What is Reddit's opinion of Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

As someone raised in an evangelical Christian home where devil worship was nothing to joke about I agree this should raise red flags for true believers in Christ. We'll see if it does, but it really really should. Otherwise I feel like the one shlub who actually believed the crap while everybody else was just winking and nodding or somehow their brains have been hacked and they're all authoritarian followers looking for a hit of "leadership" like a drug addict and Christ worked well enough in a pinch.

EDIT: After writing that last bit about leadership and addicts that tweaked something. I've heard so many testimonies of people who were addicted to something and then miraculously healed by Jesus. No more addiction. When you delve into it a bit more these people will often say that they were able to replace their addiction with Jesus. Anytime they'd feel the need to go back to drugs or alcohol they'd read scripture and boom. Saved. Right... They just substituted their addiction with a non (or less depending) destructive one and have become a very consolidated group of addicts looking for a hit and Trump's their new dealer. https://www.amazon.com/Addictive-Thinking-Abraham-Twerski-M-D/dp/1568381387 Crap.

I'm currently training to become a Psychotherapist that specializes in addictions and it's in this literature that I've found some of the best descriptions of the behavior in the story linked. Abraham J Twerkski’s Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception has some of the best descriptions of the type of thinking that leads to these types of Ecological disasters. Addictive thinking is distorted, it is the distortion of thought. It leads to irrational and illogical justifications for destructive, pathological behavior.

>That is the function of addictive thinking: to permit the person to continue the more destructive habit. The more brilliant the person is, the more ingenious are his or her reasons for drinking, for not being abstinent, and for considering AA or NA worthless organizations. ... "I need a drink" (or a drug) , and then builds a case for that conclusion, whether it's logical or not and whether or not the facts support it.

You can literally see this type of thinking in this thread, with poster commenting that the facts are simply not true. This type of pathology as become normalized in our culture and usually cloaked in economic or technocratic jargon centered around the need for economic growth and short term profits. But this is addictive thinking, it's a distortion of reality. In the same way a addict will ruin his/her life for short term satiation, our culture is ruining the biosphere for the satiation of short term economic goals. Addictive thinking leads to a distortion of time, where the future is measured in "moments" not in months or years. That is why you see so many addicts destroying their lives and futures in pursuit of whatever drug it is they think they need. Is there better description of what we are collectively dealing with at the moment? Our culture is a culture of addiction and a conception of time based off addiction.

>We are part of culture that values the delivery of service in seconds - e-mail, the Internet, and fast food restaurants all provide nearly instant gratification. We all, in some ways, operate within the addictive concept of time. We've polluted the air, rivers, and oceans for short term gain, disregarding long term effects. We've destroyed forests and habitats of endangered species with little regard to turning this world over to future generations. Are we not disregarding the future, very much as the addict does?

The problem is if this is a social pathology, then how do you detox a culture?

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Absolutely, the book that helped me sift through my own issues and finally accept recovery and abstinence for my path was Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self Deception