Healing Psychology, Part B - Sick Habits

It’s good that we hold each other accountable for the things we do. This helps us avoid misbehavior. But common sense tells us there are limits to personal accountability. When I know you’ve got a cold, I certainly don’t blame you for sneezing. Knowing you’re sick, I realize the cold virus is making that happen. When we assign responsibility, we take disease into account. But … who do we hold accountable for a diseased behavior, one like alcoholism? 

Transcript

Part B –  Sick Habits

This Episode of Healing Psychology is a reading of Chapter One of my upcoming book, Reimaging Psychology.

Copyright © Thomas O. Whitehead, 2022   All rights reserved

[Introduction] 

In ages past, we thought people got sick because they were bad – they just didn’t deserve to be well. But now we know all those moral judgments didn’t help a bit. They just kept us confused, slowing the advance of medical science.  But what about our “sick” behavior? Even today, when someone behaves badly, our natural response is to pass judgment. But … there’s reason to think that doesn’t help either. Maybe behavioral science would be better off without moral condemnation. This podcast is Part B of the multi-part series “Healing Psychology.” As with Part A, it’s not mainstream thought. But you’re invited to listen, anyway.

[Reading]

The question of how human beings  ignore the humanity of others begs an answer –
 yet answers are not forthcoming… Evil is treated as incomprehensible, a topic that cannot be dealt with because the scale of the horror is so great that nothing can convey its enormity. [1]

- Simon Baron-Cohen

Not so long ago it was common to believe that illness was evidence of sin, or at least disfavor in God’s eyes. The conventional wisdom was that people got sick because they didn’t deserve to be well. The public took symptoms of disease as evidence that the sick individual was unworthy, morally unfit. In our confusion about causes, we had trouble accepting that ill health has nothing to do with our value as human beings. 

Vilifying the unwell

Author Peter Allen Lewis notes that, even today, some still condemn sick people. He explores the historical interpretation of disease symptoms in his book The Wages of Sin. For example, Lewis discusses the sources of Americans’ feelings about AIDS victims.

In its fights about how to respond to AIDS, American society was reenacting a drama that had been written centuries before. I learned that there was a long tradition in the West of seeing disease as God’s punishment for sin – especially for sexual sins. I learned that every era had sorry tales to tell about how the sick and dying were condemned for their illnesses, and made to suffer as much in mind and heart as they were suffering in their bodies… And I learned that despite America’s apparent modernity, many people in this country – including many of those in power – were convinced that the healthy were saved and the sick were damned. All of these things, I found – history, conflict, condemnation – directly affected the course of this new epidemic, and took an enormous and tragic toll on Americans’ health and lives. [2]

The unfortunate truth is that despite our conscious awareness that a viral infection causes AIDS, there remains a lingering impulse toward moral judgment. That impulse has hampered AIDS research and remediation efforts. The moralization issue persists as an element in the background of our societal consciousness. Though new insights about the causes of illness invite a more productive, less value-laden way to interpret disease, a perverse, mostly unconscious bias toward personal condemnation still hinders our progress. 

Understanding how parasitic organisms affect us invites us to perceive illnesses more objectively, without misleading judgments about the diseased person’s worth. This principle has become a foundation of modern medicine. It is in large part how we distinguish illness from misbehavior. The manifestations of disease are involuntary, originating in causes outside the self; misbehavior, by contrast, is self-directed and deliberate.

Behavioral illness

One goal of this book is to spotlight a peculiar kind of disease. This disease differs from the sort that shows itself in problems with our physical bodies. This kind manifests as problems with our behavior, our acts as human beings. It’s a kind of pathological habit—one that has begun to repeat itself on its own, without our intending it. This kind of perverse habit defies our ability to control it, causing us to act in ways that are not what we would freely choose. 

This variety of illness certainly isn’t new. It’s been with us for a long, long time—in fact, it’s been around since our ancestors developed the ability to learn. It’s just that we don’t recognize it for what it is. Accurately understanding this kind of disease casts light on some of our most baffling and troublesome behavior. This new understanding illuminates what we might otherwise mistake for evil in the hearts of humankind. And as a most welcome benefit, the insight points us toward a more scientific psychology, one rooted in the same principles that have brought so much order to biological science.

We begin opening our eyes to the reality of this kind of illness when we resist our natural tendency to blame those who engage in nonsensical and destructive acts. Many of us feel an urge to judge our own wayward doings—and an even stronger impulse to judge the acts of others. But blame is not a good substitute for understanding. If we really want to comprehend something, we should simply gather information about it. Though it’s human to pass judgment, an emotional response just gets in the way. 

There are a number of behaviors that we interpret as nonsensical, or irresponsible, or inconsiderate, or reprehensible, or even “sinful.” What kind of monstrous creatures must we be, we ask ourselves, that we can sink to such depths? 

As we will see, there’s little need to entertain such dark questions about human nature. Most of these untoward behaviors are symptoms of this peculiar variety of disease. Maybe we’ve just been looking at things the wrong way—the same wrong way we used to look at physical illness. What would we notice if we looked with a more objective eye at some of the crazy things we do?

Recognizing that our behavior, as well as our bodies, can become diseased invites a fresh perspective on what we might otherwise consider the bewildering evildoings of humanity. Remember, adopting a neutral stance toward symptoms of physical disease gave us the freedom we needed to achieve a more useful understanding of biological dysfunction. A neutral perspective on behavioral disease can bring a similar freedom—the freedom to see that rotten behavior isn’t proof that the behaving individual is rotten. 

Distinguishing unacceptable behavior from personal unworthiness opens the door to a more effective means of pursuing psychological health. As we look at “bad” behavior from the framework of disease, let’s suspend judgment for a little while, just to see what happens. Maybe the ideas that were so helpful in illuminating bad health will help us understand bad habits. 

Habits and awareness

How can we accomplish this? It will help to take a fresh look at individual habits, both normal and abnormal. The dictionary definition of a habit is “an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary.”  [3] A habit is a string of behaviors repeated so much that the separate elements of the string have solidified into a single act. 

As the habit comes together, and becomes fixed, it slips mostly out of our consciousness. With each repetition, it requires less of our attention. In the end, normal habits operate semi-independently, largely outside awareness. This is another way of saying that habits self-execute when they are triggered, mostly under their own control.

Once learned, habits no longer require our complete attention. So they empower us to accomplish complex things without having to think much about what we are doing—as long as we have established the habit in advance. Many of us have, for example, driven home while some other concern was occupying our conscious minds. We could do that because we developed our driving habits—including an ingrained “driving home” habit—long before we began the trip. 

Why do habits operate in this mostly autonomous way? The brief answer is that, like everything else in biology, they evolved to work that way, because natural selection found a benefit in that way of working. Eons of evolution produced habits that operate largely on their own, because the bandwidth of our awareness is too small to operate them under our conscious control. The limits of our attention are too narrow to encompass more than a tiny fraction of what we do. 

Despite their semi-independence, every normal habit remains a part of our self, serving our interests. We assemble each habit in full awareness, to address one of our needs. Then, instinctively, without even intending it, we set the habit free, letting it slide out of our consciousness to continue its work for us on its own. Habits are like reliable little robots we create to assist us. And because we do create them under full awareness, we have reason to trust them. We can let them do their jobs on their own, with minimal oversight.

Rogue habits 

In the pages ahead we will focus on the difference between normal, controlled habits and those that have escaped the bonds of their minimal oversight. It will be helpful to have a name for such escaped habits, a label that will set them apart from those that are still under our control. A workable name is rogue habits. 

Each of these patterns begins as a voluntary activity. At this early point, while still a normal habit, it is already semi-autonomous. Over time, though, the rogue moves from semi-autonomous to fully autonomous. It somehow slips its controls entirely, and gets away from us. Unregulated, it is now free to evolve in its own interest—even into something that brings us harm. A rogue can morph into an entrenched, malignant habit that seems to act all by itself—and seemingly for no purpose other than to continue itself. It’s as if a bit of our behavior has taken on a life of its own. Spinning out of control, rogue habits can become recognizably disease-like, parasitic. Addictions are good examples of parasitic habits.

The key observation is this: having ditched their natural controls, rogue habits can evolve further, coming to act the way parasites act. These self-repeating behavior patterns, like biological parasites, exploit our personal resources to get themselves repeated. Bizarrely, snippets of our own behavior start to use us as their hosts. In the end, we become unwilling resources for our parasitic habits. And to the degree that they can, parasites always zombify their hosts.

Rogue habits? Parasitic habits? Zombification? Most sensible people don’t believe in such things. The idea that an element of our own behavior could begin acting in its own interest seems preposterous. The limitations of current psychological thought make it hard to see why we would compare a behavioral disorder to a biological parasite. 

But as deep thinker Ludwig von Bertalanffy long ago observed, patterns in one field of scientific study often crop up in others as well, even when those fields are quite different. [4] Similarities appear regularly enough that academics no longer find it surprising. “All systems,” says theoretical immunologist Irun Cohen, “be they social, biological or physical, employ common principles of organization.” [5] Where these common principles exist in two different areas of study, it makes sense to draw parallels. Doing so often deepens our understanding of both fields. That’s true even if there is no obvious connection between the fields. 

Here, though, the connection is obvious. The foundation of animal behavior is animal biology. Animals’ adaptation to their environments includes both biological and behavioral components. And just as animal bodies can become diseased, animal behavior can become diseased too. This way of understanding illuminates a bitter but very useful truth, that our habits can become genuinely pathological. Further, it shows exactly how they become pathological.

Though parasitic habits do indeed behave like parasitic diseases, biological parasites and pathological human behavior operate at very different levels of life. A habit that has become parasitic is most certainly not a biological disease like a tapeworm or the skin parasite that causes scabies. Nor is it the same kind of viral parasite that causes the flu or a herpes infection. 

A parasitic habit is not a biological form at all, but a bit of our own behavior that has taken a form so problematic that we can reasonably call it diseased—not just in a metaphorical sense, but in the literal sense of an actual disease process. 

If they operate at such different levels of life, why does it help to describe problematic behavior in disease terms? The comparison aids understanding, because components of our own behavior go rogue in much the same way that components of our physical bodies go rogue. So if we can understand one, we can understand the other.

The building blocks of complex living systems are semi-autonomous subsystems. So it isn’t uncommon for some of those parts to slip into full autonomy—to “go rogue.” In fact, every living thing devotes a sizable portion of its biological immune functions to identifying and eliminating rogue elements as they arise. Knowing this, it shouldn’t be surprising that the same thing happens with our semi-autonomous habits. Nor should it surprise us that higher animals, including humans, long ago evolved means of identifying and eliminating the rogue behavioral elements that do inevitably appear.

Biology and behavior

We are accustomed to visualizing diseases as tangible things like microbes and viruses. It’s harder to think of an intangible pattern of behavior as a disease. Yet every disease is partly behavioral. A disease wouldn’t be a disease at all unless it changed the organism’s behavior. One example is the change in our own behavior when we have a cold—the frequent, involuntary sneezing that spreads the cold virus. 

Every lifeform has both a genotype and a phenotype. [6] The cold virus has a genotype too. That’s its gene-based blueprint. But it also has a phenotype. That’s the mature viral pattern that unfolds from the blueprint. Sneezing is part of the virus’s phenotype. More precisely, our sneezes are a part of the virus’s “extended phenotype,” [7] part of the viral pattern that ranges beyond the virus’s physical structure. 

It’s no accident that runny noses and convulsive sneezes are characteristic cold symptoms. Spreading the virus in mucus droplets is part of the cold virus’s mindlessly evolved reproductive strategy. Both the mucus production and the sneezing are behavioral components of the viral phenotype. We could say that the behavioral components make up 50% of the phenotype package. The virus couldn’t persist without those behavioral elements, parts of the host zombification. Those elements are good for the parasitic virus, but not good for us or those we sneeze upon, who may well become infected. 

The typical symptoms of addiction and other rogue habits are not accidental either. In the case of addiction, though, the zombified behavior makes up not 50%, but 100% of the disease phenotype. We can account for all the mysterious features of runaway habits by thinking in terms of parasitic behavioral patterns. Each feature of a parasitic habit works to maintain the pattern. And each is understandable from a disease perspective.

Remember that unintended behavior is the hallmark of disease, how we distinguish it from evildoing, intentionally bad behavior. Natural selection guarantees that a parasite will always develop ways to zombify its host, influencing the host to behave in ways that benefit the parasite. The host may suffer from the consequences of its own acts, because the unintended behavior may run counter to the host’s interests. When we interpret parasitic habits as literal diseases, all the involuntarily destructive behavior we associate with addictions begins to make sense.

A familiar roadblock

The most baffling aspects of behavioral disease—for example, the dogged persistence and bizarre denial so characteristic of addictions—become far less mysterious as we identify out-of-control habits as parasitic diseases. Acting in their own interest, habits that have become parasitic always diminish our capacity for attention, our behavioral immunity. They impair our attention in order to exploit our normal human motivations, twisting them to their own ends. By exploiting the natural tendencies of their human hosts, and masking the process, they can reproduce themselves at our expense. 

But… habits acting in their own interest? Parasitic behaviors manipulating us to their own ends? How could a habit act as if it were making choices for itself? An answer might seem to require that we view rogue habits as entities with an intelligence and purpose of their own. How else, we wonder, could they act as independent agents? 

Questions like these have a familiar ring. They are reminiscent of another, much older question about evolution: “How can there be an intelligent design without an intelligent designer?” Over a century ago, this riddle was a roadblock that made it hard for people to accept natural selection. Darwin and Wallace’s idea struck them as blasphemous, because it seemed to deny God a role in creation. Other religious people saw no blasphemy in the idea, because they interpreted natural selection as the mechanism through which God creates living things. Still others, of course, concluded simply that we should keep religion and science separate.

Biologists, whether religious or not, eventually realized that the roadblock didn’t need to be there. Resistance faded as they accepted the explanatory power of natural selection. At present, most reasonable people believe that evolution, with or without an assumption of divine guidance, accounts for the sophisticated, intelligently designed strategies of all living things, including parasitic diseases. 

It's time we extend that insight to psychology. Many of our most destructive behaviors, presumed intentional, are better interpreted in terms of parasitic zombification, the unintended product of mindless evolution.

Summary

• As we stopped vilifying those who succumbed to physical illness, our forbearance hastened the development of modern medicine.
• We often judge certain kinds of repetitive behavior as “bad” or “evil.” But these moral judgments derail any deeper understanding of that behavior.
• Viewing maladaptive behavior without moral judgment confers the freedom to understand dysfunctional acts in a more useful way—in disease terms.
• We create normal habits consciously. Subsequently they perform themselves semi-autonomously, under remote supervision.
• Our most destructive acts are habits that have escaped that remote supervision—rogue habits.
• The reality of rogue habits has gone unnoticed for the same reason that the evolution of species by natural selection went unnoticed for so many years.

Next

In the next chapter we’ll take a look at alcoholism—one of many repetitive, destructive patterns that many of us judge negatively, but one that can be more fruitfully interpreted in disease terms.

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[1] Baron-Cohen, S. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Basic Books, 2012. Pages 5-6.
[2] Lewis, PA. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. University of Chicago Press, 2000. Page xv.
[3] Anonymous. Habit. Online entry in Dictionary.com. Available online at https://www.dictionary.com/browse/habit.
[4] Ludwig von Bertalanffy promoted this idea in his General Systems Theory (GST). Kenneth Boulding writes that GST “aims to point out similarities in the theoretical constructions of different disciplines, where these exist, and to develop theoretical models having applicability to at least two different fields of study.” [Boulding KE. General Systems Theory: The skeleton of science. Management Science, 1956, 2, 3, 197-208. Page 198.]
[5] Cohen IR. Tending Adam’s Garden: Evolving the Cognitive Immune Self. Elsevier Academic Press, 2004. Page xviii.
[6] An organism’s genotype is its collection of genes. Its phenotype is the organism that those genes produce—all the features of its body and its behavior and (as science writer Richard Dawkins has pointed out) its constructions.
[7] Dawkins R. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. Oxford University Press (Reprint Edition), 2016.