America: Land of the Addicted Consumer

Let’s face this simple fact about Americans: We are a nation addicts:

“Addiction is a chronic medical disease characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding behaviors or substance use despite harmful consequences. It involves complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, environmental factors, and individual life experiences, leading to changes in brain function and behavior control.” – National Institutes of Health

So here we are, addicted to smartphones, social media, sugar and fat, video games, and pornography — to name but a few. To understand the story of how we got here, we need to understand something of the story of organized crime in America. From the Prohibition era onward, Lucky Luciano and his childhood friend and “business associate,” Meyer Lansky, knew addiction very, very well. Luciano’s businesses were heroin and prostitution, and Lansky invented the modern casino. These men knew nothing of the languages of neuroscience or brain chemistry, but they knew how to manipulate both from their direct observation of addiction.

The original purposes of the casinos were three fold:
1. To generate a flow of untraceable cash
2. To launder money from the heroin trade
3. To create a venue for gangsters to mix and mingle with Hollywood stars

To address the first goal, Lansky used the statistical edge built into casino games to make money. The house could run scrupulously honest games and still make money, legally; Lansky let the statistical odds do the winning for the house, and if the house lost …it lost. All the casino needed to do to get ahead was keep the customer at the tables for as long as possible – this was where creating an addictive environment was key.

The second goal, concealing ill-gotten gains, became known as money laundering. It became necessary after Chicago franchise operator Al Capone went to prison for income tax evasion. Necessity moved Lansky to travel the world; he even spent time in Switzerland studying financial systems. He applied what he learned to inventing the modern corporate shell company and the investigator’s new dilemma: financial whack-a-mole.

Third, men such as these gangsters loved the night life. Lucky and Lansky had polished their trade skills under the tutelage of high-society Arnold Rothstein, who taught them the social skills to mingle with New York’s upper-crust. The casinos allowed them a place to “rub elbows with the stars” in their own nightclubs. But for hard, practical men such as these, there were other reasons, as well.

The casinos were Meyer Lansky’s laboratory for the study what made addicts tick at the gut level. Lansky, a math genius and friend of Albert Einstein, compiled granular statistics on the casino’s patrons. The personal information the prostitutes were able to gather from their Johns, combined with financial information from the hotel guest register, could sometimes be used to blackmail influential men — men like J. Edgar Hoover, for instance. They didn’t call Lansky “The Brain” for nothing.

The name of the mob game was “unregulated monopoly capitalism.” It was the platform their syndicate used to generate and launder enough dark money to eclipse the gross national product of a medium-sized nation state. I propose that the Cosa Nostra syndicate, with franchises in every large city in America, amassed enough cash to shift the course of our nation’s history. The American gangsters of the 21st Century had amassed enough money to influence the course of world history. Our system of free, well-regulated capitalism, the system that made America the envy of the free world transmuted our system into the racketeer’s system of monopoly capitalism — a Banana Republic economy. Today, that system is turning us in on our own addictive consumerism and destroying the country.

Turns out addicts don’t care much about democracy or our constitutional system They have shown that they care more about getting to the fast food window on their way to a job dumbed-down to accommodate workers with the attention span of a gnat. We have difficulty reading anything that isn’t on an LED screen. We are addicted to the same brain chemistry that drove the industries that made the gangsters enormously wealthy, with one difference: We’re acquiring a different fix from different pushers with different names. Make no mistake, we are once again dealing with callous, hard-hearted men.

Those men are sociopaths, for the most part, like many of the gangsters: Bill Gates, Mark Fuckerberg and Facebook, Larry Ellison, Google and the AI chat engines …these are a but a very few of the hundreds of new “drug pushers” selling us a new flavor of heroin: Addictive technology “characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding behaviors or substance use despite harmful consequences.” New, but just as addictive.

Heroin isn’t physically addictive, but the withdrawal symptoms of heroin are a psychological dependence powerful enough to destroy their lives. Something needs to be done, but can pornography addicts treat themselves? We’re in a tough spot here, folks. With the vast, highly detailed personal information the “New Land sky’s” receive about our every online mouse click, emails, thoughts and desires, finances, political views in real time. Well, I think you can guess what Meyer Lansky would do with this much personal information about every person in America.

He would use the vast pool of information about every mouse-click you make to package you off to a dumbed-down job he provides so you can earn money to pay for his devices and the internet services required to pay for the connectivity you need to pay for your addiction to his social media software, coda, and repeat. Like I said, Lansky was a genius. He helped Einstein work on the Unified Field Theory, but he was a hard, dissolute, and ruthless genius. Today, it’s still Lansky’s casino games, but with a different crime syndicate and different capos.

The so-called tech industry’s pirates and their monopoly capitalism is the same economic model used by the old-school mob bosses (which explains why our newest crime family hides behind a narcissistic buffoon and his corrupt playbook of extortion, bribery, and fraud). Is there more than a little irony that the buffoon we face today was trained and mentored by Meyer Lansky’s personal fixer?

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