Help me become an addict

When the White Queen told Alice she had sometimes believed as many as six contradictory things before breakfast, she spoke for us all. But our irrationality goes further than a simple after-the-event report. Even while we’re believing it, we can know that something we’re believing contradicts something else we believe.

Take, in my case, addiction. I believe that addicts lack self-discipline and willpower. Yet I know that this cannot really be the explanation. I feel a faint but ineradicable disapproval of people who can’t stop eating, smoking, drinking or injecting themselves with heroin, while knowing that this reaction is not only harsh, but must be ignorant.

I half suspect people just need to get a grip; yet half accept this cannot be the problem, because we all know addicts who don’t lack willpower. My late father, for instance, an entirely self-disciplined man, exhibited the classic symptoms of cold turkey when deprived of cigarettes: depression, distraction, pallor and shaking hands. Two of my three brothers smoke and would love to give it up, but cannot. The late Conrad (Earl) Russell once told me he would literally rather die than live without cigarettes. An MP friend, now dead, would in the last stages of cirrhosis teaspoon the port out of the melon with trembling fingers. And another friend with an iron will is nevertheless eating herself to death. None of these people exhibits any lack of self-discipline in any part of their lives except that relating to their particular addiction.

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Harry Mount

The Odyssey is more real than we thought

How can I reconcile the evident contradictions in my moral knowledge? I’ve concluded that the only way must be through experience. I’ve never been seriously addicted to anything in my life. If I could properly know at first hand what it was to be addicted, then, knowing myself to be self-disciplined, I could know what it is that the human will must confront when we battle with addiction.