• Gambling addiction has been shown to have the same pharmacological effects as opiates.
• Casinos are designed to disorient and confuse patrons, from the lighting and carpeting to the key of machine sounds.
• Nevada had the highest suicide rate in the nation from 1990-1994, according to statistics from the CDC.
• In Gulfport, Mississippi, suicides increased by 213 percent in the first two years after casinos arrived. In neighboring Biloxi, suicide attempts jumped by 1,000 percent in the first year alone.
• The National Council on Problem Gambling, citing various studies, reports that one in five pathological gamblers attempts suicide, a rate higher than for any other addictive disorder.
• In the UK more than 2 million households are affected by problem gambling including 50,000 addicted minors. Suicide deaths every day increasingly include young, healthy males with good careers from stable families. This is worth reading.
• Asia is even worse, with Macau generating about 8 times the revenue of Las Vegas, but Thailand, Korea, and India are also in very severe condition. Japan began the process of legalizing casino gambling in 2018, with a new agency established in 2020.
• 1 in 5 habitual gamblers attempts suicide
• 1 in 5 suicides is related to gambling (usually with no other health or psychological problems)

That's JUST the suicides. Not the drugs, prostitution, organized crime, alcohol, cigarettes, job problems, domestic problems, credit card interest, or whatever else people could be doing with their lives. It's just the suicides.
Gambling was illegal in 48 states for over 100 years, but in the last ten years has risen almost perpendicularly. Ask anyone who works at a gas station or convenience store, daily lottery drawings and scratch-off tickets are almost a $100B industry - with some states legalizing lotteries as recently as January of 2020. Sports betting is almost as large, formally estimated at $85B.
Casinos, together with strip clubs and the other forms of gambling listed above, are open and operating right now in states that continue to (illegally) force churches and businesses to shut down. By the way.

Source: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
IM: We are now in a position where we can choose the level of suffering in the entire living world, why do it?
DP: Around 850,000 or so people worldwide take their own lives each year. Tens of millions self-harm. Hundreds of millions are chronically depressed. These grim figures are just the tip of an iceberg of misery. Words and statistics can’t begin to convey the awfulness of suffering. Yet there is hope. For the first time in history, biotechnology turns the level of suffering in the living world into an adjustable parameter. The biosphere is programmable. Even a handful of genetic tweaks could massively reduce the level of suffering in the world. If used wisely, a combination of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and synthetic gene drives could eradicate experience below “hedonic zero” altogether. Life on Earth deserves a more civilised signalling system – a motivational architecture based entirely on information-sensitive gradients of well-being. Today, a few fortunate genetic outliers enjoy hints of how such an architecture of mind will function. In future, life based on gradients of intelligent bliss can be the global norm. CRISPR makes paradise-engineering technically feasible.
On a more sober note, the easiest way to reduce to reduce suffering in the world doesn’t rely on gene editing, advanced technology or posthuman superintelligence. The biggest source of severe and readily avoidable suffering today is animal agriculture. Factory-farming is inherently abusive. Factory-farms and slaughterhouses are morally indefensible. Our victims are as sentient as small children, and they should be treated accordingly. The death-factories must be permanently closed and outlawed. Any civilisation worthy of the name will be invitrotarian or vegan.
IM: Isn’t suffering a necessary part of life?
DP: Misery and malaise are so common that it’s easy to believe they are integral to life itself. Gautama Buddha’s “Life is suffering” sounds like a simplistic slogan to temperamentally optimistic life-lovers; but for billions of human and nonhuman animals, it’s true. For over 540 million years, suffering has been endemic to the animal kingdom. A predisposition to mental and physical pain has been genetically adaptive. Discontent promotes the inclusive fitness of our genes. Evolution via natural selection is underpinned by random mutations and the genetic casino of sexual reproduction. Natural selection is “blind” and amoral. But a revolution in genome-editing promises to transform the nature of selection pressure. Parents will shortly be able genetically to choose the pain thresholds, hedonic range and hedonic set-points of their future children. Prospective parents will pick genes and allelic combinations in anticipation of the likely effects of their choices. As the reproductive revolution unfolds, selection pressure in favour of “happy” genes will intensify at the expense of their nastier cousins. Barring revolutionary breakthroughs, growth in subjective wellbeing may only be linear rather than exponential; but genetic engineering plus the pleasure principle are a potent mix.
IM: If we do raise the hedonic range, do we lose other values/attributes worth keeping?
DP: Engineering a world of indiscriminate bliss wouldn’t merely be risky. Uniform bliss would undermine human relationships, social responsibility, personal growth and intellectual progress. Most people aren’t classical utilitarians: getting “blissed out” would entail losing a lot of what we value as well as the miseries we hate. By contrast, ratcheting up hedonic range and hedonic set-points doesn’t entail adjudicating between different secular and religious values or sacrificing anything we hold dear. Hedonic recalibration doesn’t subvert existing preference architectures. An elevated hedonic set-point can also enhance the diversity of experience; compare how depressives tend to get “stuck in a rut”. Information-sensitive gradients of well-being can preserve what humans find valuable while enriching our default quality of life. Hedonic uplift will vanquish the feelings of emptiness, futility and nihilistic despair that stain so many lives today. Post-Darwinian life based on gradients of bliss will be saturated with meaning, purpose and significance.
For sure, there are tons of complications. The biohappiness revolution will be messy. We’d do well to preserve the functional analogues of depressive realism. But the basic point stands.
IM: How is genetic engineering different from eugenics?
DP: Just as the Soviet experiment polluted the whole language of social justice, likewise the early twentieth-century eugenics movement polluted the whole language of genetic health. Consider the commitment to the well-being of all sentience enshrined in the Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009), or the World Health Organisation’s definition of health as set out in its founding constitution (1948): “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Lifelong health as so defined is impossible with a Darwinian genome. A living world where all sentient beings are innately healthy can be created only via genetic engineering. Societal reform on its own can’t manufacture the molecular substrates of happiness. Etymologically speaking, transhuman civilisation will be the product of eugenics. So in that sense, the critics are right. But genetically engineering the well-being of all sentience is far removed from the coercive “eugenics” and race hygiene policy of the Third Reich.
That said, a multitude of legal of legal and ethical safeguards will be essential to navigate the transition to post-Darwinian life – humans are untrustworthy creatures. Not least, we should uphold and extend the sanctity of life.
IM: How do we ensure genetic engineering is used safely?
DP: All genetic experimentation is inherently risky, not least the gamble of having children. Antinatalists might support a hundred-year moratorium on untested genetic experiments; but such prudence is unrealistic. For evolutionary reasons, most people are determined to have children via sexual reproduction. So we should focus on minimising the risks of such genetic experimentation. Let’s try to balance risk-reward ratios. Preimplantation genetic screening will be hugely cost-effective. Later this century, all babies could and should be CRISPR babies. In the meantime, access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling ought to be universal.
For example, consider the genetic dial-settings that regulate pain-sensitivity. What level of pain tolerance is optimal for our future children – and our older selves? Even now, medical science could eradicate pain altogether simply by knocking out the SCN9A gene – the so-called “volume knob” for pain. However, instant eradication of pain is too hazardous. SCN9A-knockouts would lack not just the ghastly experience of pain but also the vital function of nociception. Children with congenital analgesia need to lead a cotton-wool existence or else they come to serious harm. For now, choosing benign “low pain” alleles for our offspring is much safer. In tomorrow’s world of advanced AI and neuroprostheses, even the mildest “raw feels” of pain could be abolished. In the meantime, we can ensure that new children (and maybe our future selves) have the same exceptionally high pain-tolerance of today’s high-functioning genetic outliers: folk who say things like “Pain is just a useful signalling mechanism.”
IM: Should we still pursue genetic engineering if there was peace on earth?
DP: Suicide rates typically go down in wartime. There isn’t peace on Earth for the same reason there isn’t peace among chimpanzee troops. Nature “designed” human male primates to (be genetically predisposed to) wage territorial wars of aggression against other coalitions of male primates. Let’s assume, optimistically, that we can prevent future armed conflict without any of the biological-genetic interventions discussed here. The negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill would ensure that countless people would continue to suffer – even in a peaceful world without war, poverty and disease. By its very nature, Darwinian life is sentient malware. Only a biohappiness revolution can fix our sinister source code for good.
IM: What other types of human enhancement technologies will considerably affect the nature of humans?
DP: Safe and sustainable analogues of empathetic euphoriants like “hug drug” MDMA will revolutionise human relationships. Compare the quasi-psychopathic indifference to most other sentient beings that humans display now.
Robolovers, sexbots and designer aphrodisiacs will revolutionise sexual experience.
Novel psychedelics, novel genes and novel neurons will open up billions of state-spaces of consciousness as different from each other as waking life is different from dreaming life.
“Augmented” reality will be followed by full-blown multimodal immersive virtual reality.
“Narrow” superintelligence-on-a-neurochip will be accessible to all; with digital intelligence implants, sentient beings can do everything machine intelligence can do and more.
Opt-out cryonics, opt-in cryothanasia, and finally tools to defeat the biology of aging altogether will transform our conception of life and death. Transhumans will be quasi-immortal.
But in my view, mastery of the pleasure-pain axis will inaugurate the biggest revolution of all. The end of suffering promises an ethical watershed. Invincible well-being for all sentience will mark a momentous evolutionary transition in the development of life.
IM: What are some ethical considerations worth arguing about at this stage?
DP: As a transhumanist, I look forward to a glorious “triple S” civilisation of Superhappiness, Superlongevity and Superintelligence. But more concretely, I’d like to see a coordinated hundred-year Plan to overcome suffering throughout the living world under the auspices of the World Health Organization. Here are four policy proposals for a Biohappiness Revolution:

• Accelerate the development and commercialisation of cultured meat. Close and outlaw factory-farms and slaughterhouses. Rehabilitate the surviving victims.
  
• Genetically raise pain-tolerance. Genetically recalibrate the hedonic treadmill. Create life based on gradients of intelligent bliss.
  
• Offer CRISPR gene-therapy and preimplantation genetic screening and counselling to all prospective parents.
  
• Spread low-pain “happy genes” across the biosphere with CRISPR-based synthetic gene drives that cheat the “laws” of Mendelian inheritance.
  

At times, Darwinian life can be desperately grim. Yet depressive, pain-ridden people shouldn’t feel their lives are worthless. Even malaise-ridden lives can be valuable if one prevents more suffering than one undergoes. We should all aspire to be not just transhumanists but also effective altruists. Let’s use biotechnology to phase out suffering. Humans are stepping-stones to something better – something inconceivably sublime.
IM: In 2015, Bill Gates gave a chilling warning on a TED Talk that the world was in danger due to global pandemics or bioterrorism. These predictions have raised conspiracy theories that Bill is responsible for creating the novel coronavirus and the reason for his interest in developing a vaccine treatment. There are also conspiracy theories circulating about 5G technology being connected to the spread of the novel coronavirus which has led to the recent burning of 5G towers in the UK. Conversations about the use of microchips and biometrics in order to prevent future epidemics are also fueling conspiracy paranoia. Are these fears reasonable? Do they serve an evolutionary purpose or detriment?
DP: “Only the paranoid survive”, said Intel boss Andy Grove. There’s a lot that medical science still doesn’t understand about the pandemic viral respiratory illness COVID-19. However, the new corona virus was not created by Bill Gates, nor is it spread by 5G towers. Nor is it a bioweapon. The truth is more sinister. COVID-19 is a by-product of humanity’s monstrous treatment of nonhuman animals. Zoonotic disease and consequent global pandemics are inevitable as long as humans practise meat-eating. Animal abuse is catastrophic for humans and our victims. Details of the spillover infection in a dirty Wuhan meat market in November 2019 are still murky; but this viral pandemic would not have happened if humans didn’t practise animal agriculture – and then butcher sentient beings to gratify a gruesome taste for their flesh. Rather than being the villain of the piece, Bill Gates is a sponsor of “clean” cultured meat. The cultured meat revolution promises to end zoonotic pandemics, save billions of nonhuman and human animal lives, and yield cost-savings of tens of trillions of dollars by preventing future pandemics. Yet human health and safety needn’t wait for the commercialisation of cruelty-free cultured meat and animal products. Wet markets, vivisection labs, factory-farms and slaughterhouses are crimes against sentience; they should be outlawed. Future civilisation will be vegan.
IM: Humanity’s self-sabotaging nature exists in many forms. One, in particular, a form of self-assertion by denying, ignoring, or attacking what others consider to be true - the fear of others - is as subtle and universal as it is destructive. This form of self-defense mechanism so prevalent in modern society prevents people from establishing effective communication channels that are all-encompassing, flexible, and effective, in particular towards problem-solving. Could humans ever turn mindfulness, gratitude, hope, and a sense of solidarity into sustainable practices?
DP: Evolution didn’t “design” humans to be nice to each other – except insofar as friendliness promoted the inclusive fitness of their genes. Some transhumanists worry about the spectre of unfriendly artificial general intelligence; but our biggest challenge is creating sentience-friendly biological intelligence. Maybe the shock of COVID-19 will help persuade killer apes to close the death factories and accelerate an anti-speciesist revolution. Maybe the shock of COVID-19 will help persuade free-market fundamentalists that all people have a fundamental right to basic income, homes and healthcare. I’d love to believe that humans will “turn mindfulness, gratitude, hope and a sense of solidarity into sustainable practices”, as you suggest. But unless we combine dietary, political and socio-economic reform with remediation of our sinister source code, the well-being of all sentience remains a utopian dream. Depravity is hardwired into our DNA – a lot of it, at any rate. The worst of “human nature” must be genetically cured.
IM:To establish a global pandemic immunity for the novel coronavirus, our priorities are: 1. to keep people safe from getting the coronavirus through social distancing, 2. to figure out a way to contact-trace and test millions of people a day to know who can resume working, 3. to come up with treatments and vaccinations that can prevent coronavirus flare-ups, in particular third world countries, 4. to continue travel restrictions and global collaboration, 5. to improve our supply chain and infrastructure. Do you think this plan is aligned with the transhumanist goal of improving the human condition?
DP: Becoming transhuman will entail overcoming deeply-rooted ethnocentric and anthropocentric bias. COVID-19 has already triggered an upsurge in racism and xenophobia. Coronaviruses and future pathogens could be readily tamed with the aid of ubiquitous testing and tracking apps. But many people are (rightly) afraid that tracking measures introduced to tackle catastrophes like COVID-19 – biometric scanning, phone location data, credit-card information, security footage and so forth – will be used by authoritarian regimes to control rather than protect us.
IM: The success of a global plan to turn the economy around towards the sustainable implementation of a universal health care system that can successfully handle crisis depends not only on improving our own neural architecture but on re-defining our value system. Professor Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, also a distinguished philosopher of posthuman studies from Cabo University, Italy, whom I'm also interviewing in this issue of Immoralists Magazine (See: “The Future Of Digital Surveillance and Healthcare - A Conversation with World Leading Philosopher Stefan Lorenz Sorgner” APR-MAY 2020), makes a bold argument stating that when it comes to health and privacy, the problem isn’t about giving up privacy, but our understanding of what privacy means to us. He argues that people aren’t afraid of giving up privacy, but being sanctioned by the government. We soon realize that the fear isn’t the loss of privacy but the inability to live as one pleases. Stefan believes that the collection of digital data by means of total surveillance is needed and can be established through mutually beneficial contracts where citizens give access to their biometrics to governments in exchange for a free health care system that keeps everyone safe and healthy. He adds, "in order to collect all the relevant data, the data needs to be sold in between the companies or the companies and the government." Do you think that a decentralized, non-commercial, peer-to-peer system would be more effective, or could we instead establish a hybrid system that restricts government and companies access to people's biometrics?
DP: Let’s step back for a moment. Why exactly does privacy matter? The Borg has no concept of privacy. Many Christians believe that a benevolent and omniscient God is privy to their innermost thoughts and feelings. But we needn’t invoke science-fiction or theology. If mutually “loved up” on oxytocin-releasing euphoriant empathogens like MDMA (Ecstasy), people can forget about privacy and be honest with each other: oxytocin has been dubbed the “trust hormone”. More radically, the conjoined craniopagus twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan share a thalamic bridge. In a sense, they are distinct persons. But Krista and Tatiana can partially see though each other’s eyes and taste and feel what the other is experiencing. So in another sense, the twins can share a mind as well as a body. Maybe our transhuman successors will be able to “mind meld” via reversible thalamic bridges. If so, mind-melding technologies will inaugurate a revolution of true honesty – and (lack of) personal privacy – as understood by archaic Darwinian lifeforms. Science, morality and decision-theoretic rationality will be revolutionised too. By contrast, “normal” humans today are profoundly ignorant of each other. Moreover, most prefer to stay ignorant – and prefer others stay ignorant of them. For sure, humans want to feel loved, appreciated and respected. But we also want to prevent others from truly understanding us – as distinct from acknowledging our idealised public personae. Some of the reasons why contemporary humans want to preserve their privacy may be irrational – for example, embarrassment over bodies and their functions or a taste in porn. But the problem goes deeper. Social, personal and business life depends on a web of deceptions. If our dark, Darwinian minds practised “radical honesty”, then human society and personal relationships would collapse. Today, we have the justified suspicion that if other humans learned our secrets, they might exploit such knowledge to harm us.
Anyhow, to answer your question more directly: if adequate safeguards can be established, then everyone’s mental and physical health would be best served by allowing medical authorities to have full genetic and biometric data for all citizens, ideally from birth if not conception. Later this century, universal access to preimplantation genetic screening and counselling and CRISPR genome-editing should be available for all prospective parents. Centralised genetic knowledge-banks available to medical researchers would promote public health and benefit individuals and society alike.
However, the risks to personal freedom from sharing such knowledge are far-reaching. I will need to study Stefan Sorgner’s proposals properly before offering comment. But in my view, universal access to free healthcare, basic income and adequate housing shouldn’t depend on surrendering genetic privacy and other biometric details. Universal and unconditional access to healthcare, basic income and adequate housing is a precondition of any civilised society. One possible solution to the privacy dilemma may involve artificial intelligence. If implemented wisely, the practice of sharing intimate personal and biometric details with smart digital zombies won’t involve embarrassment or scope for human-style abuse. We’re already heading for a world of robo-carers, robo-nurses, robo-doctors and robo-surgeons: insentient robo-epidemiologists aren’t so different – not a Nanny State, but “Nanny AI”. But I believe this kind of AI option would need rolling out over decades. The devil is in the details.
IM: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are planning to partner up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to begin exploring possible COVID-19 treatments. It is known that the Zuckerberg-Chan Initiative is also on a mission to “eliminate all diseases within our children’s lifetime”. How are super longevity initiatives relevant to our quest to establish a universal health care system and happiness?
DP: Humanity needs a more ambitious conception of health – the kind of conception laid out in the founding constitution of the World Health Organization. I hope that we can indeed “eliminate all diseases within our children’s lifetime”. Yet even if all recognised genetic disorders and infections were eradicated, horrific suffering would persist in the world – all sorts of physical and mental pain. Under a regime of natural selection, a predisposition to suffering and discontent is genetically adaptive. So we wouldn’t really be healthy, just not sick. Our genomes need fixing. Hence the need for a biohappiness revolution – a civilised information-signalling system underpinned by gradients of intelligent bliss. Superlongevity? Only revolutionary medical breakthroughs can abolish death and aging. We don’t yet have the knowledge. Organs and bodies can be replaced, repaired and/or enhanced indefinitely with recognisable extensions of existing technologies; but the central nervous system is more challenging to re-engineer: I’m more pessimistic than some of my transhumanist colleagues about credible time-scales for eternally youthful mind-brains. Therefore we need a twin-track approach: SENS and Calico should work together with Alcor. Universal access to cryonics and cryothanasia could potentially make a transhumanist civilization available to all sentient beings – even the elderly and infirm for whom talk of posthuman paradise is apt to sound personally irrelevant. Hormonally, I’m one of Nature’s pessimists; but I think we are destined for a glorious “triple S” civilisation of superlongevity, superintelligence and superhappiness.
IM: How does transhumanism address issues of racism and injustice?
DP: The Transhumanist Declaration (1998, 2009) affirms our commitment to the well-being of all sentience.
This goal sounds impossibly utopian. Consider just one form of injustice, economic inequality. Traditional routes to a fairer world involve “winners” and “losers”. Zero-sum games are endemic to human society. Worse, the enforcement mechanisms of greater fairness often turn out to be as bad - or worse - than the injustices they attempt to remedy. Consider the fate of socialist experiments of twentieth-century history.
Transhuman society will be different. Information-based technology promises to erase traditional left-right distinctions by creating effectively unlimited abundance of anything that can be digitised – and that embraces almost everything. (Some transhumanists claim that everything can be digitised, but let’s postpone discussion of whether conscious minds are a classical phenomenon.) Digital information is egalitarian. Intellectual-property owners may blanch, but we can now take for granted that everyone can enjoy access to the world’s musical resources, electronic games, movies and computer software. This unfolding revolution will continue into an era of augmented reality and immersive VR. Most importantly, access to genetic information and mastery of our reward circuitry will soon be democratised. Code for the biological substrates of subjective well-being doesn’t need to be rationed any more than the source code of digital music needs to be rationed. We could all become hedonic trillionaires. Many of the world’s worst inequalities aren’t economic or socio-political, but biological-genetic: disparities of mood, motivation and hedonic range. Just consider who is better off: a rich, angst-ridden depressive or a poor, healthy hyperthymic? Transhumanism promises a civilisation based entirely on gradients of intelligent bliss. Potentially, everyone can be a hedonic “winner”.
Yet what about tackling injustice now?
In my view, universal basic income (UBI), decent housing and free healthcare shouldn’t be a political left-right issue, but a precondition of civilised society. Thus broadly libertarian transhumanists such as Zoltan Istvan support UBI no less than transhumanists in the left-liberal tradition. My own gut instincts have always favoured the underdog. But the neocortex is a more effective tool of cognition than the enteric nervous system. Rich and poor, black and white, human and nonhuman animals – we are all victims of our legacy wetware. Everyone will benefit when our Darwinian source code is fixed. Any prospective parent who believes that creating new life is ethically permissible should consider preimplantation genetic screening, counselling and (soon-to-be) professional gene-editing.
Defeating racism? This really demands a treatise, but here goes. From antiquity to the present, dominant groups have convinced themselves they are intellectually, morally and spiritually superior to stigmatised outsiders – and touted “objective” measures to prove it. The evolutionary roots of racial discrimination, bigotry and xenophobia run deep. Everything from cultural stereotypes to the institutional racism in our criminal justice systems and even transgenerational epigenetic inheritance (i.e. transmission of epigenetic information through the germline) mean that the effects of systemic racism will take generations to overcome. Our posthuman successors may find the differences between human ethnic groups akin to the differences that humans discern between different dogs or mice or beetles. Yes, there are differences between different breeds of dog and mouse – and beetle! But humans can recognise that these differences are trivial compared to what all dogs, mice and beetles have in common. Likewise posthuman superintelligence vis-à-vis archaic humans. Education harnessed to intelligence-amplification can help overcome racist prejudice and other cognitive deficits of perspective-taking ability. But creating empathetic superintelligence will be a monumental challenge.
IM: How can transhumanism positively affect policies that affect all sentient life?
DP: A “triple S” civilisation of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness can benefit all sentient beings.
Everyone could benefit from “narrow” superintelligence on a neurochip; Neuralink is just a foretaste of tomorrow’s implantable brain-machine interfaces. Some doomsters fear a zombie coup from runaway software-based AGI; but all the benefits of “narrow” AGI can be incorporated within one’s own CNS. So transhumans will be supersapient and supersentient. Full-spectrum superintelligence will be us, not some fanciful zombie overlord. Transhumanism also offers a richer conception of intelligence than the narrow, “autistic” component of general intelligence measured by simple-minded IQ tests: enhanced social cognition, superior co-operative problem-solving skills, an expanding circle of compassion, and the tools to explore alien state-spaces of consciousness.
Yet who will live long enough to enjoy triple-S civilisation? Unless you’re a hydra, you and your loved ones suffer from the lethal hereditary disease we call “aging”. Rejuvenating interventions such as regular therapeutic blood exchange can potentially turn back the biological clock. “Cyborgisation” and synthetic body parts will increasingly enhance, repair and replace biological organs. But full-blown body-replacement is still decades away. Therefore we need not just medico-genetic advances, but also a medico-legal revolution: opt-out cryonics and opt-in cryothanasia for life-loving oldsters. At its best, transhumanism is all-inclusive.
Critically, the biohappiness revolution won’t be race- or species-specific. Transhumanists aspire to transcend ethnocentric and anthropocentric bias. Everyone can potentially benefit from genetically programmed well-being – a civilised signalling system to replace the dismal dial-settings of a Darwinian hedonic treadmill. There is a crying need for the World Health Organization to live up to its obligations as set out in its founding constitution. Good health should be the birthright of all sentient beings – or else they shouldn’t have been conceived in the first place. I’m personally gloomy about timescales for the abolitionist project. Centuries? Millennia? I don’t know. However, a hundred-year blueprint to eradicate suffering is technically feasible. The world’s last experience below hedonic zero will mark a major evolutionary transition in the development of life on Earth.
My own focus is the plight of nonhuman animals – humble minds as sentient and sapient as small children and worthy of equivalent care. Currently, the abuse of nonhumans by humans is systematic. Factory-farming and slaughterhouses are nastier than even the most virulent racism and child abuse. Ideally, moral argument alone would suffice: I’d implore everyone to adopt a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle. But transhumanists are hard-headed. We tend to favour technical solutions to ethical problems. Cultured meat and cultured animal products once belonged to science fiction. Yet over the next few decades, the cultured meat revolution will end the horrors of animal agriculture. The death factories will close. The surviving victims will be rehabilitated. Zoonotic plagues like COVID-19 spawned by animal abuse like will pass into history. And looking further ahead, what Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus called “the great slaughterhouse of Nature” can be civilised too. The biohappiness revolution can be extended to the rest of the living world via genome editing, cross-species fertility-regulation and synthetic gene drives. The entire tree of life is programmable. For sure, pilot studies in self-contained mini-biospheres will be prudent. But post-Darwinian ecosystems won’t resemble today’s snuff movie. Post-Darwinian ecosystems will be engines of bliss.
IM: What approach would you recommend for someone that intends to recalibrate their hedonic set-point and live "better than well" in a sustainable way in the current technological paradigm, before the democratization of gene-editing arrives, assuming that all the typical healthy habits (sleep, nutrition, exercise, meaningful social interactions) have been already maxed out?
DP: Most people today have not “maxed out” their genetic potential. Optimising sleep, nutrition and exercise is more often preached than practised. Yet what about depressive people who done everything right and still aren’t happy? Maybe they have also tried nutritional supplements (omega-3 fatty acids, S-Adenosyl-L-Methionine (SAMe), St John’s wort, etc) and worked their way through the officially sanctioned mood-brighteners – “antidepressants” such as the SRRIs, MAOIs, tricyclics, bupropion and so forth. Meditation, cognitive-behavioural therapy and other non-biological interventions hasn’t produced lasting relief. Nothing works. The set-point of their hedonic treadmill is too simply low.
It’s tragic. I’ve no easy answers to the hardest cases. One of the biggest challenges to pharmacological (as distinct from genetic) remediation and enhancement is that the neurotransmitter system most directly involved in hedonic tone is the opioid system. We are all born dysfunctional opioid addicts with cravings to fix. Alas, exogenous opioids have well-known pitfalls for users, their families and society at large. That said, there is still scope for creative psychopharmacology. For example, the “French” antidepressant tianeptine - a full mu and delta opioid receptor agonist – can be combined with a selective kappa opioid receptor antagonist. (Kappa agonists induce dysphoria.) Also, perhaps add the novel agent LIH383. LIH383 blocks the atypical “scavenger” opioid receptor ACKR3. Blockade of ACKR3 increases the availability of opioid peptides that can bind to classical CNS opioid receptors, thereby increasing their “natural” mood-brightening action. The negative-feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill can be sabotaged. However, this kind of cocktail of creative psychopharmacology is best explored with the aid of a medical specialist. If all else fails, the modern equivalent of “wireheading” would work. Intracranial self-stimulation is not the transhumanist vision of paradise engineering: superintelligent life based on information-sensitive gradients of bliss. Wireheading is clearly a last resort. But no one should be forced to suffer: it’s unethical.Fortunately, future sentience will be blissful.

The author here is clearly referring to a specific cult which we have discussed before here, but to respect his obvious decision to not identify that cult specifically, I'll just say that it's the cult whose most prominent members are the star of the movie Top Gun and the star of the movie Saturday Night Fever.
And the town mentioned, the one that's close to the Soboba Indian Reservation, is also the site of one of the US' largest earthworks projects! TIL! Actually, I already knew that - I used to take the kids out there to their excellent museum of the fossilized mammoth (or is it a mastodon? I always get those mixed up) and giant ground sloths and other extinct megafauna they found in the excavation.

Understanding Codependence as "Soft-Core" Cult Dynamics... ...and Cult Dynamics as "Hard-Core" Codependence

That reminds me - I think we're going to have to discuss the Ikeda cult's fascination with "soft power" a while back (do they still talk about that, I wonder?) and the fact that the Ikeda cult is all "hard power" authoritarianism, but another post.

My two theses here are that 1) cults of personality are little other than large networks of what can range up to an extreme form of codependency, and 2) that understanding the operational dynamics of cults can be highly useful to sponsors and sponsees in Co-Dependents Anonymous, as well as to treatment professionals. One paradigm informs the other in both cases.
I grew up in Hollywood. It's no surprise to me that several large cults of human potential have flourished in soil pre-treated to ardent belief in (excessive) self esteem, black and white / all-or-nothing thinking, obsession with achievement and fame, and submission to dominating authority. Observed through the lens of those four concepts (aka: perfectionism, eitheor dichotomism, narcissism and authoritarianism), the attachment and devotion to what some might call a self-destructive degree of co-dependence near the Soboba Indian Reservation close to San Jacinto, California (described in recent articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker magazine) may make a lot more sense.

While the Ikeda cult hasn't attained anywhere near the level of celebrity adherents, notoriety, or degree of brand recognition that other cult has, the same factors apply.

We may never really know what all it was that the founder of Hollywood's largest cult had been exposed to that empowered his seemingly messianic (and megalomanic?) quest. Read those who deconstructed the individual, family-of-origin and group dynamics of the National Socialist, Red Chinese and North Korean "thought reform" techniques that made Hitler's, Mao's and Kim's (as well as Sun Myung Moon's) cults of personality possible. (Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer, Robert J. Lifton, Edgar Schein, Margaret Thaler, Michael Langone, et al, are listed below).
In so doing, it may be evident that the founder of Hollywood's Cult numero uno (who finally expired in a trailer in a tiny village in north San Luis Obispo County) had access to -- as well as a considerable grasp of -- them. And that, at least in the last half century, he was only one of several who may have gotten his or her guru chops from the folks who produced the grisly spectacles of 1933 to 1953.

Let's not forget the structure, behavior, and effects of the Japanese Imperial war effort during the Pacific War. I don't fault the authors - they have a very specific focus, and our focus is sourced halfway across the globe.

"Over time, I learned that I could escape the awful feelings of being an incompetent, shameful, guilty, submissive little fool by finding someone else in the cult to dominate, embarrass, belittle, humiliate and demoralize so that I could feel competent, capable and prideful. I learned to do whatever it took to please my dominators, including channeling their domination of me onto other little fools."

Welcome to the world of SGI leadership! THIS is the draw for frustrated authoritarians; they can figure out what it takes to climb the organizational leadership ladder and then get a kind of status, social standing, and power that they haven't managed to earn "on the outside".

For me, anyway, the major shortcoming of many of the fine books out there on cults is that they often pay attention to all the drama but fail to connect all the dots.

We connect dots around here. ALL the dots.

Nor did they look into whether the top dogs of the era following the founders' deaths are less, equally or even more schooled in the methods of mind control described by those listed above nearly as deeply as Joel Kramer, Diana Alstad, Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman, Steven Hassan, Kathleen Taylor, Mark Galanter, Arthur Deikman and the redoubtable Charles Tart (on his concept of the "consensus trance").
BUT... I'll take a shot at some dot-connecting here. Because over the more than four decades since I first either fell down the well or at least drank some of the Cool Aid in several of these organizations, I was able to see from outside the paradigm, "box," "cage," "cave," "frame," "trap" or consensus trance what was going on inside with ever greater clarity. (In fact, it was a renown psychologist in Beverly Hills for whom I worked in the late 1970s -- who himself had a relatively benign, and far less dangerous, human potential cult going there -- who kicked me in the shins just hard enough to start my own, real growth process.) (But giving credit where it's really due, it was Jiddu Krishnamurti who first put the dots close enough together for me to get some real traction with them.)
Let's look at the four characteristics I have seen again and again among cult members, leaders and escapees, as well as ardent codependents:

1) Excessive "perfectionism" usually acquired earlier in life.
2) Black and white / all-or-nothing thinking; aka "dichotomism."
3) Blindly ambitious obsession with either achievement and fame or to compensate for earlier invalidation, devaluation, being ignored and/or functionally abandoned; aka "compensatory narcissism."
That sure sounds like an accurate description of Ikeda right there...
4) An unusual willingness submit to dominant authority to get the rewards of attention, validation and esteem from others; aka "authoritarianism."
"Oh, how I adored President Toda! I dream of him-and-only-him night and day! I devoted my whole life to President Toda, and it is only in service to his memory that I continue to courageously fight ceaselessly for WORLD DOMINATION HAHAHAHA!!"

I could have listed credulity, but elected not to do so because it is evident that while many co-dependents and cult members are highly credulous, many others are startlingly given to ardent skepticism; an almost knee-jerk questioning of and/or argument with those who promote propositions that they find dubious. Nevertheless, credulity and skepticism are worth understanding for those who want to comprehend the mentality of many co-dependents and cult members because it points to a particular form of dichotomism.
Neither do I see psychologic paranoia in the behaviors of all co-dependents or cult members. But I have observed it often enough to consider it a high-order correlate. Nor do I see Seligman's "learned helplessness" or Tangney & Dearing's (and Forward's) "toxic shame" in all co-dependents or cult members... but I do see them a lot.
I also see a lot of excessive internalizing (or taking too much responsibility) in both groups, but find some codependents and many cult members to be either externalizing (e.g.: blaming others) or alternatively (and excessively) internalizing and externalizing in a sort of flip-flop / ping-pong fashion. And I see a lot of Van der Kolk's "compulsion to repeat the trauma," but do not (or cannot) see it in enough people of either category to assert that it is universal in either co-dependents or cult members.

Someone was telling me about one of his SGI leaders, a longtime (decades long) member, who had such profound daddy issues that she only dated married men, despite claiming that she seeks marriage and children. And she's in her 50s...

Taking those four one at a time in the frame of their relevance to both cult membership and co-dependence:
Excessive Perfectionism
Too much of a good thing may not be.
Many (most?) of the co-dependents and virtually all of the cult members or former members I have known are (often covertly and/or unconsciously) perfectionistic to the point of at least occasional (if not chronic) obsession with saying and doing what they believe to be "correct," "right," "functional" and/or "appropriate."

Those are definitions of "orthodox", BTW.

Some came from backgrounds that predisposed them to achievement to meet parental expectations; perhaps because their parents were either high -- and proud -- (or low and shame-infected) achievers themselves. Others seem to have dots connecting their current perfectionism with early life experiences with parents who set them up to "try harder" by ignoring, invalidating, abandoning or otherwise devaluing them.
The worst cases, however, tended to have backgrounds with parents who gave paradoxical injunctions; parents who (overtly) said one thing and then (usually covertly) said or did the opposite so that the child was damned if he did and damned if he didn't follow the conflicting -- often overt here and covert there -- instructions. The typical combination of paradoxical injunctions was something like, "Do your best to get rewards from us," and "Do you really expect us to pay any attention?" The child of such parents is often set up (in the fashion of the classic "double-bind") to strive for enough achievement to finally get the attention and approval that still remains out of reach. And the adult child of such parents will often work him- or herself half to death to meet the expectations and requirements of the parental dynamics that remain normalized in the so-called "superego" between his or her ears. (Wickliff's excellent rundown of family dysfunction as a precursor to cult affiliation is more than germane here.)

We've already noted how SGI capitalizes on and exploits people from dysfunctional families:
SGI and Dysfunctional Families
SGI's Narcissistic Families
SGI similarities to abusive relationships - love bombing, manipulation, gas-lighting, and contempt

The manipulation of one's own, perfectionistic moral principles very easily induces (emotional) shame, guilt, remorse, regret and (cognitive) worry and morbid reflection in the minds of those already conditioned, socialized, habituated, accustomed, normalized and institutionalized to these affective) and cognitive states.
Conditioned, socialized, habituated and normalized by their early life experiences to seek approval by being "perfect," such people make terrific (and "highly co-dependent") employees for bosses and employers who care little or nothing about those who backs they climb over to make their own way to the top, regardless of what they say or the minimal (and occasional) rewards they provide to those in the state of anxious attachment. In moderate burnout (before they collapse from stress), they also make fine and dandy salesmen, supporters and slaves for covertly ruthless gurus.

See "I did the right thing by leaving, because I couldn't have 'tried harder' or 'chanted harder' or done 'more responsibilities' by the end - I was absolutely burnt out."

Dichotomism
If there is any one technique of manipulation that stands out for its ubiquity among those who succeed at politics via the building of massive cults of personality, it is all-or-nothing, this-way-or-that, all-good-or-all-bad, black and white thinking. Our culture conditions, socializes, habituates, normalizes and even institutionalizes polarized perception to such an extent throughout childhood that most of us cannot see that we think in terms of "either / or." Researchers estimate that only about five percent of us can be counted upon to regularly see outside the box, frame or paradigm of this possibility or that. Which makes it very easy for politicians, manipulative bosses and gurus to stipulate a choice between two ("obviously") "good" or "bad" opposites. Such stipulation forces the unconscious employee, party or cult member to limit his or her choice to those offered without noticing any others.
Most children are taught by virtually every authority they encounter to "follow the rules" and not to question those rules. The child's natural capacity to simply use his eyes, ears and other senses to tell what is from what is not with respect to anything fairly complex is dulled nearly to the point of extinction by the time he or she is six years old (see Cvencek, Greenwald & Meltzoff, and who knows how many others). From the point of view of the guru, this couldn't be any better. Because -- like any effective politician -- he will present his own explanations of and solutions for life's challenges in either / or terms that exclude all other possibilities.
Compensatory Narcissism
The very word "narcissism" has -- as the result of vernacular usage -- come to mean "too narcissistic for one's own good." The fact that a limited degree of narcissism is actually useful is obvious to those who watch infants set up a fuss to get picked up, fed and otherwise attended to when they are uncomfortable. And those frustrated, learned helpless children who were too often ignored or dismissed when they needed attention usually grow up to be fine candidates for those who understand how easily they can be manipulated by appealing to their healthy, but unmet, narcissistic needs.

Think about how this ties into that popular child-rearing advice to leave a baby screaming in his/her crib in an empty room with the door shut until s/he "learns" to go to sleep when put in the crib.

I am not speaking of the "classic," entitled narcissist who was "spoiled" by overly indulgent parents (though such people do make good cult fodder, as well). I am talking about the adult child of self-absorbed parents who did not get enough attention, and who grows up having collected all manner of ways to compensate for believing him- or herself to be "unwanted," "unnecessary" and "unimportant." Listen to any card-carrying co-dependent for ten minutes, and then tell me that those three words do not describe their unconscious self-concepts. One need only listen to a cult member for a fraction of that time to grasp how obsessed they are with being wanted, necessary, important and significant.

We've noted this before:

Cult members can't just be normal good people; they have to be moral titans, playing out grand heroic roles in an epic cosmic moral melodrama. Many members feel that their lives will be pointless and meaningless if they don't play such grand roles in life — to live an ordinary life and be a normal good person is "merely meaningless, pointless, existence". Source
Authoritarianism
Raised as "victims" on Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle (by alternate "rescuers" and "punishers"), the typical co-dependent -- and cult member -- has formed an unconsciously foreclosed identity as a victim. And he or she will spend the rest of his or her life trying to get out of the victim corner by rescuing... and if rescuing fails, by persecuting and punishing. This (non-sexual) dominance and submission schematic is glaringly obvious in the world of the cult, regardless of whether it is "religious" or not.
(Virtually all cults -- whether they are "religious," psuedo-spiritual or "human potential" -- are set up in a tiered, top-to-bottom hierarchy of relatively more powerful dominators and less powerful submittors; each dominator being submissive to the dominators on the level above. The guru stands at the top of a functional pyramid of increasing dominance from bottom to top and increasing submission from top to bottom.)

Here's a visual.

Because it seems germane at this point, let's take a quick left turn into Trinkner, et al's, work on Baumrind's parenting styles:
"Authoritative parents are both demanding and controlling, but they are also warm and receptive to their children's needs. They are receptive to bi-directional communication in that they explain to their children why they have established rules and also listen to their children's opinions about those rules. Children of authoritative parents tend to be self-reliant, self-controlled, and content.
"On the other hand, authoritarian parents are demanding and highly controlling, but detached and unreceptive to their children's needs. These parents support unilateral communication where they establish rules without explanation and expect them to be obeyed without complaint or question. Authoritarian parenting produces children who are discontent, withdrawn, and distrustful.
"Finally, in contrast to authoritarian parenting, permissive parents are non-demanding and non-controlling. They tend to be warm and receptive to their children's needs, but place few boundaries on their children. If they do establish rules, they rarely enforce them to any great extent. These parents tend to produce children who are the least self-reliant, explorative and self-controlled out of all the parenting styles."
Morality is as waaaaay twisted in the frame-work, paradigm, cave, cage, box or consensus trance of the cult as it was for most co-dependents and cult members in the interpersonal family system of the family in which they grew up. Twisted morality was so effectively -- and covertly -- socialized, habituated and institutionalized in such families of origin that it seems perfectly normal in the cult or severely co-dependent marriage or workplace.
The recovering co-dependent is at somewhat of an advantage here. He or she hears that long grind of "patterns and characteristics of codependence" at every CoDA meeting they attend. (For them, it's a way of working Steps Six and Seven again and again.) Those who arrived at this weblog from at least somewhat informed perspectives on cult dynamics, however, may find themselves more than a little surprised.

 "I judge what I think, say, or do harshly, as never good enough." "I value others’ approval of my thinking, feelings, and behavior over my own." "I constantly seek recognition that I think I deserve." "I have difficulty admitting that I made a mistake." "I need to appear to be right in the eyes of others and will even lie to look good." "I look to others to provide my sense of safety." "I am extremely loyal, remaining in harmful situations too long." "I compromise my own values and integrity to avoid rejection or anger." "I put aside my own interests in order to do what others want." "I am afraid to express my beliefs, opinions, and feelings when they differ from those of others." "I give up my truth to gain the approval of others or to avoid change." "I believe most people are incapable of taking care of themselves." "I attempt to convince others what to think, do, or feel." "I freely offer advice and direction to others without being asked." "I become resentful when others decline my help or reject my advice." "I have to be needed in order to have a relationship with others." "I use charm and charisma to convince others of my capacity to be caring and compassionate." "I use blame and shame to emotionally exploit others." "I adopt an attitude of indifference, helplessness, authority, or rage to manipulate outcomes." "I use terms of recovery in an attempt to control the behavior of others." "I pretend to agree with others to get what I want." 

Tell me you've never seen any of this in a cult.
Codependence, Cult Participation & Complex PTSD
Like co-dependents (only generally even moreso), the devoted cult member displays high allostatic loading (especially see Bruce McEwen's, Sonya Lupien's and Robert Sapolsky's work on this very hot topic in abnormal psychology) and other behavioral presentations of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that usually began in childhood. Generally speaking, this allostatic loading was greatly densified in co-dependent, romantic and workplace relationships, as well as religious and other large group activities that were interpersonally stress-inducing, even if they seemed "normal" to the participant.
My observation is that this allostatic loading is the direct result of what Susan Forward called "emotional blackmail" (in a truly fine book of the same title) by means of the "F.O.G." manipulations of fear, obligation and guilt.
I have observed repeatedly -- via scans of the brain with magnetic resonance imaging and three-dimensional computer-aided tomography -- that those who have been tortured psychologically have brains that function very similarly to those who have been tortured physically, as well as those exposed to violent, military combat. I have seen scans of the brains of those who have been exposed to chronic -- as well as severe acute -- stress and abuse. The histories may be as different as one can imagine... but the limbic systems look pretty much the same: amygdalae and hippocampi that are either grossly over- or under-size owing to over-growth to deal with relentless threat, or excitotoxicity from being on the receiving end.
Over time, the severely co-dependent or cult member may find he or she needs to drink or drug, gamble, exercise, work, volunteer or otherwise distract him- or herself to excess to try to displace the conflict, anxiety, mania and/or depression typical in the traumatic stress that both causes and results from continued, chronic allostatic loading.
Are cult membership or codependence potentially "deadly?" I wish you could see those scans. As well as the statistics on both fast and slow suicide among people with anxiety-, depression- and mania-soaked, complex PTSD induced by having become "learned helpless" victims at the bottom of Karpman's Drama Triangle.
Treatment
Once [programmed] and caught in the vicious cycle of trying to escape from what is causing the problem by indulging in yet more of it, is there a way out? I think so, but only for those (more or less as for anyone who has been obsessed or addicted to a substance or behavior like gambling, workaholism, excessive exercise or sex, or severely codependent relationships) who have moved through denial / pre-contemplation and contemplation / consideration into self-identification / acceptance so that they can move on to commitment / action and maintenance / relapse prevention (see Prochaska & DiClemente on the five stages of addiction recovery).

Those ^ are all linked at the site - I didn't feel like linking them in.

In combination with understanding the fear, obligation & guilt ("FOG") dynamics of cult mind control (e.g.: see above, see Goleman's list of cult danger signs, see Zimbardo's ten lessons from the Milgram studies) have seen the following work for both codependents and cult exiters: Pia Mellody's approach to the 12 Steps of Co-Dependents Anonymous, Albert Ellis's Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy, Aaron Beck's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Stephen Hayes's Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, Stanley Block's Mind-Body Bridging Therapy, and Patricia Ogden's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for Trauma.
Or one can take a look at the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing, yet another of the new wave of reality therapies that re-ground the mind in observing what is, as opposed to what the mind has been trained to believe. See also The 10 StEPs for Recovery from the Consensus Trance and The 10 StEPs to Freedom from Emotional Blackmail.)
But one may have to employ the consciousness-raising, "howzitoworkingforyou?" techniques of motivational enhancement much as they are used in the treatments of substance abuse and behavioral addictions (including severe, unconscious, ardently denied or unseen co-dependence) to break through the first stage of denial / pre-contemplation to get the co-dependent or cult member on the road through contemplation / consideration to self-identification / acceptance of his or her causes and conditions.
Finally, those who may be looking for edification on the causes, conditions, treatment of, and recovery from both co-dependence and cultic thought reform will find an exhaustive list of published resources below. Also see the outline on CARM's website. Source

5 year lurker.. first time poster. There have been a number of posts recently of very fortunate people which have been received with everything from incredulity paired with despair to heartfelt congratulations. What a spectrum of emotion! Accusations of humblebragging have reverberated around the sub and it’s altogether been a little too salty for my liking. Let’s start with the basics:
Graphs
Married, no kids. 30(M), 29(F) Income: $375k. $275k (me), $100k (DW) Net worth: $610k Home equity: $220k Semi-liquid: $390k. Spread across taxable and non-taxable. FIRE Number: $2-2.5 million including HE.
Now that I’m done with my humblebrag, let’s look at what portions of my experience and perspective I can share. If I can do this from my starting point, so can most of us. I am under no doubts that luck has played a large role in my success, but there are number of decisions and risks I took that have been equally important. A number of the seemingly insurmountable barriers that people described are just that.. barriers. You can do it too!
The above is a one-dimensional view. Let’s look at the barriers on the way:

Lower wage job ($25k) in a lower paying country that the US (UK). Check. Degree with poor job prospects (manufacturing). Check. Lower (relatively) income ($75k) in a HCOL (SF Bay area). Single income couple in said area. Check. Student loan debt ($70k). Check Industry that is stagnant, losing jobs and lower paying (manufacturing). Check.

Getting a job I graduated in the middle of the recession (2010). TBH it was the best thing that happened to me. Prior to 2010 I was bottom of my class. The raw, primordial fear that the recession introduced into my life changed me from a skirt chasing Counter Strike: Source addict to one of the library’s most studious residents. I had mistakenly studied manufacturing engineering in university, oblivious to larger global trend of automation and the exodus of manufacturing jobs to low cost locations. It was hard, really hard to get a job. My first job paid decent money, $25k, all things considered. I took any advantage I could get to get it- I had to travel for my interview. When I checked into my hotel room, the receptionist told me that my “colleagues” had already checked in. Thinking on my feet, I asked her who they were and what rooms they were in. Turns out, 2 were there to conduct interviews and were in the bar. I dumped my stuff in my room and headed to the bar. We all joked about what a remarkable coincidence it was when all three of us ended up chatting for a few hours! 100% this is why I got the job over the other 200 applicants- I got to connect with them, on a human level, outside of the interview process.
Finding a profitable area in a waning industry My early professional life was plagued by a sense of impending doom. I knew I had to do something differently if I wanted to avoid building a career in a dead end industry. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t get into a different industry, so I started to look into the areas of manufacturing less likely to go to a cheaper location. Anything where the value is derived from IP (Pharma, medical devices), government contracts (defence) or major capital equipment (trains, planes). I landed a job in medical devices, $35k at a US multinational. At this stage of my life, I lived on $10k a year with a savings rate of ~60%. I didn’t heat my room, never had AC, I never ate out. My food budget was $25 / week for groceries and $20 / week for subsidized meals at work. Video games kept me sane. I studied at night time to pick up certifications in statistics and business to broaden my skillset.
Engineering a relocation In 2012 I went on a business trip to the US. I was dumbfounded. My peers in the States were earning 3x what I was and paying less tax. Not only that, but progression was fast! There were managers and directors in their thirties. I was sick with envy. It was a visceral feeling that hijacked my emotions for weeks! And like that, I decided I HAD to go the US. It was the only option for me. I applied for every single posting I could find in my company and was uniformly rejected. New grad with 2 years’ experience? No chance. Then I found out that an important VP was visiting our plant. I begged my friend, an administrative assistant, for his schedule. She eventually relented. Pro tip: Admins are gatekeepers and have huge amounts of important information. Always be on their good side! I researched his career and then “happened” to be in the elevator at the same time as him and delivered an elevator pitch. Just like that, he scheduled a follow up call with me, which led to some other calls. 3 weeks later I left everything behind and landed in San Francisco airport. Salary was $74k.
Stuck in rut, but still saving Fast forward 3 years and I’m horribly unhappy. The manufacturing site I’m in has 30%+ attrition and has laid people off. It is disproportionately staffed by low paid visa workers who cannot leave. Compensation is generally 20-40% below market. Thankfully, I did not sacrifice my life for work and I’m in a very happy and meaningful relationship with my future wife, who kept me sane. We were living together and subsisting on one income as she was in graduate school. Total expenses for 2013 and 2014 were $40k and $42k respectively. This was very challenging in the Bay Area. I don’t know how parents support children on that level of income here. They must be budget ninjas! We had a good deal on rent ($1,650 for a studio) which we got by being the first at every showing (usually 7AM), and being willing to sign a lease on the spot.
We got married ($16k, 80 people). Happiest day of my life. $16k was a small price to pay for such an amazing day. We made all the decorations and married at a restaurant- cheaper as their business model is to provide food and seating together. Surprising how expensive it is to pay two different companies for each separately. My biggest regret was paying the included 18% service fee but leaving no additional tip. There’s being frugal and there is being cheap. I cringe every time I think of it as the staff were fantastic. DW had $70k of debt from her undergrad and master’s degrees. Refinanced at 6.8% and put everything we could towards it. DW got an excellent job in healthcare, income is relatively fixed around $100k for.. well forever. Her job and income are much more stable than mine, which is nice.
Know your worth and take risk Green card came through (did the paperwork ourselves to save $3k+ in lawyer’s fees) and I started job hunting. I was desperate to leave. I was shouted out, called names, lied to and promised a promotion that never came. I knew I was in the hottest job market in the country, one where big risk is rewarded and failure is accepted. I found a company that I really liked the look of. Product was good, financials were healthy and growth prospects were excellent. I found a contact who worked there and got her to refer me instead of me applying. Why? Interviews are an extended negotiation. Having a narrative that “they found you” gives you much more leverage than the other way around. Interviewed, they made me an offer as a level individual contributor with a 20%+ pay increase. I turned it down. What? Yup, I turned it down. When you are negotiating, it is important to know your worth. We had a NW of ~$140k at the time, so I knew I could quit my job and be unemployed if I had to so I took the gamble they’d offer me something better. Two months passed and they rang me back to say they had changed their organization structure around to create a management position for me and offered me the job, I took it. Total comp that year for me was $130k.
Jumping ahead to now, I’ve been through two promotions and the company has done very, very well. Salary is $155k, the rest is bonus and equity. Still in manufacturing, compensation can be good in any industry. It’s just a question of where (or how high) you have to go in a company to find it. Average compensation sucks for most in manufacturing.
TL;DR and general advice:
Everyone reading this has decent analytical and financial skills (thank you FIRE community). These are real skills, parlay them into your work.
Learn to read a balance sheet and P&L account. Be mindful of who you work for by understanding their product, market and financials. It is much, much easier to progress in a growing company.
Focus on value and impact. Don’t focus on the task you are doing. Seems simple, but it is amazing how many people do something because they’ve been told to do so without understanding what they are trying to achieve. Pursue further education to do so.
Luck is important. The ability to recognize opportunity and take advantage of it is even more important. Or “creating” your own lucky situations. See above examples.
Relocate if necessary.
Make sure your spouse has shared values. Mine does and everything we do is a team effort!
No barriers are insurmountable, it is just a question of it of what it takes to overcome it and if it’s worth it. If you think you can’t do something, you can’t.
Edit: Some thoughts on skills and doing MSc's or Phd's. True value tends not to come from deep knowledge of one skill, but the intersection of several. It is much rarer and you can add much more value as a result. Rather than become an expert in something, I've gone around and picked up a few complementary things and built an extremely competitive skillset.
Edit: Appreciate all the kind comments. I'm just a regular dude, I'm not anything special. I never, ever thought I'd break 100k in income. I use to despair at how unachieveable the salaries I'd see in this sub were. Regular people can chase FIRE and be successful. That's what this community is about. Anyone can do it!

By Request my TL;DR Posted in comments
This is an epic post of ridiculous proportions. But I wanted to be thorough in getting across what I've been through, where it started, what I've done to try and stop and what seems to be working for me right now.
Multiple rehabs, meetings and therapy.. I came to the conclusion that a physical problem within my brain (this IS a mental illness) isn't going to be cured by talking it out or hugging. Something is seriously wrong because I cannot 'choose' to stop. I have lost the ability to say no. And that was terrifying.
So I researched things myself, a lot of self experimentation and some clues which led to successfully improving my cognitive functioning enough to make the choice again.
While it will never go, it has gotten better!
Apologies for the length. I wrote it in a stream of consciousness, so I will try and edit it down tomorrow morning. I guess I wanted to include a lot so that people could relate if they are having problems with constant, chronic relapsing, even after treatment and are feeling like there is no hope.
Well.. have you tried EVERYTHING? I did.. I didn't even mention the Ibogaine treatment I did. Pretty much mentioned everything else though.
Good luck getting through this.. see you on the other side.
I began trying to stop using Heroin only 6 months after I started using it. That was over a decade ago. I was instantly addicted. The first day I tried it, led into the second day of using it. I had spent my life savings, at 27, I had the deposit for a home with my girlfriend. Well, my ex-girlfriend of 6 years. It ended because my weird drug interests became too much for her, and I don't blame her. This was even before heroin - I had been addicted to GBL and valium. I had primed myself for addiction and didn't even know it. I managed to quit those drugs with relative ease, but the breakup left me so empty, heroin found me one night and filled that hole.
Just 6 months after starting I began an insane spiral of disgust at myself for the things I couldn't stop doing. After the money dried up, that first withdrawal hit, I still have never experienced anything like it. Virtually unlimited high quality heroin (this was over a decade ago, before Fentanyl, during the Iraq war, soldiers were bringing back virtually pure product into the UK.
THAT withdrawal, it almost killed me.
Anyway..
Since then, I've been to 8 rehabs and all of them were abstinence based and believed that coming to terms with an underlying trauma, or changing your personality, or dealing with shit were the way to deal with being an addict.
This is the best the world of medicine has to offer. Eventually I would try some bizarre alternative therapies too, suffice to say, there is no cure for addiction. But for me, just being able to say no a day at a time would be a start.
Every councillor I've had has tried to tell me that the relationship with my mother or father was a factor, or that I had a trauma I had forgotten.. all these presentations and talking sessions and endless analogies about cause and effect. I just didn't feel it applies to me. I had a great childhood, I was a happy person. But the part of my brain that made decisions, weighed up the pros and cons and did my future outcome planning - was broken or non-existant. I wanted to feel good, I pursued that feeling regardless of knowing it would be bad, knowing the outcome and doing it anyway.
I decided that it was a mental health issue, but that all addicts are on a spectrum. I mean, the 8% (yes... EIGHT PERCENT) reported success rate of treatment centres says it all really. That is no better than chance. People are spending 10-30k a month on something that has less than a 1 in 10 chance of working. No matter how hard you work at it.. and Holy Shit, I wanted it.. I was fucking SICK of being SICK.. Throwing year after year away financially, socially, having no career, et. etc.
So, I worked my ASS off. Every single time as soon as the withdrawal finished in treatment, I took advantage of everything I was allowed to in those places and more. I forced myself to quit smoking, to eat PERFECTLY, to go to the gym, I even got a special pass from the centre so I could wake up at 6am and go to Hot Yoga every morning and go running in the evenings. I figured, if I was going to get addicted to something, it might as well be health and exercise.. I did what they said and abandoned my pre-conceived notions of everything - after all, when they said my thinking didn't work, they were right, so I let them brainwash me and do some of my thinking for me. I chose a higher power, I decided to try and believe there was a God, despite being a lifelong atheist.
And what happened.. after a few weeks out of rehab, looking and feeling awesome. I just had a craving and went with it. Immediately falling back into old habits, feeling miserable and undoing everything I had built up.
I was the winner in that rehab, people looked up to my commitment. I quoted shit from the AA/NA literature. I was a spiritual guru and every evening when I was doing my diary, I kept myself in check. Not to be arrogant, not to let success go to my head (How can staying away from drugs that fuck you up be successful, most of the population does it just fine..) every person that worked there said 'you got this!'. I did 120 meetings in 90 days.. I wanted it.. I wanted it.... so, why did I throw it away every single time. At the beginning of every new rehab, where that sentence of 1-3 months stretches out in front of you and you say to yourself 'well, you've done it again. You're back.. here.. again'.
My last rehab, I walked it. Everything was so easy. I didn't care at all. I had no expectations of doing well after I left. I took it a day at a time and before I knew it, I was back at the gym, eating well and got a bit more clean time under my belt. But I was scared.. I'd done this so many times before, I could run my own rehab centre I had absorbed so much of the way they speak. I've done an insane amount of meetings.. It seemed to me, there is a spectrum of addicts. Those that go to rehab, get it first time and are fine forever more. There are a few that it takes a few times to click.. and then there are the chronic relapsers, like me.
I promise you, I am not half assing. I am now as equally sick of being clean and the effort required to maintain that for me as I am using the drugs and being miserable. I want to feel normal, like I have choices, not like everything is a fighting battle that I need to check with a sponsor whether I am doing the right thing.
It took me months just to deprogram and de-indoctrinate myself from the cult like thinking of meetings. If thats how I have to live, I don't know if I can take that. Is that ungrateful, is that selfish.. is that evil to think that there is help and I am throwing it back in their faces because I don't think hugging and step work make a blind bit of difference. It's not professional, its not scientific, its got no statistics. Its a revolving door where people come for the therapy of people to moan to or if you're an egomaniac, to inspire by saying how wonderful things are for them..
I don't want any of it. I JUST want a regular brain that doesn't seemingly have no willpower at all. Even if I got well and had to think through everything I ever chose to do just to be sure I don't go off the rails - that defect keeps me awake at night. Existential crisis about the nature of free will and consciousness.
Anyway.. I've got my PhD in addiction through living this hell on earth. I've always been an addict.. it started with collections as a young kid. Obsessive stuff.. stickers, games, my music collection (without going in to specific details about just how insane my collections are - I starved myself for months to save up enough lunch money as school to buy the first 1x CD Copier so I could buy CDs, copy them and take them back for a refund. I was encoding MP3's to the biggest hard drive money could buy at the time (7GB) each song took 45 minutes to rip and encode on my 66Mhz machine. I bought an ISDN line so I could download MP3s at twice the speed of a 56k modem and 5x the price!
Blah blah.. etc etc.. It went from obsessions, to weed, making myself into the stereotypical stoner, to mushrooms (the obsession with that experience led to some extremely weird cocktails and experiences that distorted my view of reality for months at a time) to something I never thought I would do or had any interest in.. Heroin. But it grabbed me and held me and would not let go - immediately.
But my obsession with science and learning never stopped either. I've always done well at school because I over-researched. over-worked.. went ahead in the book because I am an anxious and impatient person through and through.
I do feel like I have a PhD in addiction. By living it and researching it. I have folders and folders of statistics, studies, drug trials, psychology results..
I came here to try and convince you of my story and my place on the scale of addicts. I definitely don't want to use, but I am a chronic relapser. It has got me into trouble so many times. Times when I thought.. finally.. everything is okay. No drug debts, a happy family, no impending court cases, nothing hanging over my head.. to 2 days later, I've got dealers living in my apartment, I owe money, I'm being threatened, I haven't paid my bills and I'm sick.. I need the drugs just to stop thinking about the mess that drugs got me into, and to stop myself asking 'why.. why did you do this to yourself AGAIN..' and having no good answer. Knowing exactly what was going to happen and doing it anyway. I've had so much experience seeing what using drugs does to me, I get a brief high and a comedown that manifests in life altering disasters and poor choices.
Just believe me.. there is something wrong with me and the things that make no difference are..

• therapy
• praying
• spirituality and meetings
• Just Say No! / Think it through!
• maintenance drugs
• pretty much anything on offer in the pitiful excuse for a health system or places designed to help addicts.

What does work.
If anyone is interested, I can link the myriad articles, studies etc. I mentioned and have cross references to find the collieries and what self experimentation I have done to determine what effects it has on me.
I notice everything my brain does. I have done so much yoga, meditation and mindfulness work that I know just what sort of space my brain and thoughts are in.
It is my belief that the addiction is progressive. Many people might be in that perfect 8% that get well from a trip to rehab (or quit themselves) because they haven't pruned every single neuron in their brain to point towards 'Go get drugs' as the response to virtually every thought you can have. There is some hope in reducing (but never completely rewriting - it never goes away) that cognitive outcome.
The ability to think more clearly and 'think it through' is a state of mind that is on the fence between 'no chance addict' and 'able to recover'.
There have been times when I get a craving and I am already ringing a dealers doorbell, no thinking inbetween. I knew what I wanted and there was no internal discussion whatsoever.
I know, that there have also been times where the same thought has sat, circling in my mind for a good hour before I gave in. Meaning that it can be pondered and I can say no.
One weird thing that I do, is take it out of my hands completely. Knowing that my decision if I take to long thinking will always lead to a relapse, is to make crazy deals with myself, like 'You can only cop a bag of heroin, if when you look at your watch, its an even number of minutes'. Shit like that... More often than not however, I'll play best of 3 and end up going anyway.
I've tried every 'think your way out of this disease' possible and none of them work.
However, I mentioned self experimentation..
I tried every herbal supplement known to man. From fringe science stuff like turmeric to neurochemical precursors to serotonin like 5-HTP.
I feel like I've written far too much anyway and nobody will have made it down to this point.. but..
After MUCH and I do mean MUCH experimentation and careful mindfulness about the way my brain feels and works.. I firmly believe that addiction, once programmed in after you've gone too far for some period of time, cannot ever be unwritten, but it CAN be mitigated. For the chronic relapsers, such as myself (and please, feel free to comment if you are close to me, I would feel better. I know there are many people that just get it first time, struggle 'a bit', only been using a couple years now they're in recovery for the past 10.. I don't diminish your struggle. But I am envious that your ability to think straight about this insanity, came somewhat easier than for the people at the other end of the scale that will fuck over their own parents after watching them cry and you hug them saying you'll never do it again, pickpocketing them as you hug them goodbye..
Now, for me to get to the place where I can at least consider my actions rather than skip over that part and simply wake up in a dumpster, there must be something preventing that.
Saying I tried all different chemicals.. I did. I even tried antidepressants. They DO NOT work for me at all. I'm saddened by all of this life I have wasted, but weirdly, I'm not depressed. There is a difference. Looking into what receptors are affected by SSRIs, its all about serotonin. However, there are actually 3 main neurotransmitters that work together. When one goes up, others follow to compensate. They are, Serotonin, Dopamine and Glutamate. The reason that anti-depressants work on some people, not others or take weeks to start working is because they are targeting the wrong chemical. Extra serotonin does nothing for me. But give it a few weeks and I feel a change. Which makes me believe I should be looking at other neurotransmitters.
I don't believe I have a problem with dopamine either, as I don't have parkinsons symptoms (movement disorder etc.) which is a sign of low dopamine. It's part of the 'pleasure/reward' system and while heroin hijacks it completely, after the withdrawal, the system should settle down.
Which leaves - glutamate. There are a few ways to affect the glutaminergic system, but one chemical that is being trialled for serious depression and doesn't mess around with the Serotonin or Dopamine systems is... Ketamine.
Yes, its been in the news quite a lot in psychology and science areas because a single dose seems to reverse and undo serious depression the same day for up to 6 months at a time.
Now, while I said that I don't have depression, glutamate does a hell of a lot more and is related to inflammation. Remember that, its a key point that I will come back to.
So, I decided to do a controlled experiment with ketamine. Now, you may think.. an addict, doing drugs.. Sure. That's logical. The weird thing is, if I am using something as directed, as stated on the bottle, for medical purposes or any reason other than to change the way I feel / get high.. I do not abuse it.
That's what always upset me about militant rehab centres or meetings that say 'ABSTINENT AS ALL COSTS' Even if you're dying in a road accident and require painkillers, you must refuse them because they'll make you relapse.
I don't believe a word of it. Are you telling me women have to have babies with no aid because they'll relapse the day after if they get a taste of it again.
No, for me its always been about motivation. I don't like who I am, I want to feel different.
I did say earlier that I don't think working on myself in therapy made any difference - I don't. I've worked on myself, I like myself, but I'm left with a compulsive disorder after trying to mitigate those feelings for so long.. So long its lost its original motivation and is simply an out of control vice now.
What was the result of Ketamine. I stopped using for a couple of months, I had thoughts of it that were easily dismissed, it made no real impact on my mood, except things obviously started to get better as soon as I stopped using, which made me happy!
It didn't last however.. but that was an interesting result. For a long time I had been so lost in my own spinning mind of disjointed worry, idiotic notions and outcomes unplanned for, I had forgotten what it was like to have that calmness. Where I could make decisions again, where drugs didn't rule me.
An interesting result though.
I went back to the drawing board and continued researching Glutamate. Also, the word inflammation had come up a hell of a lot during much of the reading I had been doing. I didn't understand it, so I spent a few months getting into what it was all about and what it caused..
And holy shit. Here is where I feel I've come across something really important. Do not misunderstand regarding the problems this can cause. This isn't just swollen hands, no.
While it can cause arthritis, this simple reaction to an environmental trigger affects all areas of the body and the knock on effect is an illness related to that part of the body.
One of the most profound statements I came across looking into this was "Modern medicine often treats the symptoms of an illness until the problem abates rather than treat the underlying cause'.
That seriously hit home.. Many diabetics simply take insulin in order to continue living the life they had previously. Whatever you think about 'fad diets' such as Ketogenic, it has had effects on reversing diabetes by removing the cause of the problem (sugar) rather than simply treating it. While keto may be extreme (no carbs, no sugar) it appeared that sugar was a prime source of inflammation and disease with the body.
This is a short but excellent article from Harvard Med regarding inflammation being the common thread behind many, many illnesses.
Okay, so, I'm not sure how well I explained that. But from research, it appears that the brain can be seriously impaired via inflammatory processes. Leading to dementia later in life if left unchecked, but more importantly, can mimic the symptoms of obsessions and addictions.
I wonder, if I am on the spectrum for people that are sensitive to this effect. While genetically I may have been off to a worrying start with the way I obsessed in childhood, there was no guarantee that I would end up being addicted to drugs - however, once I was primed, my risk/reward system was hijacked and all roads lead to heroin.
Then, I'm sure a terrible diet, no exercise, no sleep and just about every unhealthy decision I could make was causing all sorts of poor reactions in my body.. and every year, getting older, it was getting harder and harder to feel like there was any hope. My thoughts were looking less and less like my own and I had given up giving up. Rehabs were becoming tedious when I knew the outcome and lost hope. The only thing out there that gave me any sort of comfort, was thinking that I was smart enough to work this out by myself.
I honestly felt like I had given it my all (certainly all my money to snake oil salesmen anyway) and these so-called 'solutions' that the government relied on just to be able to say 'help exists out there for addicts of all kind' (To me, food, drugs, sex, gambling.. its all the same thing. It's not the high that is the problem, its the inability to change your decision to do whatever it is you can't stop doing. Once you're locked into that, like gravity, nothing you can do will prevent falling for it. Again and again and again.
I felt like it was up to me.
I'd tried exercise on its own and it gave me a great boost in confidence and motivation. It wouldn't stop me from using, but in my day to day living, if I felt better, I couldn't argue that a great feeling in my body was a good thing. I'd also gotten addicted to exercise. I'd began a routine of an hour, but then slowly added more and more running, weights, machines that if I wasn't doing 2-3 hours a day I would get anxiety attacks thinking that if I took a day off, I'd relapse. As I said, I knew exercise wasn't keeping the problem away, just at bay. I'd replaced one obsession with another and it was becoming unhealthy..
I'd changed my diet to what I believed to be healthy. I was eating a lot of fruits, whole grains, the general food pyramid but with more vegetables as I was trying to lose weight too. Because I never had money for food while using, I used to pocket chocolate in most shops I would visit and live off that. It was suicide. I wasn't fat, but not having protein or adequate vitamins, I had lost definition and my skin looked bad.
After some further reading, another relapse, another detox. I decided to try and reduce inflammation. (Note - inflammation is not swelling, I'm not talking about my feet hurting after a 10k run, this is an internal issue relating to cell tissue - check the link above to get more of your head round it).
I was willing to try anything at this point.
I decided to go Keto. Cut out absolutely all sugar and carbohydrates (I'm quite sure limited good quality carbohydrates are important occasionally, but I also read that this diet is safe - I had to make sure of that if I was going to try a long term experiment. After making sure I was getting everything I neeeded vegetable wise, I made sure my energy intake was coming from fatty products like avacado, quality fatty meats, fatty fish like salmon etc. I worked hard. Many keto people wax lyrical about the joy of eating a block of cheese a day. While that it technically keto, I don't believe it is in the spirt of healthy eating either)
My parents were in tear again, watching me destroy myself and they offered to take me away from it all in order to try and get a fresh start. They booked a last minute, inexpensive cruise with all you can eat buffet on board. Which meant I could pick and choose my food and not have to annoy restaurants!
Not that I ate for the first 3 days. After we set sail, withdrawal kicked in hard and I was just sick, couldn't keep anything down, shivering, sweating.. Slowly I pulled it together and had a really great time actually, despite the no energy. By the end, I managed to keep up with my 70 year old parents, but only because it felt like I was dragging small weights on every limb instead of the tractor tyres there at the start.
By the end of the first week eating Keto some weird stuff happened. I wasn't fat to begin with, but I dropped almost 12lb in weight. I was peeing ALL the time. This is the infamous water weight that these fad diets think you'll believe will continue. It does not. Your weight continues to decline, but at a much more sensible weight. However, what this did show, was that due to inflammation, your body tends to hold onto large amounts of water. The cause of which being the processing of sugar and carbohydrates with insulin.
I know I should be feeling worse. But a fog lifted from my brain. I felt clear. I could swear I was hearing things better, that my vision looked sharper. People I met laughed at my jokes! I had a quiet confidence - and drugs entered my mind, I won't lie. But, they also left.
I chalked a lot of it up to a psychosomatic effect - the fun of being away (except, I was still sick and withdrawing. Something under all that did feel different).
Upon return, I surprised myself. I didn't go and get high 3 minutes after throwing my suitcase on the bed. I sat, calmly and put some music on. Music always being such a huge passion of mine, I burst into tears having not listened to anything for SO long because my thoughts had been so desperately weird and I was never in the mood. The feeling of clarity didn't leave me either. It never got stronger, it wasn't like I had such laser like focus I could beat a chess grandmaster, but I was closer to what I would call 'normal' that ever before.
Again, instead of walking out the house to 'that part of town'. I joined the gym.
I didn't obsess. I got a job and things were sensible.
I got complacent. I began eating the free chocolate in the break room at my job. (This was the highest paying job I have ever had. A computer company. 6 months training just to begin working with their software. I breezed through the interview with 10 other people, completed the training a month early and was top guy within 2 months, winning every work prize going - trips out to racecourses to drive supercars, free beer and chocolate endlessly)
I forgot to mention. I quit drinking (I never really drank anyway, never did enough for me..) but its not really compatible with keto anyway.
The incentives from this major company (I won't give it away, but suffice to say, it was among the top 40 companies to work for in the UK last year) were nearly all alcohol, chocolate and sugar related. To get people to come in early there was free sugary cereal, lunchtime free choc/cereal bars, do the most work that month, help the most customers .. winning = sugar, was the takeaway from that.
Am I blaming the company for slowly caving? Yeah, I kinda am. As an addict (or possible alcoholic) I don't think that giving people without questioning their preferences wine, beer and everything sugary imaginable every month is either ethically acceptable or healthy in any way. My god, I just had a flashback. Almost everybody that worked there was horribly overweight - verging on morbidly. I was proud of looking the way I did.
It was easy to resist at first because I got to observe monkey feeding time often, which put me off. The token gay guy in the office baked chocolate cakes, muffins, frosted things, glazed things, sugar overload.. constantly, and left them on the centre table. He used to Email:All [Subject: I've baked treats for everyone!] The fatties used to wheeze over to the table and take fistfuls of cookies and slices of cake to smear over their faces and drop crumbs into their keyboards. Then complain they couldn't lose weight to me on their lunch break while the tried to look dedicated eating a few rounds of toast or something their wanted people to perceive as healthy and that they were just unfortunate. Lady, I'm a heroin addict. I see through you, because you are me, you just like a different chemical in your veins.
I was doing well.. I was doing so well I had actually upset people by winning most of the monthly prizes. I often gave them away though as I couldn't have anything to do with them.
But as I was given more responsibility. I began coming in earlier, I wanted eggs and bacon in the morning or a meat and cheese platter at lunch, but everything either offered or given to me was completely incompatible with what I was trying to achieve.
I slowly began to cave.
My reasoning.. "Yeah, this diet makes me feel pretty good and I'm not using any more - but surely it's just another obsession"
It didn't feel like an obsession. It felt like I was so rocksteady in my control that I could say no to things. And that was a weird feeling, it almost set me off balance thinking about it.
It took less than a month before I had put on about 15-20lb. It turns out I'm so awesome I can turn my hand to any addiction. Sugar.. as it turns out, if it is all around you, at all times and free - my brain tells me that it might as well be consumed (and it promises to give me a little hit of dopamine in return).
The brain fog came down like a British summer and my numbers became totally erratic. My manager called me in to see her a few times. I was making some weird mistakes too. I felt sleepier in the afternoons, actually nodding off once and a co-worker actually kicked my chair as I walked past to save me from the boss.
I had clearly lost the power of choice. It took about 2 more weeks before I was back using again.
I was fired a month after that for.. well, being a smacked out employee no longer giving his best, oh and leaving a bunch of drug paraphernalia and burnt foil in the bathroom didn't help.
I was called in, questioned and fired on the spot. All in all it took less than 3 minutes from 'A word please...' to 'Clean out your desk and leave now'.
I'm sure people knew, I'm sure people talked. Not one person said goodbye. I was crushed. I had attempted friendships, but the tolerance of drugs and addicts amongst the straight laced office workers is virtually non existent. That girl I fancied on reception was out of the picture now I guess. My dream of having a relationship for the first time in years was dashed too.
I drifted further into it and burned all my savings on heroin again.
I forgot what I had learned and began to believe there was no hope again.
By a miracle chance, I was offered rehab again. I took the opportunity, not to listen to what they had to say (by the 8th time, there's nothing new they can teach you. I'm sure the NA literature even says that you must become 'teachable' and humble in order to accept the program. Whatever that means. I just don't want to be mentally ill anymore. You think schizophrenics need real medication or a group that says a prayer and a spiritual program is all you need.
Like I said. It's a spectrum. Some people need therapy, I did not. Some people get it first time. I did not. Some people need a program and way of living because they never had the opportunity to learn to live right, either due to childhood issues or just been using so long they forgot how to live. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, don't just keep trying expecting a different result - that truly is insanity, try something different until it works.
I used my time in rehab to get a professional detox, spend time in the gym and alter my eating again. Although, this time I found it extremely difficult to stop binging on junk and sugar. I seemed I had picked up an additional obsession. That was a strange realisation as it had been so easy before.
Eventually, I did get a few days under my belt and then I began feeling the mental haze, the fogginess lift. My sleep improved. It became like clockwork. Something I have always struggled with (and something that also causes inflammation. Sleep cleans the brain of damaged proteins. It's thought that buildups of uncleaned brain chemical leftovers can contribute to dementia)
I was falling asleep faster than ever, waking up at exactly the same time and jumping out of bed for the gym.
That was in January this year. I got out in February and not wanting to feel restricted, I have introduced, very slowly, certain sensible foods into my diet. I eat no sugar at all, but complex high GI carbs, I eat sparingly. No fruit (fructose) but loads of vegetables. I wouldn't give my diet a fad name, but it works for me and I want for nothing! The thought of actually eating something sweet after this long actually makes me feel a bit sickly.
I have to say, the time before when I caved, that first bite made my teeth hurt. My taste buds had become so much more sensitive, tuned to the sweetness of red pepper or tomato - going back to pure sugar I realised how accustomed to it we have all become, its in everything and its lethal (seriously). I guess there's a reason its a white powder!
So, this is the story of what worked for me. How much I tried and what I came to understand what was wrong with me. There is something I am sensitive to in the foods around me that are affecting my body and my mind in a way that prevents me from thinking clearly - and at its peak effect, totally destroys my ability to make rational choices about substances that will kill me - that I don't even want, but the neural pathways laid down over years of abuse have become so streamlined that using drugs has become more of an instinct, a muscle memory, rather than a thought process.
I must say, I haven't stopped working on this problem.
If you want to improve your chances of success when it comes to getting and staying clean. If you have tried antidepressants and don't feel they quite fit right, but were perhaps tickling the right area. May I suggest experimenting on yourself.
Ketamine for me, I actually quite enjoy. If I had access to it all the time and wasn't treating it like an important test to determine if something was affecting my brain negatively (glutamate not being processed correctly, potentially due to inflammation) then I most certainly would be addicted to that too.
Now, what has the feeling of control given me back - am I cured?
No. As I have tried to reiterate, those mental pathways are etched in stone and aren't going anywhere. Whether genetic (certainly my family has this problem in abundance in various forms - from shopping to gambling and drink), whatever the trigger, the problem lives within me now, so I must remain vigilant. But my day to day life I have thought about what I used to be like less and less. If I feel like thinking about it, I try and do it in the safe environment of a meeting - where you can relate to people that used to or still have serious drug issues. I'll pop in once a month or so.
I know I am not cured, it's still early days (10 months or so). However, I really feel like after all this time, I'm on the right track. It's different this time, it's not just me had enough, I have clear empirical evidence that something alters the way I think and that I should avoid it - this in turn lets me stay sober through choice, not by fight.
The bottom line to all of this.. and I wish I could go back and edit this outline into a more amusing, better punctuated and more streamlined saga than this barrel of monkeys I poured onto the keyboard... but I just had to get it out to see if anybody related and if it might help someone else.. is that..
SUGAR
Does seriously seem to be a massive trigger in causing and maintaining certain addictions (clearly obese people have chosen the actual cause as their actual drug too).
Some people I have seen make no change to their diet and do really well in recovery. This isn't a one size fits all solution as clearly different things work for different people - but I see a lot of young people (stubborn and impulsive) actually do better than the older people. Is this because they are more tolerant to sugars and have done less damage that long term users that have had bad diets?
I'm not saying I have all the answers. Nor that this is even correct. But I don't suffer placebos gladly. If I don't get absolutely blasted out of my mind or feel an effect when I take something, I don't accept it as having done anything. If the box says 'take no more than 1 pill every 12 hours', or course, I'll eat 6 because I want the effect to work and be 3x stronger than those wimpy doctors suggest. Whether its a narcotic or just antibiotics.. my mind always says 'more is always better'.
I absolutely feel a difference when my body is running on a different form of energy (in case you were wondering, if you take carbohydrates away, your body produces ketones and runs the bodies energy from the breakdown of fat. It feels totally different. Ever eaten a huge pizza or pasta and felt sleepy. Well, I believe there is a low level of that feeling constantly if you're running on glucose for energy.
Try it for yourself, see if you feel any different. Give it a chance.
For me, it was a silver bullet.
Top ups and supplements:
My parents read a lot about the things I was suggesting to help myself. They've been rather amazingly supportive, even in my worst times - I have some Ketamine that they look after and I have told them to administer 10mg per hour for 3 hours once every 3 months. Which is roughly the amount of time that it seems to clean everything up for. Eating badly of course makes it worse, faster. But I've kept up a strict and excellent diet which makes me feel different, sleep different, think different.. its quite dramatic in my case.
And, finally...
CBD
I think that some people without issues as extreme as me, might get away with being able to just take a couple drops of CBD under their tongue once a day.
I've been looking into CBD. I suggest you Google CBD+ your own search terms.. 'Withdrawal','addiction','inflammation'..
Its fascinating. Don't buy cheap.. it matters. I know, I tested them all. Yes, it will help with sleep and anxiety during withdrawal. Studies suggest a single dose and prevent relapse for a few months at a time (again, suggesting it is having an effect in the body that was causing an impairment in thinking and that having relieved that issues, the subject can decide correctly whether to relapse or not. After the effect is mitigated, the issue comes back)
I believe it reduces inflammation. DO NOT expect to feel anything. The effect is subtle. But I noticed that I was calmer, slept somewhat better and it integrated perfectly into the diet. Whatever cutting poisonous sugar did, this continues to do also.
I'd say that it is essential for addicts and that they should be prescribed it as a continued aid to their recovery. Actually, it should be prescribed while the person is still using as it may trigger the desire to quit also.
Regarding CBD oil.. There is a vast range of this stuff. From cheap and useless, to $150 per small bottle. I splashed out and decided to try one of the most expensive 2000mg CBD per bottle
Oh, and like I said. Drugs depend on context and intent. Smoking medical low THC high CBD weed is absolutely allowed in my opinion for people that will always 'need' something to help with their anxiety or as an outlet. Simply. Not everyone has the time to become a mindfulness, meditation guru. People don't want to give up their careers because of the mantra 'If it gets in the way of my recovery, it's gone..'.
I'm sorry, but I want choice. Isn't that the point of recovery, to gain the ability to choose back.
Of course, meditation I recommend (Stress, again, major cause of inflammation), yoga even more!
Although every rehab I've been to has said 'abstinence is the only way'. (Incidentally, there's always been some 17 year old kid who's parents have dropped him off at rehab from smoking too much weed.)
Unfortunately, weed in places that haven't legalised it, we are more likely to end up buying the super strong skunk (high THC, low CBD) does seem to be causing mental health issues because THC is almost psychotic at high doses with no CBD to balance the effect. This is why its so important to legalise it - choose the variety that works for you. I don't want to be blasted out of my head, I want to feel relaxed and I just don't know what I'm buying on the street.
I guess that's it. If you made it this far - I got everything I think I ever wanted to say off my chest. I will go back and edit this down over the next day or so.
Hope you related.
Hope you got hope.
The standard model of recovery simply does not fit me. I needed more, a more drastic change, my brain is fundamentally impaired.
Will you be in the grand 8% of people that graduate rehab and succeed. Lets face it.. fucking unlikely.
If you don't think its going to work for you. Find your own solution. Augment. Supplement. Build your own recovery.

http://cancerherald.com/tobacco-kills-15-people-every-minute-and-just-one-cigarette-has-the-potential-to-cause-cancer-via-carcinogens-binding-to-dna/
It may seem obvious that smoking is bad and that using tobacco has the potential to cause cancer, but wherever I turn I see people smoking. It seems that a major fraction of the population has simply ignored the obvious scientific data which shows that smoking is deadly, and The Cancer Herald hopes to shock smokers back into reality by discussing how exactly cigarettes cause cancer and how many people tobacco kills, so that the dangers of smoking are no longer an abstract concept.
The Cancer Herald believes this issue is not discussed enough in the mainstream, likely due to lobbyists from the tobacco industry. In 2017 it was estimated that the tobacco industry was worth $785 billion, not including China. In order to maintain this obscene level of profits, the tobacco industry aims to ensure that tobacco is available at practically every gas station and grocery store in the world, and that people remain addicted by releasing new and ‘exciting’ products which often combine tobacco with menthol to increase addiction potential.
For the record, I smoked cigarettes for years beginning in college, and have even smoked cigarettes once in awhile this year. I have used essentially every type of tobacco product, including chewing tobacco, cigarillos, cigars, and snuff. I am giving this personal information over so that readers who are tobacco users will know that I am basically in the same boat as them, and not some outside observer criticizing smoking without having ever done it. I pray that the explicit facts presented in this article will keep readers away from tobacco for the rest of their lives, as well as myself.
15 People Die From Tobacco Use Every Minute
The World Health Organization (WHO), which is one of the most reputable sources of health related statistics, reports that as of 2019 8 million people die every year due to tobacco. This is equivalent to 15 deaths per minute, 913 deaths per hour, 21,917 deaths per day, and a death once every 4 seconds on average. This basically makes tobacco the leading cause of death on the planet, although when ranking leading causes of death tobacco does not even appear, since people that die from tobacco are categorized into the specific diseases that they died from.
To make matters even worse, the WHO finds that 1.1 million people smoke tobacco globally, which is 14.3% of the entire population of the world. This makes tobacco one of the worst pandemics in human history.
Tobacco Use Is A Disease, How It Works
In the past tobacco use was not considered to be a disease in its own right. However, modern science reveals that tobacco use is undoubtedly a disease. Instead of a virus or bacteria, the disease of tobacco use is fueled by nicotine. Nicotine acts as a receptor agonist at the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), and this induces the release of dopamine and endogenous opioids, essentially both ‘feel good’ chemicals that are usually only released from eating, accomplishing something, exercise or sex. Also, nicotine causes the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine, which is basically adrenaline and gives people energy, as well as serotonin which is critically important for regulating a person’s mental state.
By ingesting tobacco a person can basically ‘cheat the system’ and feel rewarded even when they have done nothing that would cause their body to feel good. This is essentially the same principle behind all drug addictions, as well as other non-drug addictions.
The excessive release of all of these natural chemicals which regulate a person’s psychology, as well as the existence of nicotine in large concentrations in the brain, essentially throws the body’s carefully regulated balance out of whack. Specifically, the nicotinic receptors cannot handle all the nicotine so they become desensitized to an extent, while simultaneously the body produces new nicotinic receptors to try and achieve balance in a process called upregulation. Likewise, receptors for dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin also go through physical changes.
Essentially, the brain physically changes in response to tobacco use in an attempt to achieve balance in the presence of nicotine. If the nicotine is then removed, the brain is thrown out of balance towards the opposite direction, with a lack of dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin. This causes depression, headaches, anger, anxiety, irritability, insomnia, extreme hunger, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating.
In-depth information on how nicotine actually physically changes the brain, leading to addiction, can be read in the paper ‘Nicotine-induced Upregulation of Nicotinic Receptors: Underlying Mechanisms and Relevance to Nicotine Addiction‘.
The good news is that the brain can downregulate nicotinic receptors and head back towards normal with weeks of abstinence. However, most smokers feel like they cannot go through the withdrawal since it would interfere too severely with their work and life, and it may be a wasted effort since tobacco is sold everywhere, making it too easy to relapse.
In-fact most relatively new smokers probably try to quit multiple times, due to the vague knowledge that smoking can be deadly and is frowned upon, and because people generally do not want a substance to control their lives. Also, even towards the beginning of tobacco use a person notices that they suddenly cannot breathe as well and are physically out of shape, and that everything they own smells like acrid smoke. Perhaps some people succeed in quitting, but many people give up on trying to quit after multiple failed attempts.
Quitting nicotine is made especially difficult by the lack of good medicines for nicotine withdrawal. The most popular aides for quitting nicotine are actually comprised of nicotine, such as nicotine gum, lozenges, and patches. This keeps the nicotine addiction going, while simultaneously being unsatisfying compared to a cigarette, creating a mental state that leads to relapse. Various smoking cessation aides and real tips on how to quit smoking will be discussed in future articles on The Cancer Herald.
One shocking fact is that 32% of new smokers develop an addiction from the first dose, since even a single dose of nicotine can throw off the brain’s carefully regulated balance. This gives meaning to the advice given to children regarding tobacco: “not even once”.
How Tobacco Causes Cancer, Carcinogens Explained
According to the WHO, tobacco smoke contains 7,000 chemicals, 250 chemicals which are harmful, and 69 carcinogens, i.e. chemicals which can cause cancer. It is mind boggling to comprehend this, since each one of the 250 harmful chemicals has its own properties and damages the body in its own way, and the interaction between all of them in the body is likely incredibly dangerous.
This article will focus on how tobacco causes cancer via carcinogens, because understanding this truly exposes how each cigarette that someone smokes puts their life at risk.
In the 1960s scientists discovered that carcinogens can bind to DNA, as can be read about in-depth in this paper. DNA is essentially a blueprint which determines how the body functions, and therefore carcinogens interacting with DNA can cause problems.
One specific example is benzo[a]pyrene (BP), one of the most well known carcinogens in tobacco smoke. BP is actually found in car exhaust, soot, charred meat, and pretty much any type of burning plant matter including marijuana. That’s a subject for another time though. The efficacy of Cannabis for cancer treatment, and the possibility that its smoke contains carcinogens which could actually cause cancer, will be explored in future articles on The Cancer Herald.
Most foreign chemicals, including BP, are turned into water-soluble molecules via enzymes in the body, so that the kidneys can excrete the foreign chemicals via urine. The water-soluble forms of BP are known as epoxides, and they have a high affinity for binding with DNA. When epoxides bind to DNA, bulky attachments to the DNA called adducts are formed, and this can bend the DNA out of shape.
Scientists have found that adducts form preferentially at the guanine base in DNA, and when the cell goes through replication and copies the DNA, usually an adenine base is placed opposite of the guanine base where the adduct was located, rather than the typical cytosine base opposite a guanine base.
This mutation can completely change the function of cells, possibly leading to the out of control growth that defines cancer. It can be thought of as changing a critical line in a computer program’s code, which would cause the program to not function correctly or even crash.
A specific example is that the DNA for the TP53 gene can be modified via the process described above. TP53 is in charge of making a tumor suppressor protein, and this natural line of defense can be eliminated by carcinogens. Indeed, TP53 mutations are common in people that have lung cancer, and occur right at the site of DNA adducts.
The body does have some ability to defend against this via DNA repair enzymes. This does not work all the time though, and if the adducts remain stuck then a wide variety of problems can result. Indeed, the lungs, mouth, and bladder are perhaps the most common sites for smoking-induced cancer since that is where the epoxides from smoking end up.
Finally, although numerous carcinogens are produced by tobacco when it is smoked, there are carcinogens present in tobacco even before it is smoked. One example is nitrosamines, which are produced during the tobacco curing process. Therefore, even chewing tobacco can cause cancer, as well as nasally ingested tobacco. Tobacco is dangerous to ingest and has the potential to cause cancer no matter what form it is in.
Tobacco Is Like Russian Roulette, A Single Dose May Be The One That Causes Cause Cancer
Thus, tobacco use is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. People become addicted to tobacco due to nicotine dependence, which causes the desensitization and upregulation of receptors in the brain, so that if a person quits then their chemical balance is thrown completely out of whack. This causes withdrawal symptoms, and makes quitting a difficult endeavor that can interfere with work and life. People often smoke a cigarette every hour at least, with some chain smoking, i.e. smoking one cigarette after another. Tobacco habits can range from a few cigarettes per day to several 20 cigarette packs, and each cigarette that is smoked releases 7,000 chemicals, 250 harmful chemicals, and 69 carcinogens into the body.
Regardless of the amount of cigarettes that a person smokes, each and every cigarette (and every single use of any other tobacco product) puts a person’s life at risk. It is like playing Russian roulette, in the sense that the carcinogens released by a single cigarette have the potential to bind with DNA, leading to genetic mutations, cellular abnormalities, and cancer
The only solution is for people to never ingest tobacco again in any form. This is something the government should have taken care of decades ago, but political lobbyists from the hundreds of billions of dollars tobacco industry have made it impossible to ban tobacco. Combined with nicotine’s extremely addicting qualities, which often produce an addiction during the first use, the situation seems intractable. Basically, if someone slips up and smokes a cigarette once, because they are curious and their guard is down, the addiction may start right then and there. Then that person can go to basically any gas station or grocery store and choose from a wide variety of tobacco products. If that person tries to quit there is no avoiding all the people out in public who are smoking, and every time that person gets gas or food they will see cigarettes for sale, and remember the nice feelings that cigarettes give while likely being ignorant of the severe consequences.
Cigarettes are actually being actively updated to make them more addicting, so the cigarettes of today are the most addictive in history. This is due to tobacco companies competing to take market share, resulting in a tobacco ‘arms race’. A future article on The Cancer Herald will explore this topic, and there will be many more articles as well on all the various issues surrounding tobacco addiction and its potential to cause cancer.
Considering the situation, with corporations and governments basically doing nothing to protect people from tobacco, each and every person that cares should take it upon themselves to educate, friends, family, and even strangers about the shocking tobacco death rate statistics and how exactly tobacco causes cancer. Hopefully that will cause at least some people to realize that every cigarette is a life and death gamble.
A final note is that nicotine, the addictive chemical in tobacco, is not a carcinogen itself. This has led to the rise of vaping technology, which is based on the premise that inhaling nicotine without burning any substances is much safer than tobacco. However, there are doubts concerning the carcinogenic potential of other ingredients in nicotine vape juice, and there have even been deaths recently due to poorly made vape juices. The Cancer Herald will soon post an article which will deep dive the vaping issue and explore if it is a healthy alternative to tobacco.

And no I’m not talking about the dice bots in GE, I am referring to staking. Aka the duel arena but better known as the Sand Casino. I know I am going to have some people disagree with what I have to say, and there are going to be people who are in denial about it. But I feel like this is important and something needs to be done/implemented to make the game a more safe and enjoyable place. I have spoken to other players in game and friends and they have all mostly agreed with the following.
As a former gambling addict and 10 year+ veteran of the game, There’s a few things that I would like to address about the current state of in game staking.
For starters, the duel arena has now just become a place for people to degenerately gamble away their in game valuables more than it ever has before. With RWT being at an all time high and being so accessible this is no different to going to a bank, withdrawing money, walking into a casino and losing absolutely everything you own or have worked hard to earn.
Not only are some people becoming addicted to gambling through the game, but it is also providing another means to gamble to those who already have a gambling problem.
Here in Australia there is at least 1-2 gambling related suicide per day. Yearly that is over 4-500 people taking their lives due to an addiction that ruined their lives. To put it into perspective our population in Australia is only 24.5 Million people. I’m sure I could find statistics and supporting articles for UK,EUR & USA but I’m sure you already get my point.
Not only is the game allowing and providing a breeding ground for degenerate gamblers, the game (Jagex) is also not/has not taken any steps to regulating or providing some sort of in game infrastructure to help with what could be a possibly extremely dangerous aspect of the game.
To start with, there needs to be an age restriction on the duel arena. You can’t walk into a casino when you are 13 yrs old and gamble, so realistically you shouldn’t be able to do the same in game. This would be a great step to preventing young kids from forming a gambling problem early on in their lives.
As it stands, there currently no way to place a limit on what you are willing to lose in the duel arena. Eg you could select that you want to limit yourself to lose no more than 30M In gold and item value within a certain amount of time. This could be a completely optional feature that people could use if they feel they need to place some sort of responsible limit on what they are prepared to lose (I know there would be a lot of people that would appreciate this option)
Finally the most important part of this thread. there NEEDS to be a self exclusion or cool down option that can be toggled. For instance an in game UI or NPC that you can select a cool down period of let’s say 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year etc. I think having a “self exclude permanently” option would benefit a lot of people also.
The game as it stands is probably legally breaking a lot of real world laws when it comes to gambling regulations. I am calling for Jagex to look into implementing some responsible gambling options and do their part in helping some people prevent what could be a life ruining problem.
Keen to hear some opinions on this and happy to discuss with anyone who has conflicting arguments.
I know there will be a lot of people here that support this in one way or another.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/communism/comments/5ku8dz/china_as_a_socialist_marxistleninist_state_a/
Seeing that the topic of Chinese socialism has stirred up some controversy recently, I find it necessary to write this. First and foremost I must say I’m fairly disappointed with the level of theoretical comprehension of some so-called Marxists who published these sources. The sources made some serious theoretical errors, coupled with poorly researched claims in an attempt to paint the current Chinese government as “socialist”. What makes it even more disappointing, is the fact that half of the counter-arguments in my post is empirical, rather than theoretical. In other words: The claims by those who defend China as socialist state are factually wrong; these authors use statistics from dubious sources, in some cases outright fabricated. This is a symptom of intellectual laziness. As a Vietnamese Marxist, I find it absolutely necessary to break this illusion, so that we can have a proper analysis of modern China that is rooted in material reality.
Of course, some may question the relevance of my nationality. Indeed, Vietnam is not China; but it’s also important to take into account the fact that the market reforms in Vietnam and Laos are heavily influenced by the Chinese model. Our understanding of modern Chinese society, therefore, on a fundamental level would affect our analysis of Vietnamese and Laotian society, and vice versa.
I shall now address all the sources, one after another. Some parts of these sources however, would be left out to avoid repetition. Final notes: the post is getting much longer than expected, so I’m breaking this up into a few parts. Most of my statistics, are lifted from stats.gov.cn (Website of the National Bureau of Statistics of China). So before you attack me for being a “ultra-left anarcho-Trot” who made all of this up: please, go to stats.gov.cn. Last but not least: This is NOT a post attacking modern China from a Trotskyist perspective, applying the “state capitalist” theories of Tony Cliffs and his followers. This is show our comrades that China is just simply capitalist in the normal sense.
I. RESPONSE TO THE INTRODUCTION

China's primary contradiction was not proletariat vs bourgeoisie, it was how to build socialism with underdeveloped productive forces. The answer was inspired by Lenin's NEP: a form of market-socialism, controlled by the Communist Party of China. The goal is to modernize the productive forces, to enable the building of higher stage Socialism. This is not a "betrayal" of Socialism or Mao. Far from it, in fact. The economic progress in China has been hailed as "miraculous" around the globe, as it is the fastest growing economy in the history of human civilization.

Lenin’s NEP was not a form of “market-socialism” – as that is an oxymoron in and of itself. No one denies the necessity of building up the productive forces. This, however does not validate the existence of “market socialism”. This is an invention of bourgeois opportunists who to distort Marxist theory to serve their own interests. Li Minqi – a Chinese Marxist of the New Left, summed this up perfectly in his book “Class Struggle and Development of Capitalism in China”:

“The socialized production objectively requires the free movement of labor force and means of production. But under the market economy, the movement of labor force can happen only if there is buying and selling of labor power, and the movement of means of production can happen only if there is investment of “capital.” Thus, under the socialized production, a market economy must be a capitalist market economy. There is not and will never be a “socialist market economy.”

Lenin characterized Russia’s economy during the NEP as transitional “state capitalism”. And so, if we were to be honest with ourselves, even if modern China’s economy completely similar to that of Russia during the NEP, it cannot be anything but state capitalism.
“The fastest growing economy of human civilization” – let us not forget for a moment, the cost of this growth. Environmental destruction, dehumanizing conditions of labour, concentration of wealth into the hand of the few.

Moreover, China appoints top management, and can fire them. This is nothing like "Capitalism". This is a Marxist-Leninist tool (market socialism) with the purpose of modernizing the productive forces with the goal of building Socialism, not betraying it as many confused Leftists have wrongly claimed.

What government doesn’t appoint top management of government owned companies? This is the case in every capitalist country where a state sector is present (and that means all capitalist countries).

"Examining what companies are truly private is important because privatization is often confused with the spreading out of shareholding and the sale of minority stakes. In China, 100 percent state ownership is often diluted by the division of ownership into shares, some of which are made available to nonstate actors, such as foreign companies or other private investors. Nearly two-thirds of the state-owned enterprises and subsidiaries in China have undertaken such changes, leading some foreign observers to relabel these firms as “nonstate” or even “private.” But this reclassification is incorrect. The sale of stock does nothing by itself to alter state control: dozens of enterprises are no less state controlled simply because they are listed on foreign stock exchanges. As a practical matter, three-quarters of the roughly 1,500 companies listed as domestic stocks are still state owned."

The author’s disagreement here, is obviously with the criteria of what is considered “state owned”, and what isn’t. And yet, this claim seem to ignore the bigger picture: First of all, large scale privatization occurred in 1997-1998, documented by domestic and foreign observers. Second, even when we consider all the enterprises that have mixed ownership with the state owning majority of the shares, state owned companies is nowhere near being the predominant force in the economy. According to the Second National Economic Census conducted in 2008 by the Chinese government (not a foreign observer), 208 trillion RMB total assets of the secondary and tertiary sectors (industrial and service sectors), 63 trillion – or 30 percent of total – was held by SOEs. (SOEs here correspond to state sole funded corporations and enterprises with the state as the biggest shareholder). While 30% is undoubtedly, significant, it isn’t synonymous with “playing a predominant role” within the Chinese economy. In terms of numbers, SOEs at the end of 2015, only accounting for 2.3% of the total enterprise number. If we add the number of collectively owned enterprises, the figure is 4.3%.
The OECD Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs has published statistics in 2014 that agree with the trends in official reports. According to the OECD, in 2010 SOE only makes up 4.5% of all the companies in the manufacturing sector. Regardless of sector, SOEs never own more than 30-40% of the total assets, with exceptions in communication, aviation, banking and securities (These exceptions however, do not reflect the socialist nature of the Chinese economy). Overall, SOEs own about 38 % of all industrial assets. Again, 38% is a significant, but nowhere near being dominant. Parallels could be drawn to Singapore with its Temasek model.
SOEs are also nowhere near being the main employer in China. According to OECD, SOEs provide for only 19% of manufacturing jobs, in 1980 this figure was 70%. In January 2011, the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce published a report indicating that small and medium enterprises accounted for more than 99 percent of all Chinese companies and accounted for more than 70 percent of urban employment and 90 percent of newly added jobs. In 2014, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce announced that sole proprietorships and private companies accounted for approximately 90 percent of all new urban jobs nationwide. According to the latest 2016 Statistical Yearbook published by the National Bureau of Statistics, state, collective, and mixed ownership companies employ only 8.7% - 17% of the labour force. (The LLC section include state owned LLCs and "other type of LLCs, but didn't specify the state to private ratio, leading to the wide estimation range).
Some other interesting statistics: Investment in fixed assets of state, collective and mixed ownership enterprises makes up 28% - 32% of all fixed assets investment in China by the end of 2015. In 1995, this figure was roughly 80%. In the same time period, state owned industry accounted for 21.77% of total industrial revenue, 17.2 % of all industrial profits in China.
Does any of these statistics suggest that SOEs dominate the Chinese economy? The answer is quite clearly, no. No one, in their right mind, would deny the shrinking role of state companies.
What’s also peculiar, is the accusation of “relabeling” mixed ownership enterprises as private. Most statistics concerning SOEs do include mixed ownership enterprises. As far as I’m concerned, such relabeling is quite rare. The capitalist institutions usually take the opposite method, exaggerating the role of the state sector as much as possible, and blame the economic issues on this “public sector boogeyman” to push for even more privatization. In fact, the EU uses this same approach with Vietnam, not acknowledging that it has a “proper market economy”.
II. RESPONSE TO PART 1 OF 5 – SOURCE 1

In the mid-1930s, China was being rent asunder by four competing sides. One was the communist Red Army, headed by Mao Zedong. Another group was the Japanese fascists and their Imperial Army. A third was the Guomindang Nationalists, abbreviated “KMT” in English and ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek...Things were not going as planned for the Western empire. They were backing, hell or high water, Chiang Kai-Shek [referred to as "Peanut" or "Generalissimo" by the West]
Americans privately understood that the very corrupt, dissipated Generalissimo and his KMT did not stand a chance against Mao and formidable Reds..."Red Star over China" became an international bestseller that year. Much to their shock...Everywhere the communists took control, opium addiction, gambling, organised crime, prostitution, feet binding, child slavery, homelessness, illiteracy and starvation were eradicated. Red Army soldiers and citizens were smiling, industrious, positive, well-fed and committed to the cause. It was clearly not propaganda and all manifestly real.
The West was caught in a philosophical, transitive loop. Mao and the Reds are communist, communism is evil, therefore everything that Mao and the Reds do must be bad. And that was the rub, this massive cognitive dissonance: they’re communists, so how can it be working so well for them?
Unable to come to terms with their blind ideology, FDR, Washington and the popular press simply could not bring themselves to say “communists”, so Mao and Co. were dubbed “the so-called communists”....British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Roosevelt [were told] that the Chinese were “radishes”, red on the outside, but white below the surface – not real communists...Thus, the square peg of CPC reality was crammed into the round hole of Western denial.
This same kind of rigid, anticommunist ideology is still going strong in the West, as it tries, mostly badly and incorrectly, to understand the Chinese people’s sociocultural evolution and Baba Beijing’s (the leadership) politico-economic management of the country. To Western mass media, politicians, movers and shakers, China is still “so-called communist”. It must be capitalist, to be doing so well, right? Just as FDR and his generation were blinded by propaganda, today’s Eurangloland and much of the rest of the world are still brainwashed. Evidence is beating Westerners over the head, if they could just take their zealous blinkers off.

Either I’ve been living under a rock, or this is some unfounded, conspiracy theory level delusion. Up until this very point, as far as I’m aware, communist all around the world has never heard the mainstream bourgeois press calling Mao and his comrades “not real communists”. The reality is quite the opposite: Mao and his comrades were always called – and rightfully so, communists. Mao has always been depicted by the Western media as the blood thirsty “communist dictator” that murdered 100 million people. And if Winston Churchill and FDR were told that Mao and the Red Army were actually “white below the surface”, then what’s the whole point of imperialist funding of the KMT? After all, if they’re all “white underneath”, they’re all the same thing, it doesn’t matter which sides win anyway and there would be no need for the imperialists to intervene in the first place. This narrative breaks down completely upon further investigation.
Calling modern China “not really communist” however, is another story. This is not an unfounded claim, and can be verified with empirical data. The opposite claim on the other hand, requires the deliberate distortions of truth.

Let’s start with China’s national People’s Constitution and Deng Xiaoping. Anticommunists love to fawn over Deng, like he was some kind of crusading capitalist guru. Yet, it was he who presided over the most recent rewriting of the national constitution, in 1982.¹ China’s constitution is a powerful rebuke of capitalism and everything the West stands for.
The Chinese constitution proudly splashes the term “communism” or “communist” fifteen times, “socialism” and “socialist” a whopping 123 times. Dialectical terms like “class”, “struggle”, “mass”, “independence”, “labour”, “workeworking”, “peasant”, “exploitation”, “capitalism”, “ownership”, “proletariat”, “collective”, “cooperate”, “private”, “fight”, “struggle”, (democratic) “dictatorship”, “power” and “feudal” are spelled out a total of 265 times. “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought” are cited ten times and “revolution” twelve times.
Big government, central planning vocabulary, such as “safeguard”, “protect”, “lead”, “reform”, “rural”, “urban”, “production”, “plan”, “economy”, “system”, “administration”, “rules”, “regulations”, “institution”, “enterprise”, “science”, “technology”, “modern”, “organisation”, “manage”, “progress”, “agriculture”, “farm”, “land”, “industry”, “resources”, “education”, “central” and “develop” get cited a mind boggling 703 times.
The importance of the central government guiding the people to what is now being dubbed the Chinese Dream, is expressed by the words “state” and “government” being used 292 times.
Defiant words aimed at standing up to and defeating the West, like “hegemony”, “imperialism”, “colonialism”, “combat”, “defend”, “army”, “military”, “security”, “aggression”, “fight”, “sabotage” and “provocation” are flung like weapons a total of 85 times.
Any doubts about who is the beneficiary of China’s constitution are dispelled by “public” being used 143 times and “people”, a mind blowing 392 times, Western elitism be damned.

The method of investigation being used here is utterly laughable. As Marxists, is it our job to have a concrete analysis of material reality, or to count the number of times left wing rhetoric is used in a document, devoid of any socio economic context? That is not to say, what’s mentioned in a constitution is worthless. However, what kind of analysis are we doing, if we do not examine the relationship between the words in these documents, and the actual practice of the government in power? It’s one thing to have a constitution claiming to uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, it’s quite another thing whether or not a government abides by such principles. Haven’t imperialist governments and their pawns always been spouting words, claiming to be the defenders of “equality, freedom and democracy” in their constitutions, mainstream press and speeches; yet then turn around mass slaughtering working people worldwide? The German Social Democratic Party surely had a party program that “proudly” claim their allegiance to the socialist cause, but what did they do once a socialist revolution really happens? The bootlickers sent in fascists to crush the Spartacist Uprising, negotiated with the ruling class for mere concessions. Another example is how most of the socialist parties in the Second International did have a Marxist party programme, but once the imperialist world war break out, agreed to send the working people to the battlefield.
What we should also keep in mind, is that the constitution was last amended 1982, with small modifications to highlight the protection of private property in 2004. Since then, the economic/political landscape in China had developed. The constitution of China, therefore, can hardly be considered a useful tool to explain current events in Chinese society.

Property market bubbles? What property? Private property, for sure, but it’s not real property. All real estate is 100% owned by the people of China. There is not one square metre of private land in the People’s Republic. You can pay for up to a 70-year usage lease on a piece of land and develop it, but no one can buy the dirt.

The oversimplification is astounding. On paper, real estate is 100% owned by the people of China. And indeed, you can pay for 70 year usage rights. However, this is far from the full picture. From onestop.globaltimes.cn:

These land usage rights can be legally transferred, traded, rented, given, exchanged, inherited, pledged or invested as though the land were owned by the occupier, but the true ownership of the land remains in the control of the government.

Let us come back to the very basics of Marxist political economy: the analysis of the commodity. A commodity has a use value and an exchange value. Things are exchanged because of their different use values: for instance no one would trade a shirt with another shirt completely the same. In the history of development of commodity production, one commodity emerges as the universal equivalent – money; and thus commodities have money-prices.
Land in China is no different. It has a use-value. This use-value can be exchanged on the market. Officially, land has no money-price; however on the market the rights to usage of the land has a money-price. Legally, there’s a difference between the rights to usage of land being a commodity, and the land itself being a commodity. However, in reality, if the rights to usage is tradable, is it really different from the land itself being a commodity? The vocabulary of real estate traders in China reflect this: Not a single one of them would say “I’m buying and selling the rights to use the land”, they say “I’m buying and selling land”. The “true ownership of the land remains in the control of the government” is merely a tool to justify seizing land, most cases, to hand it over to private businesses whenever necessary.
We can approach this from a different perspective. In Capital Vol. 1, Marx made the following comment about the money prices of land:

Objects that in themselves are not commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics.

On BrendanMcCooney’s blog (Kapitalism101 on YouTube, I’m sure there’s a fair amount of socialists who got introduced to Marxist political economy through this channel), he noted:

The first thing we might note is that since conscience and honor are not products of labor they are not freely reproducible and thus do not respond to the laws of supply and demand, or socially necessary labor time, the typical forces by which prices are established.
Because commodity production dominates all production and exchange, the exchange of “imaginary values” takes the form of commodity exchange, even though it is not commodity exchange proper. To win the loyalty of a Cardinal in medieval Europe a king would need ply the Cardinal with political favors. To win the loyalty of a politician in a capitalist society one must give her money. Thus the price of loyalty takes the form of commodity exchange even if it is not commodity exchange proper.

The land usage rights in China are not products of labour. They do not respond to the laws of socially necessary labour time. Yet, the process of obtaining these rights from different private investors take the form of commodity exchange. Quite clearly, this demonstrate the dominance of commodity production in Chinese society. A society that is dominated by the laws of commodity production – can it be characterized as “socialist”?
As Marxists, we also know that the real estate market is not only the buying and selling of land, apartments and houses, it’s also fictitious capital – speculative claims on future value created in the production process. If we accept the premise that land in China is de facto a commodity (or at least take the form of commodity) despite the legal difference between ownership and rights to usage, then it logically follows that speculative bubbles of fictitious value that develop after long periods of real estate trading is a thing. And indeed, it was a thing. The property market bubble was real, documented by both observers in China and in the West. To deny this, is to outright deny reality.
And what happens after 70 years? According to article 149 of Chinese property law, not much:

When the period of time for the right to the use of land for construction of residences expires, it shall automatically be renewed.
Renewal of the period of time for the right to the use of land for nonresidential construction shall be handled in accordance with the provisions of law. Ownership of the houses and other immovables on the said land shall be decided on according to the agreement reached; if there is no agreement or the agreement on the matter is indefinite, it shall be decided in accordance with the provisions of laws and administrative regulations.

Let’s not forget that most of the land in the real estate market, is registered as “for residential purpose”. Thus, in practice, most property on the real estate market is permanent, providing that it doesn’t get reclaimed for other purpose by the state (This reclaiming comes with compensation, which resembles capitalist nationalization rather than any sort of socialist expropriation)

Private enterprise? It is thriving for sure, but is heavily concentrated in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), that complement and do not seriously compete with the state sectors of the economy. The private sector is especially the many millions of mom and pop and solo businesses that blanket the country.

“Do not seriously compete with the state sector” – reality points to the opposite direction. In almost every industry, aside from what’s known as the “commanding heights of the economy”, the private sector dominates. These industries include the following, but not limited to:
• Mobile phone – contrary to the misguided comments, Huawei and Xiaomi are not state owned • Fashion/Textile • Retail • Food & drinks • Computers • Home appliances
The overall trend suggests that the private sector dominates in the production of consumer goods and the service sector, which happens to be the majority of what China manufacturing sector produces. After all, China doesn’t get the nickname “the world’s workshop” out of nowhere. These are not just “mom and pop shops”. The statistics on private sector employment prove this claim to be once again, unfounded.

Free markets? There [are virtually no] private banks in China. They are all people powered. The world’s largest bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is state owned of course, as well as three other global Top Ten banks: #1 (ICBC), #5 China Construction Bank (CCB), #9 Bank of China (BOC) and #10 Agricultural Bank of China (ABC).³ Ditto all insurance companies, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock and precious metals markets. Same goes for all major media outlets, especially television, radio and print media, although everyone has heard about Beijing being the new “Hollywood of the East”, which is mostly public sector.

To claim that there are virtually no private banks in China is frankly dishonest, but it shouldn’t be discarded completely. It is true that if we only count domestic banks, state-owned banks dominate the banking sector. Domestic private banks do exist, but they exist in smaller numbers compared to state owned ones. However, what the author of this claim either accidentally or intentionally left out, is the large numbers of 100% foreign owned banks allowed to operate here. This includes the top names of international finance capital, such as Citibank, Standard Chartered, JP Morgan Chase and HSBC.
As for state ownership of media: Socialism undoubtedly would require control of media by the state, but state ownership of media, does not automatically mean socialism. Mussolini’s Italy had state control of media – does this mean Fascist Italy was socialist? A more nuanced view is needed than just simply point out “state ownership” as the golden criteria to consider a country “socialist”. For instance, we must examine whether or not the state media actually is a tool to promote the socialist ideology, and what’s the influence of proletarian ideology on the grassroots level.

Unfettered capitalism? Get outta here! Almost all major economic sectors in China are dominated by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Everything from airlines/avionics to aerospace to chemical industries, from construction to maritime shipping to mining, from nuclear energy to petroleum to railways, from steel to telecommunications to utilities, over 100 key sectors have a huge, people-powered footprint. Many are some of the world’s biggest corporations.

Capitalism in China by no means, is unfettered. And I do not for a second, disagree that in the key strategic sectors of the economy, state ownership is dominant.
But whether this translates to socialism is completely different story. “Keynesian economics” is perhaps the best term to describe the economic policies of the Chinese government at this point in time. The state plays an active role in the economy, but to label this as socialism is far-fetched.
The wording of this excerpt is dubious: pay attention to the language and the style of writing being used here. Listing the sectors where SOEs dominate, using words like “from”, “to” all to create to impression that there are a lot of sectors in China owned by the state. If the author were honest he would say the only sectors where the state dominate are the 100 key sectors mentioned above.
We also shouldn’t be too impressed by state ownership in key sectors – while this is a step forward from neoliberal economic policies, it is no different to what happen in many other capitalist economies. The sectors in China where SOEs dominate, are also the sectors that are state owned in other “East Asian tiger economies” and Western Europe economies post WWII. The post WWII Labour government in the UK for example, had a state owned steel manufacturing sector, a state owned electric grid. Are we supposed to consider post war Britain “socialist”? How different are we then, to liberals?
We should also take into account the nature of “regulations” in China. This cannot be stressed enough: China is a very complicated society. It’s all too easy for Marxists in the West to sit in front of a computer screen, looking up official legislation on the internet. At best, this would result in a surface level analysis. The influence of Confucian values in Chinese society also encourage people to save face, value the family unit. Consequently, within the state apparatus there’s a high level of cronyism and favoritism of family members (Although to be fair, Western governments aren’t much better). In China, business and politics alike, connections and unofficial actions holds more weight than official policies. All of this, along with the systematic corruption in China means that on the grassroots level, one can get away with violating regulations through bribery and connections. Therefore, calling capitalism unfettered is not to be discarded entirely: It does contain some degree of truths in it. The fetters are there, but as ridiculous as it may sounds, they do not effectively restrict much. To put things into perspective: If capitalism in China was so restricted, and if China was really a proletarian dictatorship that subjugate the bourgeoisie to the interests of the masses, why are imperialists rushing to invest in China? They wouldn’t even dare to invest in China on a large scale. Not only that, they would be under constant attack, in the same manner that Cuba and North Korea is. And yet, FDI plays a significant role in the Chinese economy, rivaling that of the state. (Fun fact: U.S.S.R during the N.E.P, was a proletarian dictatorship, and throughout the NEP years, only about 169 companies “dared” to invest in the country).

Privatisation? You have to look beyond the deceptive headlines. Baba Beijing caps the sale of SOE stock to the public, at 30%. Furthermore, there are strict controls on making sure someone doesn’t try to control what’s offered. The ownership of the shares has to be spread out. Most of these stocks are owned by Chinese citizens (A shares), but some are on offer to foreigners (B shares). Interestingly, more and more Chinese companies, including SOEs, are doing IPOs in Western stock markets, as part of their 30%.

Citation needed. There’s no document anywhere suggesting that such “30% privatization cap” exist. A quick Google search would show SOEs where the state barely own 50% of the shares.

Reforms? Ha-ha-ha, the joke’s on you! Baba Beijing will never sell off the people’s SOEs. It knows that the citizens’ social harmony and economic stability are rooted in its ability to macro-manage and long term (Five-Year) plan the country’s direction, via the 100% ownership of all the real estate (Marxism’s controlling the means of production), as well as the key industries and sectors. The CPC will continue to create wealth, under the rubric of socialism with Chinese characteristics, by borrowing some capitalist trappings. But it is only transitional. Deng Xiaoping said it many times and it continues going unheard in the West, that the goal is to follow the Marxist economic path to a wealthy communist society.

Ha-ha-ha indeed! Joke’s on us left-wing critics of modern China, for being in touch with reality. But what’s much more laughable is the author’s complete inability to distinguish planning in a capitalist economy, and the role of planning under socialism. Those who points to the Five-Year Plans of modern China as “evidence” showing that’s the country has a socialist planned economy, has made grave theoretical errors. China_comrade for instance, linked to a video of “Five Year Plan” catchy song, as a “A ha! Gotcha! Told you China is socialist”.
Any economic system, has to coordinate social labour, as well as allocate it to the right task. Prior to the capitalist mode of production, labour is directly social; its coordination and allocation is therefore, direct. Under capitalism, labour is indirectly social, it’s coordinated and allocated by market forces i.e the law of value. Production decisions are made through price signals. Under socialism, a common society-wide plan coordinate all labour, and the allocation of labour also follow this plan, labour is once again directly social.
A series of questions now arises: is there directly social labour in China at this point in time? Is there a common plan, to coordinate all production? Has the anarchy in production been ended? It’s simply not good enough to just see the label “Five Year Plan” and be done with it. The more we look into it, more questions need to be answered: What is the nature of this planning process? What is the mechanism of planning? It’s important to keep in mind that with the private sector owning more than half the assets, providing over 90% of the jobs, takes up over 90% of the number of enterprises, the existence of any sort of central coordination is very difficult, if not impossible. The recent stock market crashes in China, and the uneven regional economic developments are living evidences to this undeniable fact.
Economic planning in China are merely guidelines on the macro level. These plans for the most part, do not directly allocate resources. One doesn’t have to look too far: A quick look at the targets of these plans reveals a great deal about what these plans actually are. The targets are realistically, broad national development priorities. Now compare this with the Five Year Plans of the USSR; we see a radically different picture: Even it its revisionist years, the targets of the plan are specific targets regarding production and resource allocation, measured in units rather than value – indicators of production for use rather than production for exchange.
South Korea utilize macro-economic planning to develop the infrastructure of its economy. Same with India and Singapore. Just because it’s called a “Five-Year Plan” accompanied with a catchy song, does not in any way change the nature of the Chinese economy: a market economy, in which labour is coordinated and allocated through market exchange, by the law of value.
China, is not just “borrowing a few capitalist trappings”. Full-fledged capitalism is here in China, and it would be here to stay for a long time.
*** END OF SOURCE 1 RESPONSE ***
III. RESPONSE TO PART 2 OF 5 – SOURCE 2

Ever since the Peoples' Republic of China invited foreign capital into the country and behind the "Bamboo Curtain", China has been dismissed by most Left observers as selling out to capitalism and class society, with all its associated evils.

Cuba has invited foreign capital into its economy, and yet no “majority” of Left observers called it selling out to capitalism. The Chinese situation has developed far beyond “small concessions to develop the productive forces”; something which certain misguided Western Marxists don’t seem to understand.

Of course capitalist commentators and "expert" economists gloat over the Chinese renunciation of socialist principles and their craven debt to neo-liberal market economics. "Proof that socialism is dead", they say. But China's rapid and successful response to the capitalist Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has obliged a serious rethink of such knee-jerk assessments. Clearly China has, against all the doomsayers' predictions, survived a crisis within which their neo-liberal "betters" in Europe and the USA are drowning, and the economic miracle continues. Maybe the "Chinese Economic Miracle" is not as capitalist as most westerners think.

China is not a neoliberal economic miracle. It’s a Keynesian economic miracle. And if we look closer, it’s not a miracle at all, considering the resources available and the price that the Chinese working class had to pay for this “wizardry”.
The active role of the state in the Chinese economy surely deserved credit for easing the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. However, since when is Keynesian economics being equated with socialism? It has always been Austrian economists who do this. Now, I have discovered that some “Marxists” also adopted this practice.. To my comrades out there: India has also handled the crisis very well using government stimulus packages. That’s right Naxalites, put down your guns. Your service to the working people is commendable, but we have now reached socialism. Yes, India also has a state oil company.
If we were to look at this seriously, we would see that the reason behind China’s easy time during the 2008 crisis include: 1) It’s lack of dependency on international finance capital, as capitalism in China is in its earlier, commodity exporting stage. This is also the reason why the average size of private enterprises in China seemed small compared to SOEs: the process of capital accumulation – concentration of capital have yet to reach its peak; monopoly capital have yet to develop to its fullest extent. (Ironically enough, this is also why it’s too soon to say that China’s an imperialist power, although in 10 years, this may no longer be the case) 2) The role of the state during the recessions, actively trying to internalize the crisis in the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Deng had always maintained that the Party's reforms were a specifically Chinese road to socialism, and subsequent leaderships have echoed the same position. On closer examination, they may well have been correct.
At no stage over the past 30 years has the State relinquished control of the "commanding heights" or "levers" of the Chinese economy: • agricultural pricing • heavy industry • power and energy • transport • communications • foreign trade • finance (state banks)
This is something Lenin pursued during the New Economic Policy and the various Eurocommunist parties demanded in the 1980s. Throughout, the State has directly owned more than 50 percent of all industry (mainly through State Owned Enterprises or SOEs), and holds more than a significant interest in many so called "private" enterprises and foreign ventures as well.

By the end of the 90s, all agricultural price controls were lifted. Heavy industry were largely privatized, hence the figure of SOEs taking only 4.5% of the manufacturing sector. State banks were not privatized, yet private banks both foreign and domestic are allowed to operate.
Foreign trade monopoly ceased to be a thing long ago in China. According to www.china-embassy.org, the official website of the embassy of China in the US:

In addition to state-owned enterprises, foreign-invested enterprises and private enterprises also engage in foreign trade, and their total value of import and export has each exceeded that of the state-owned enterprises. From the 1980s to the early 21st century, China's processing trade flourished, accounting for half of the country's foreign trade volume. Throughout China's foreign trade development, foreign-invested enterprises and processing trade have played very significant roles.
China's foreign trade system has completed the transformation from mandatory planning to giving full play to the fundamental role of the market - from state monopoly to full openness
China absorbed foreign direct investment to introduce foreign-invested enterprises as new business entities in its foreign trade sector, breaking the monopoly of state-owned foreign trade enterprises.

“more than 50% of all industry” – National Bureau of Statistics respectfully disagree.
“many so called private enterprises”. “many” - how many? Vague claims that do not correspond to reality.
END OF POST #1