Psychiatrist, psychoanalyze thyself - why is net surfing addictive but power lust isn't?

What’s more harmful to society, internet surfing or
power lust? (source: Depressed Metabolism)
 

Congratulations to Dr. Louise Nadeau. Dr. Nadeau is a psychiatrist. Dr. Nadeau is “director of the new university institute on addiction” at Université de Montreal's Department of Psychology.

Dr. Nadeau has discovered a new addiction. It’s obsessive internet use. Dr. Nadeau would like to have it officially recognized as a clinical disorder.

Dr. Nadeau does admit, however, that:

a. There is a vacuum when it comes to internet addiction.

b. There is no reliable study or clinical data on the issue.

c. “We are starting from scratch."

And yet the good doctor still somehow already knows that a large number of people are "continuously hooked on to the Internet for hours," and that this activity should be officially recognized as a clinical disorder.

Perhaps the reason Nadeau already knows this last fact is because the new university institute on addiction, of which Nadeau is director, conducts epidemiological studies on addiction, evaluates the services available to patients, guarantees state-of-the-art practices, and documents new forms of addiction. 

So maybe it just might be in her own best interest to document new forms of addiction.

At this writing, what we know about Dr. Nadeau comes from a single story reported or linked on a handful of mostly obscure websites from India, which only a person "continuously hooked on to the internet for hours" would have found. So she should be grateful for this new addiction.

One question that immediately comes to mind is this: if being continuously hooked on to the Internet for hours is obsessive internet use, why wasn’t reading ever officially recognized as obsessive document use?

Long before the advent of electronic media people read newspapers and magazines and novels and essays and poetry and treatises and long letters from friends and loved ones. They were continuously hooked on to the printed word for hours. 

Carpal tunnel addiction? (source: HubPages)
 

Ms Nadeau herself may have been continuously hooked on to the printed word for hours, reading textbooks about psychiatry and clinical obsession and epidemiological studies on addiction while in school. Could it be that she is addicted to reading? Or could it be that she is addicted to the government tax money that pays for her epidemiological studies on addiction?

The latter would certainly explain why no psychiatrist, Ms. Nadeau included, has ever suggested that one of humanity’s oldest and cruelest addictions ought to be officially recognized as a clinical disorder: power lust.

The people who decide what is and is not an addiction have had centuries of observational criteria for declaring power lust as a clinically recognized psychotic antisocial disorder. Even the layperson can readily diagnose it. People obsessed with acquiring and exercising some form of domination over others, whether physical, emotional, psychological, moralistic or political, inevitably gravitate toward power structures such as religion, government, corporate law firms or similar criminal organizations.

Politicians, to be perfectly clear, are people who suffer from power lust. Even the least addicted of them will spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours and immeasurable amounts of energy just to gain an elective office where the desire for authoritarian power over their fellow human beings can be satiated.

Power lust meets the criteria for clinical disorder far more readily than long hours of enjoying the internet.

It’s not just Nadeau, of course. The whole psychiatry-psychology-psychoanalysis axis suffers from an un-self-diagnosed self-interest complex. Taxbucks pay for their academic positions and their research studies while government licensing guarantees what government licensing in every field guarantees; limited access to the field that results in fewer practitioners which artificially props up salaries and helps create those lucrative $400 per hour couch-time profits.

Bottom line: psychiatrists telling politicians that their lusting for political power is a twisted, obsessive, antisocial addiction that does incalculable harm to society would amount to an act of biting the handouts that feed them.

Until the head-shrinking industry cures itself of its own conflict of interest why should anyone believe what its practitioners say?

After all, if anything can be called addictive everything can be called addictive.

So keep on surfing, netizens. What some people call addiction others call freedom.