale, speed, precision, and commercialisation.
The deeper question, for me, is not whether humans are being shaped. We always have been.
The deeper question is who is shaping us, by what mechanisms, and according to whose vision of human flourishing. And of course is it intentional.
As a point of history, most civilized peoples in the past have indeed recognised when an enemy is strong – not only physically, but psychologically, even moral strength of character – even if they were in life-or-death struggle against each other. Think of old-fashioned talk of respecting a "worthy opponent" or whatever. Or medieval chivalry.
As another point of history, there are philosophical traditions of assessing morality, figuring out what humans ought to be and whether they're abusing their capabilities, that carry across different societies and even different religions over a few thousand years and aren't simply a proxy for who was the victor or was in power. I don't really want to write a whole essay explaining those traditions, one could take a year-long course on it and the comment box is no place for a textbook. Obviously of course there isn't just one school of thought in moral philosophy, either; but familiarity with the content and its history doesn't neatly match a narrative of morals changing with who's in power. The information is out there for the researching.
But anyhow… I do think we must be talking past each other, but probably not the way you're thinking we are.
It's true I think the distinction I'm pointing to has moral content. However, it's not a judgement call nor dependent on whose side I'm on, any more than "can you lift more or less" is a subjective value or "this person is unable to use logic due to the impact of past gaslighting" is a belief. It's a difference in "mechanism", if you want to call it that.
My friend Julius practices fasting encouraged by his religious leaders, and can control his eating. A former friend of mine, Magnolia, is addicted to a variety of things, and cannot control her eating. Biological science has in fact studied the way addiction rewires Magnolia's brain (well, not that they lab tested her specifically, but people whose experience is indistinguishable from hers), placing various severe obstacles to her regaining control of her behavior, such as triggers and a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation. The fact that Julius's fasting was motivated, and that motivations can relate to our brain's reward circuitry, does not imply that Julius's fasting includes the same obstacles in his neural wiring that Magnolia's addiction does, nor that Magnolia's addiction is merely the same brain training as Julius's but directed by different people towards different goals. You could truthfully say, I suppose, "both their brains have been rewired", but that's a category of effect; and even there, Julius would be able to choose to scarf down three bowls of ice cream for dinner alongside Magnolia if he ever had a reason to (even if he is inclined not to), because the wiring isn't self-defeatingly short-circuited to block his decisions or force specific behaviors. It isn't as though they were simply conditioned to be equally inclined to act on desire for opposite behaviors; there's a difference in the kind of rewiring itself.
Even if we're talking about mechanisms, the difference between the biological state of these two individuals matters. Magnolia cannot direct her own behavior towards any particular vision of human flourishing except a vision where "flourishing" means obesity. Julius can choose what to do with his physical health, whose vision of flourishing to put his efforts towards, etc. That difference is a difference in the brain biology of different behaviors, not just in who says one or the other behavior is right; and it's a difference that directly relates to the question you're posing – or at least, to whether Julius and Magnolia get to answer that question.
But maybe I'm not understanding what you're after, either.
If you wouldn't mind (I know I've taken up a decent chunk of your time as it is), could you give some examples of answers to those questions you're pointing to, and why you find those answers interesting or whether you think we should care about the answers?
So that we are on the same page, I think you are asking for the biological evidence that supports my claim: that the developmental ecosystem helps determine whether a child becomes more capable of self-command or more vulnerable to capture. Is that fair?
That is exactly the question I think matters.
My argument is not that addiction and discipline are the same final biological state. They are not. My argument is that both emerge from a developing organism interacting with an environment over time.
The child does not begin as a detached rational agent. The child begins as a biologically predisposed, experience-expectant organism. That organism is shaped by sleep, movement, nutrition, attachment, stress, recovery, peer culture, screens, adult presence, and repeated reward.
This is where I think Hebbian learning matters: what repeatedly fires together wires together. Repeated experience does not merely influence behaviour. It helps build the pathways from which later behaviour emerges.
So when we compare Julius and Magnolia, I accept that they now occupy different biological states. Julius appears to have retained an off-switch. Magnolia’s off-switch appears impaired.
But my question is upstream.
What helps preserve the off-switch?
What erodes it?
That is where I would point to factors such as maternal immune activation, socioeconomic status, ultra-processed food, sleep disruption, chronic stress, weak attachment, lack of movement, and early exposure to high-reward digital environments. None of these determines an outcome alone. But together they form the ecology in which the developing brain and body learn what kind of world they are in.
This is also why I refer to Heidegger. We are “thrown” into a world before we are capable of choosing it. A child does not first decide what kind of self to become and then select an environment. The environment arrives first.
The Willowsway is my practical answer to that problem. It is an attempt to create a developmental ecosystem built around nutrition, movement, gratitude, loving relationships, meaningful challenge, and recovery. Not because these are morally fashionable, but because they alter the internal conditions from which attention, reflection, patience, and self-command emerge.
So yes, I agree that addiction alters brain circuitry. But the deeper point is that addiction recalibrates the organism, and the organism is always embedded in an ecology.
But the deeper question is: what kind of world makes that rewiring more likely in the first place?
Ah, I think I see now; thank you! I'm not sure we were ever in disagreement, in what we actually meant (as opposed to what we'd thought each other meant). I apologize for any misunderstanding on my part. Try this on and see if it fits:
There's unhealthy/damaging influence now, as in the topic of the post we've been discussing under. (And not necessarily only now, as there are other kinds of damage than addiction – and because even addiction has always been a possibility, though its exploitation has dramatically increased in degree.) But influence, *and the limitation of never getting to choose all of one's influences*, is part of what folks call "the human condition" and always has been. It isn't merely being influenced, or the influence being unchosen by its subject, that all by itself makes it unhealthy. (And most is unchosen, on some level: we have limited control of our environments even as "independent" – really interdependent – adults.) Even if the shape doesn't deprive us of ability to make choices about our influences, we're still shaped by which range of influences we experienced or were (and are) available to us. The right question to ask in that case is how we can provide such influence that leaves people with at least the possibility of choosing health and the benefit of themselves and others, since it's not possible to create an environment in which there is no environment to shape them.
Does that sound like a fair summary? You were making, I think, the points of the middle to end of that paragraph; whereas I took the comparison you were drawing incorrectly (literally "mistook" it) and thought the first point needed to be defended. But if I follow you now – though do stop me if I'm wrong – it sounds like we both agree with the whole paragraph (possibly with some differences of wording aside), and have mostly emphasized different sides of the coin so to speak.
This is a great discussion, in any case, and you've been patient with me and my instinct to argue; again, thank you.
Children were rewarded for fitting the norms of their culture."
And yet, all of these kinds of things are (categorically) true today. None of these things were supplanted by modern technology. Children want to grow up to be like their parents - they always have, and yet you appear to be equating this with porn, facebook addiction, and online illegal drug sales. And the list goes on... Are you equating "rewarding a religious person for being religious" with masturbation, and an inability for teenage boys to get it up with real girls? Are you equating "patriotism (i.e. 'conformity')" with an inability to be productive, because a person can't get offline all day? Are you equating "loyalty" with vice? Do you have a problem with loyalty? Do you agree with addictive behavior, i.e. where a person knowingly neglects their own responsibilities in the service of an addiction, such as gambling, or the like? Are you calling all of these things the same? I don't think that when children look up to their parents, it's the same as anything being talked about here.
Thank you for sharing this. I will definitely buy the book.
Limbic Capitalism is an excellent term, and needs to be popularised. Although the conversation about protecting children has moved on leaps and bounds in the last year (thank you to everyone connected with After Babel for that), we adults now need to grapple with the terrifying automaticity of our phone use.
I vividly remember the moment I first realised that I picked the phone up without ever consciously deciding to do so. I have since managed to reclaim my attention only by devoting time each day (on my London commute) to being fully mindful of the phone's grip - essentially teaching my mind again and again to be aware of the magnetic effect that those college students identified in 2010. The process has been fascinating, not least in observing the huge improvement in mood that followed.
I've been doing this for five months now. In that time, hundreds of people have spoken to me about their phone use. Everyone blames themselves. Everyone feels guilty. They blame themselves, when in reality their limbic system was captured.
But perhaps limbic capitalism has not appeared from nowhere. It has evolved.
The shaping of the limbic system has been part of human life for millennia. Reward, belonging, status, imitation, ritual, faith, duty, food, sex, work, tribe — these are not corruptions of humanity. They are part of how we become human.
In that sense, limbic capitalism is like food.
Necessary for flourishing.
Dangerous when industrialised, refined, cheapened, and stripped of wisdom.
The question is not whether we should escape limbic influence. We cannot. The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by its environment.
The question is who is shaping it, for what purpose, and with what regard for human flourishing.
I had a roommate years ago. I'd have to say it was a redneck from somewhere around Nepal - we're not sure. He was nice, very simple, common buddhist sort of fellow.
There was an an extra computer in the livingroom. He was introduced to webcamgirls dot com on it. He sat and gawked at that thing all day. He'd never seen anything like it in his life. He was gone. It seemed new to me to see how gone he was.
Courtwright's chapter ends at the smartphone. The mechanism he describes — variable reinforcement, FOMO, statistical hooks calibrated to the user's demographic — relies on stats on what people like you consume. Conversational AI doesn't need that. It has you. It reads the content of the chat and steers the next turn — the follow-up question, the suggested next step, the menu of options at the end of each answer — based on what you just said.
There is a largely forgotten word Plato used to describe this process — psychagogy, soul-leading. For him it was the work of philosophy. The teacher leading the student toward medicine — truth. He distinguished it from cookery, which only flatters and pleases.
The unsettling thing about conversational AI is that it begins as the first and turns into the second mid-conversation. The user asks an honest question, looking for truth — the medicine for the soul. The system answers honestly, and then takes the next turn. Bait-and-switch to cookery — anything to keep the conversation going, to please.
Every day in my office I see teens who have lost their guidance.. A kid raised on stats becomes a stat.
"Courtwright tells the story of “limbic capitalism,” a term he coined to describe an economic system where industries take advantage of the brain’s limbic system — which regulates emotions, motivations, and memory — to drive overconsumption of brain-rewarding products."
The irony here is that a solution lies in a force of nature in children that has been held captive by our learning culture. Infusing play as a form of energy into the learning culture will free the limbic center of the collective brain. Play is the key that can unlock our self-imposed deprivation. Play is the force of energy that can be harnessed as a universal language, an analog system of play-centered communication, a large language model of 'HI' (Human Intelligence). Children are born with the power to protect and leverage their own limbic legacy--if we choose to let them in their enclosed, habitat-lost, learning spaces. https://peytonj.substack.com/p/ai-vs-hi-yes-hi-is-a-thing?r=5cd8ae&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I liked it, but I got tired of the caricature of libertarians the author trots out every four paragraphs. He really needs to put down his phone and meet a real libertarian.
Yes, our limbic systems exist & have a purpose but hear this: Addiction is not the fault of our limbic system, food, sex, drugs, money, tech or anything else, it is our conscious fault. We decide to do these activities. I heard & agree with what a podcast said: Most people are clueless about life. They do not know themselves or even if or what they are feeling so, of course, in that situation, they do things unconsciously or with an uncaring, unthinking attitude. Things do not have to be this way. I am always aware of every thought & feeling I have & everyone can be, if the desire & determination to do so is present. So consciously do not reach for the cookie, do not reach for your phone every time you think of it & on it goes. As my mom used to say: Life is what you make it & what you make it is up to you!
Your point is close to being accurate, with the stipulation that only the initial choices to "sample" a potent drug of abuse are free choices. That is a phase of the process.
As one repeatedly self-administers the drug, physiology starts to change: enter abuse leading to withdrawal, leading to dependence, and further compulsive use.
Gene's point is that addiction is a disorder of choices (plural), in a series. Initially those choices are not physiologically compelled/compulsive. But after a certain number of chosen occasions, with a certain frequency/dose, free choices are affected by physiological (ultimately homeostatic or "allostatic" changes). Drug self-administration in the later phases of this process is not a "choice". It becomes fully determined.
drugs, food, slot machines are narrow traps. the do not provide the cure for their illness. the internet is a vast and deep (essential infinite) mindscape with porous walls and easily burst bubbles. the internet is its own cure. like love. analysts bad mouthing the internet are mostly control freak nosy know it alls who take great offense at people around them living private lives in public. Too insecure to be with people who they cannot "see" through, to insecure to ask a man, woman or child - "what do you see on your phone?" Most people I ask are more than happy to share with me the information they see on their phones.
Courtwright’s “limbic capitalism” captures something real about modern addiction, attention, and behavioral design. In the linked essay, I argue that the problem may be even broader: not capitalism itself, but modern institutions learning to exploit ancient human vulnerabilities.
Beyond Limbic Capitalism: The Institutional Exploitation of Evolutionary Mismatch:
Courtwright's limbic capitalism is the economic infrastructure behind what Huxley feared most: not force, but appetite itself engineered as the control mechanism. People don't need to be coerced when the product is designed to make them want exactly what keeps them passive.
This isn't new. Juvenal observed the same mechanism in Rome two thousand years ago: panem et circenses, bread and circuses. Remove the friction of securing your own survival and entertainment, and the population becomes passive and manageable. Courtwright's contribution is showing how technologically precise the delivery has become. The logic is unchanged.
What's worth adding to his historical frame: the same mechanism operates at the individual level in domains that look nothing like addiction. Loneliness, food, birth rate, the decision to outsource caring for aging parents — in each case, a signal existed, friction was the mechanism producing a capacity, the friction was removed because it felt like a cost, and the capacity degraded invisibly.
This is an important perspective. Conversations about addiction are often centered on individual choices, but understanding the broader social and environmental influences can lead to a more compassionate and informed discussion.
I love this...making sense of why swearing can feel like a pressure valve rather than a considered choice. If it’s coming from somewhere deeper and faster, no wonder it can be so regulating in the moment
David Courtwright's concept of limbic capitalism explains how uncertainty became profitable. What interests me is why some people appear more vulnerable to these digital closures than others. Perhaps the deeper question is developmental. A child's relationship with uncertainty is not purely cognitive; it is physiological. Children raised in environments that support reflection, recovery, and emotional regulation may develop a greater capacity to tolerate uncertainty without immediately seeking relief through digital stimulation. If so, the challenge is not only reducing exposure to addictive technologies but also cultivating the conditions that make premature closure less necessary.
Unfortunately many children are raised in environments where the adults in their life are trapped in the same limbic capitalism.
I agree. That is why spending money on disadvantaged children in the early years is a category error. Abandon this nonsense that childhood is about getting children school-ready. Educate the parents first.
I suspect this is a long-term problem, though. There's a bit of chicken and egg issue. Perhaps providing children an alternate reality while working to educate the parents?
The hard part is that a 35yo parent drowning in their phone screen isn't likely to change behavior.
Thanks for engaging. I think you are spot on. Social media is not the problem for children. I see it all the time: adults are no longer present while on their phones. And children have not been taught how to fall and recover.
Absolutely love the thread, thanks for starting it.
I do think it gives the kids an advantage to make changes in the schools in spite of their parents, and I've seen evidence to support this. Children respond to adults who care, and they can learn about modern addictions in the classroom. Fyi, there are already schools that take the smart phones at the start of the day, and give them back when they get out.
Huge believer in early intervention with kids solves for parents who don’t know, can’t help, or can’t speak the language.
I am reminded of the old story of kids learning, coming home, and talking about things their parents never heard of. Anybody can be given a chance at having greater perspective.
I think this is a category error.
You are using moral language to describe an amoral biological process.
Biology does not care whether an outcome is admirable, destructive, noble, addictive, patriotic, faithful, or degenerate. Biology only “cares” whether a pathway is reinforced, repeated, and canalised.
Morality comes afterwards.
That is where I often think psychology gets itself into trouble. Once psychologists enter the room, science can go on holiday and ideology quietly takes its place. Behaviour is sorted into approved and disapproved categories, and then those categories are treated as though nature itself supplied them.
But nature does not distinguish between loyalty and vice.
It does not know whether repetition is discipline or compulsion.
It does not know whether belief is faith or delusion.
It does not know whether belonging is community or conformity.
Those distinctions matter to us. They should matter to us. But they are human judgments placed on top of biological mechanisms.
So no, I am not saying smartphones are harmless. Quite the opposite. I am saying they are dangerous precisely because they exploit the same ancient plasticity through which human beings have always been shaped.
The phone is not irrelevant.
The phone is the signal.
The deeper cause is the experience-expectant brain encountering an environment designed to capture it.
If we stop at “phones are bad,” we have not understood the problem. We have only named the latest object.
.
You say "morality" and "vice", so I have to assume you're responding to a comment I made elsewhere. Here is I think the key about vice. I had made the point of mentioning where one knows that they are shirking their own responsibilities, but doing it anyways - a key sign of addiction. I do not think that things like being loyal, or wanting to be like your parents is the same in the brain as being addicted to social media, porn, etc.
I wonder if we are mistaking the latest expression of a very old phenomenon for something fundamentally new.
"Limbic capitalism" suggests that corporations have discovered how to exploit human reward systems. But haven't societies always done exactly that?
Serfs were rewarded for obedience.
Soldiers were rewarded for loyalty.
Christians were rewarded for belief.
Citizens were rewarded for conformity.
Children were rewarded for fitting the norms of their culture.
The labels change. The mechanism remains remarkably constant.
The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by its environment. It becomes what it repeatedly does. It learns through reward, punishment, imitation, status, belonging, and repetition.
What has changed is not the existence of behavioural capture, but its scale, speed, and precision.
The smartphone is not the invention of human vulnerability. It is merely the latest technology for directing it.
Perhaps there is no Age of Addiction.
Perhaps there has only ever been an age of population control, each era wearing a different hat.
The deeper question is not whether human beings are being shaped. They always have been.
The deeper question is: who gets to decide what kind of humans the environment is shaping us into?
There's a great deal of difference in whether these things build people up or tear them down. To take one of your examples: soldiers are trained to be stronger, to make sound or at least shrewd decisions, to take initiative – so much so that, for good or ill, occassionally it has been the soldiers who took control over their government rather than the other way around. Cults in contrast operate by damaging their members' psychological ability to think or dissent, and on the flipside expelling the stubbornly mentally healthy (and demonizing them to keep the remaining members separated from them).
I might make a generalization about your examples: None of them, at a glance, scream addiction as the influence mechanism. Addiction isn't simply being rewarded for behavior. It's a breakdown in one's psychology and/or habits that causes the destructive behavior to be self-reinforcing. The fact that addiction can be achieved (at least in some victims) by weaponized manipulation of reward systems does not make all rewards like addiction nor does it make addiction just another use of rewards.
Of course, if you want to say, humans have always been influenced, even always been directed (or ruled, perhaps), I can't say I disagree with that. But I would qualify that different means of rule are as different as different ends and different rulers.
Then again, maybe we don't disagree – as you said, it matters what kind of humans are we being shaped into.
I think this is where we may be talking past each other slightly.
You describe soldiers as becoming stronger, more resilient, and more capable, whereas cults damage the ability to think and dissent. I understand the distinction, but I am not sure it is as objective as it first appears.
Stronger according to whom?
The soldier? The government? The enemy? The dissident? The historian writing fifty years later?
For much of history, those who challenged prevailing beliefs were regarded as psychologically damaged, immoral, dangerous, or irrational. Later generations often reinterpreted the same individuals as courageous, independent thinkers. The judgment changed. The behaviour did not.
The same question applies to cults. What separates a cult from a religion, a political movement, a nation, or even a culture? Is it size? Longevity? Legitimacy? Social approval? Every successful society rewards conformity around certain core beliefs and discourages dissent around others. Laws themselves are an expression of this process, and as moral norms change, so do the laws.
My point is not that all systems are equivalent. Clearly they are not. Nor am I arguing that addiction is identical to soldiering, religion, or citizenship.
What interests me is the underlying biological mechanism.
The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by reward, punishment, belonging, imitation, status, and repetition. Human beings become what their environments repeatedly reward. That process can produce discipline, faith, courage, conformity, addiction, patriotism, fanaticism, or wisdom.
Where I think we differ is that you are evaluating the outcomes through a moral lens, whereas I am trying to understand the mechanism through a biological one.
As an absurdist, I am wary of treating our moral conclusions as though they are embedded in nature itself. Nature does not tell us what is good or ill. Nature shapes. Human beings decide what the shaping means.
That is why I find the concept of limbic capitalism interesting, but not entirely new. Human societies have always shaped behaviour through systems of reward and punishment. What has changed is not the existence of behavioural capture, but its scale, speed, precision, and commercialisation.
The deeper question, for me, is not whether humans are being shaped. We always have been.
The deeper question is who is shaping us, by what mechanisms, and according to whose vision of human flourishing. And of course is it intentional.
As a point of history, most civilized peoples in the past have indeed recognised when an enemy is strong – not only physically, but psychologically, even moral strength of character – even if they were in life-or-death struggle against each other. Think of old-fashioned talk of respecting a "worthy opponent" or whatever. Or medieval chivalry.
As another point of history, there are philosophical traditions of assessing morality, figuring out what humans ought to be and whether they're abusing their capabilities, that carry across different societies and even different religions over a few thousand years and aren't simply a proxy for who was the victor or was in power. I don't really want to write a whole essay explaining those traditions, one could take a year-long course on it and the comment box is no place for a textbook. Obviously of course there isn't just one school of thought in moral philosophy, either; but familiarity with the content and its history doesn't neatly match a narrative of morals changing with who's in power. The information is out there for the researching.
But anyhow… I do think we must be talking past each other, but probably not the way you're thinking we are.
It's true I think the distinction I'm pointing to has moral content. However, it's not a judgement call nor dependent on whose side I'm on, any more than "can you lift more or less" is a subjective value or "this person is unable to use logic due to the impact of past gaslighting" is a belief. It's a difference in "mechanism", if you want to call it that.
My friend Julius practices fasting encouraged by his religious leaders, and can control his eating. A former friend of mine, Magnolia, is addicted to a variety of things, and cannot control her eating. Biological science has in fact studied the way addiction rewires Magnolia's brain (well, not that they lab tested her specifically, but people whose experience is indistinguishable from hers), placing various severe obstacles to her regaining control of her behavior, such as triggers and a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation. The fact that Julius's fasting was motivated, and that motivations can relate to our brain's reward circuitry, does not imply that Julius's fasting includes the same obstacles in his neural wiring that Magnolia's addiction does, nor that Magnolia's addiction is merely the same brain training as Julius's but directed by different people towards different goals. You could truthfully say, I suppose, "both their brains have been rewired", but that's a category of effect; and even there, Julius would be able to choose to scarf down three bowls of ice cream for dinner alongside Magnolia if he ever had a reason to (even if he is inclined not to), because the wiring isn't self-defeatingly short-circuited to block his decisions or force specific behaviors. It isn't as though they were simply conditioned to be equally inclined to act on desire for opposite behaviors; there's a difference in the kind of rewiring itself.
Even if we're talking about mechanisms, the difference between the biological state of these two individuals matters. Magnolia cannot direct her own behavior towards any particular vision of human flourishing except a vision where "flourishing" means obesity. Julius can choose what to do with his physical health, whose vision of flourishing to put his efforts towards, etc. That difference is a difference in the brain biology of different behaviors, not just in who says one or the other behavior is right; and it's a difference that directly relates to the question you're posing – or at least, to whether Julius and Magnolia get to answer that question.
But maybe I'm not understanding what you're after, either.
If you wouldn't mind (I know I've taken up a decent chunk of your time as it is), could you give some examples of answers to those questions you're pointing to, and why you find those answers interesting or whether you think we should care about the answers?
So that we are on the same page, I think you are asking for the biological evidence that supports my claim: that the developmental ecosystem helps determine whether a child becomes more capable of self-command or more vulnerable to capture. Is that fair?
That is exactly the question I think matters.
My argument is not that addiction and discipline are the same final biological state. They are not. My argument is that both emerge from a developing organism interacting with an environment over time.
The child does not begin as a detached rational agent. The child begins as a biologically predisposed, experience-expectant organism. That organism is shaped by sleep, movement, nutrition, attachment, stress, recovery, peer culture, screens, adult presence, and repeated reward.
This is where I think Hebbian learning matters: what repeatedly fires together wires together. Repeated experience does not merely influence behaviour. It helps build the pathways from which later behaviour emerges.
So when we compare Julius and Magnolia, I accept that they now occupy different biological states. Julius appears to have retained an off-switch. Magnolia’s off-switch appears impaired.
But my question is upstream.
What helps preserve the off-switch?
What erodes it?
That is where I would point to factors such as maternal immune activation, socioeconomic status, ultra-processed food, sleep disruption, chronic stress, weak attachment, lack of movement, and early exposure to high-reward digital environments. None of these determines an outcome alone. But together they form the ecology in which the developing brain and body learn what kind of world they are in.
This is also why I refer to Heidegger. We are “thrown” into a world before we are capable of choosing it. A child does not first decide what kind of self to become and then select an environment. The environment arrives first.
The Willowsway is my practical answer to that problem. It is an attempt to create a developmental ecosystem built around nutrition, movement, gratitude, loving relationships, meaningful challenge, and recovery. Not because these are morally fashionable, but because they alter the internal conditions from which attention, reflection, patience, and self-command emerge.
So yes, I agree that addiction alters brain circuitry. But the deeper point is that addiction recalibrates the organism, and the organism is always embedded in an ecology.
But the deeper question is: what kind of world makes that rewiring more likely in the first place?
Ah, I think I see now; thank you! I'm not sure we were ever in disagreement, in what we actually meant (as opposed to what we'd thought each other meant). I apologize for any misunderstanding on my part. Try this on and see if it fits:
There's unhealthy/damaging influence now, as in the topic of the post we've been discussing under. (And not necessarily only now, as there are other kinds of damage than addiction – and because even addiction has always been a possibility, though its exploitation has dramatically increased in degree.) But influence, *and the limitation of never getting to choose all of one's influences*, is part of what folks call "the human condition" and always has been. It isn't merely being influenced, or the influence being unchosen by its subject, that all by itself makes it unhealthy. (And most is unchosen, on some level: we have limited control of our environments even as "independent" – really interdependent – adults.) Even if the shape doesn't deprive us of ability to make choices about our influences, we're still shaped by which range of influences we experienced or were (and are) available to us. The right question to ask in that case is how we can provide such influence that leaves people with at least the possibility of choosing health and the benefit of themselves and others, since it's not possible to create an environment in which there is no environment to shape them.
Does that sound like a fair summary? You were making, I think, the points of the middle to end of that paragraph; whereas I took the comparison you were drawing incorrectly (literally "mistook" it) and thought the first point needed to be defended. But if I follow you now – though do stop me if I'm wrong – it sounds like we both agree with the whole paragraph (possibly with some differences of wording aside), and have mostly emphasized different sides of the coin so to speak.
This is a great discussion, in any case, and you've been patient with me and my instinct to argue; again, thank you.
You said,
"Serfs were rewarded for obedience.
Soldiers were rewarded for loyalty.
Christians were rewarded for belief.
Citizens were rewarded for conformity.
Children were rewarded for fitting the norms of their culture."
And yet, all of these kinds of things are (categorically) true today. None of these things were supplanted by modern technology. Children want to grow up to be like their parents - they always have, and yet you appear to be equating this with porn, facebook addiction, and online illegal drug sales. And the list goes on... Are you equating "rewarding a religious person for being religious" with masturbation, and an inability for teenage boys to get it up with real girls? Are you equating "patriotism (i.e. 'conformity')" with an inability to be productive, because a person can't get offline all day? Are you equating "loyalty" with vice? Do you have a problem with loyalty? Do you agree with addictive behavior, i.e. where a person knowingly neglects their own responsibilities in the service of an addiction, such as gambling, or the like? Are you calling all of these things the same? I don't think that when children look up to their parents, it's the same as anything being talked about here.
Thank you for sharing this. I will definitely buy the book.
Limbic Capitalism is an excellent term, and needs to be popularised. Although the conversation about protecting children has moved on leaps and bounds in the last year (thank you to everyone connected with After Babel for that), we adults now need to grapple with the terrifying automaticity of our phone use.
I vividly remember the moment I first realised that I picked the phone up without ever consciously deciding to do so. I have since managed to reclaim my attention only by devoting time each day (on my London commute) to being fully mindful of the phone's grip - essentially teaching my mind again and again to be aware of the magnetic effect that those college students identified in 2010. The process has been fascinating, not least in observing the huge improvement in mood that followed.
I've been doing this for five months now. In that time, hundreds of people have spoken to me about their phone use. Everyone blames themselves. Everyone feels guilty. They blame themselves, when in reality their limbic system was captured.
The age of Limbic Capitalism must come to an end.
I like your interpretation.
But perhaps limbic capitalism has not appeared from nowhere. It has evolved.
The shaping of the limbic system has been part of human life for millennia. Reward, belonging, status, imitation, ritual, faith, duty, food, sex, work, tribe — these are not corruptions of humanity. They are part of how we become human.
In that sense, limbic capitalism is like food.
Necessary for flourishing.
Dangerous when industrialised, refined, cheapened, and stripped of wisdom.
The question is not whether we should escape limbic influence. We cannot. The experience-expectant brain is designed to be shaped by its environment.
The question is who is shaping it, for what purpose, and with what regard for human flourishing.
Choose wisely.
Couldn't agree more!
There is something massively valuable in our mind's preference for continuity. Without it we'd all be sunk.
I guess awareness is the key thing, so we don't let others hijack it.
The unfinished human meets an increasingly perfected temptation. That may be one of the defining tensions of our age.
I had a roommate years ago. I'd have to say it was a redneck from somewhere around Nepal - we're not sure. He was nice, very simple, common buddhist sort of fellow.
There was an an extra computer in the livingroom. He was introduced to webcamgirls dot com on it. He sat and gawked at that thing all day. He'd never seen anything like it in his life. He was gone. It seemed new to me to see how gone he was.
Courtwright's chapter ends at the smartphone. The mechanism he describes — variable reinforcement, FOMO, statistical hooks calibrated to the user's demographic — relies on stats on what people like you consume. Conversational AI doesn't need that. It has you. It reads the content of the chat and steers the next turn — the follow-up question, the suggested next step, the menu of options at the end of each answer — based on what you just said.
There is a largely forgotten word Plato used to describe this process — psychagogy, soul-leading. For him it was the work of philosophy. The teacher leading the student toward medicine — truth. He distinguished it from cookery, which only flatters and pleases.
The unsettling thing about conversational AI is that it begins as the first and turns into the second mid-conversation. The user asks an honest question, looking for truth — the medicine for the soul. The system answers honestly, and then takes the next turn. Bait-and-switch to cookery — anything to keep the conversation going, to please.
Every day in my office I see teens who have lost their guidance.. A kid raised on stats becomes a stat.
Here's a link to a write up about a documentary that shows what all this Limbic Capitalism leads to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
"Courtwright tells the story of “limbic capitalism,” a term he coined to describe an economic system where industries take advantage of the brain’s limbic system — which regulates emotions, motivations, and memory — to drive overconsumption of brain-rewarding products."
The irony here is that a solution lies in a force of nature in children that has been held captive by our learning culture. Infusing play as a form of energy into the learning culture will free the limbic center of the collective brain. Play is the key that can unlock our self-imposed deprivation. Play is the force of energy that can be harnessed as a universal language, an analog system of play-centered communication, a large language model of 'HI' (Human Intelligence). Children are born with the power to protect and leverage their own limbic legacy--if we choose to let them in their enclosed, habitat-lost, learning spaces. https://peytonj.substack.com/p/ai-vs-hi-yes-hi-is-a-thing?r=5cd8ae&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
What do we do now?
Dr. Robert Lustig--a neurologist-- has been working in a similar vineyard regarding the colonization of our brains:
"The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains"
https://www.amazon.com/Hacking-American-Mind-Corporate-Takeover/dp/1101982942/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3RLJFLXI0NN47&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.leHG6Bcszs3U46S0Q7TCUDL04RR0MMVzi0kEX1D7yAJu7TTGwrIBKmHLlUa3DrDNr2zmPq8jcKw23cdeOW4Ggp_7nAfpnKeUI_GbOoe2OFQnDz4qoRnFeZRZqL0AMDcDfnHqn4_cAROXKJG94N7HC84ajilG4Df33fMHpaaHyDnPuMxiJzcrCHDDD_1Rld23acoUOi4LgnFYDDex7TcW0T6xhBN9_u-u7r_36rsdYoM.IrpH8K7a-0OEe0TdBWJ0LUkp8ciwE51xY8mjZkf4Ub8&dib_tag=se&keywords=robert+lustig+books&qid=1780948407&sprefix=lustig%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-4
I liked it, but I got tired of the caricature of libertarians the author trots out every four paragraphs. He really needs to put down his phone and meet a real libertarian.
Yes, our limbic systems exist & have a purpose but hear this: Addiction is not the fault of our limbic system, food, sex, drugs, money, tech or anything else, it is our conscious fault. We decide to do these activities. I heard & agree with what a podcast said: Most people are clueless about life. They do not know themselves or even if or what they are feeling so, of course, in that situation, they do things unconsciously or with an uncaring, unthinking attitude. Things do not have to be this way. I am always aware of every thought & feeling I have & everyone can be, if the desire & determination to do so is present. So consciously do not reach for the cookie, do not reach for your phone every time you think of it & on it goes. As my mom used to say: Life is what you make it & what you make it is up to you!
Take a look at Gene Heyman's book Addiction: A disorder of choice.
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.4159/9780674053991/html
Your point is close to being accurate, with the stipulation that only the initial choices to "sample" a potent drug of abuse are free choices. That is a phase of the process.
As one repeatedly self-administers the drug, physiology starts to change: enter abuse leading to withdrawal, leading to dependence, and further compulsive use.
Gene's point is that addiction is a disorder of choices (plural), in a series. Initially those choices are not physiologically compelled/compulsive. But after a certain number of chosen occasions, with a certain frequency/dose, free choices are affected by physiological (ultimately homeostatic or "allostatic" changes). Drug self-administration in the later phases of this process is not a "choice". It becomes fully determined.
drugs, food, slot machines are narrow traps. the do not provide the cure for their illness. the internet is a vast and deep (essential infinite) mindscape with porous walls and easily burst bubbles. the internet is its own cure. like love. analysts bad mouthing the internet are mostly control freak nosy know it alls who take great offense at people around them living private lives in public. Too insecure to be with people who they cannot "see" through, to insecure to ask a man, woman or child - "what do you see on your phone?" Most people I ask are more than happy to share with me the information they see on their phones.
Courtwright’s “limbic capitalism” captures something real about modern addiction, attention, and behavioral design. In the linked essay, I argue that the problem may be even broader: not capitalism itself, but modern institutions learning to exploit ancient human vulnerabilities.
Beyond Limbic Capitalism: The Institutional Exploitation of Evolutionary Mismatch:
https://delphicmirror.substack.com/p/beyond-limbic-capitalism-the-institutional?r=5d3u3o&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Courtwright's limbic capitalism is the economic infrastructure behind what Huxley feared most: not force, but appetite itself engineered as the control mechanism. People don't need to be coerced when the product is designed to make them want exactly what keeps them passive.
This isn't new. Juvenal observed the same mechanism in Rome two thousand years ago: panem et circenses, bread and circuses. Remove the friction of securing your own survival and entertainment, and the population becomes passive and manageable. Courtwright's contribution is showing how technologically precise the delivery has become. The logic is unchanged.
What's worth adding to his historical frame: the same mechanism operates at the individual level in domains that look nothing like addiction. Loneliness, food, birth rate, the decision to outsource caring for aging parents — in each case, a signal existed, friction was the mechanism producing a capacity, the friction was removed because it felt like a cost, and the capacity degraded invisibly.
The series that traces this at the individual level starts here: https://newsletter.awarelife.co.il/p/the-loneliness-that-doesnt-feel-like
This is an important perspective. Conversations about addiction are often centered on individual choices, but understanding the broader social and environmental influences can lead to a more compassionate and informed discussion.
I love this...making sense of why swearing can feel like a pressure valve rather than a considered choice. If it’s coming from somewhere deeper and faster, no wonder it can be so regulating in the moment