I recently stumbled on the term ‘anhedonia’ in a book called ‘Dopamine Nation‘.
Authored by a well-known psychiatrist named Anna Lembke, the book is all about the brain chemicals which regulate our mood and our sense of motivation. I will explain this briefly to make a point, though I urge you to grab a copy if the subject interests you.
One of these key brain chemicals is the eponymous dopamine. The author helpfully describes how the body, much like any other self-regulating system, strives to maintain balance at all costs. When it comes to dopamine, this balance fluctuates according to a pleasure-pain dichotomy.
At the outset, it seems fairly straightforward. Pleasurable activity stimulates the brain into flooding the body with dopamine, making us feel good. The brain, that ever ingenious wonder of life’s engineering department, rewards the body to shape behaviour according to its needs.
However, there’s a catch.
Pain short-circuits this mechanism by depriving us of dopamine, making us more likely to look for easier ways to restore that balance towards the pleasure side. This is how addictions are formed: by finding an activity which stimulates the release of dopamine when we are unable to produce enough of it naturally, we fill the void with whatever makes us feel good. Our brain’s safety mechanism, designed to motivate us to survive in times of scarcity, will latch onto anything when deprived.
Enter ‘anhedonia’. If you were wondering whether it has any relation to the word ‘hedonism’, you are correct. It is, in fact, a paradox. As Lembke puts it:
“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
Lembke provides further explanations for this observation – she points out that, since the body is so efficient at maintaining balance, constantly tilting dopamine levels towards the pleasure side denatures the mechanism itself. Pleasure becomes less pleasurable, pushing our hypothetical hedonist towards more extreme sources of pleasure. Pain becomes worse, accelerating the downward spiral.
The downward spiral crashes at the bottom when we’ve pleasured ourselves for so long that it becomes meaningless.
As soon as it clicked in my head, I immediately thought about the Identita’ racket, which Jason Azzopardi recently described at length in his two-hour interview with Lovin Malta. By now, you must have heard about the cocaine-fueled sex parties which these same racketeers were allegedly very fond of.
As soon as I understood the term which inspired this commentary piece, I imagined what it must be like to be so desperate to feel something that you’d be willing to pay thousands of euros for what was allegedly the equivalent of an all-you-can-snort-and-shag buffet. The sheer size of the racket, which involved complex arrangements like sending fixers to install letterboxes at addresses their bosses’ clients never lived in, attests to the lengths which these individuals were willing to go to in order to secure their pound of flesh.
The point isn’t just the money that was spent on these wild evenings. The Identita’ racket is merely a known example of how extreme excess is the new norm. And it’s not just about substance abuse and the proliferation of complex, increasingly organised prostitution rings to service a booming demand – you can see it everywhere, from the way we consume food to the way we hoard wealth and even the way we callously uproot lives in this psychotic fit of rage against anyone who is portrayed as a threat.
The handful of individuals who wield real power in this country – and no, I am not just referring to the vultures circling over Mile End, but also their paymasters – have been extracting boundless pleasure out of the suffering of the rest of us for so long that they must be itching for anything to feel something by now. How else do we explain cocaine sex parties, insufferable levels of corruption, the disgraceful lack of interest in actually governing the country? The dissociation from reality is so unbelievably vast because nothing hits the spot anymore.
The end stages of addiction are particularly devastating because one becomes completely blind to consequences. After more than a decade, the Labour Party is so intoxicated by power that it has grown accustomed to abusing it, to the point of being unable to even think of stopping. Widespread hedonism is merely a symptom of this decline. It’s not just about having more money to throw around – it’s about never being able to get enough. It’s about having so much, yet still compulsively obsessing over how to get more.
Some describe the Labour Party’s ongoing internal drama as a ‘battle for the Labour Party’s soul’, as if it were some divine clash of the titans and not the back alley brawl that it actually is. The old adage of ‘no honour among thieves’ doesn’t even cut it anymore – at this stage, Mile End looks more like the set of Squid Game than it does anything else.
The party’s house of cards collapsed a long time ago. Its ‘soul’ lies buried beneath the debris, and the titans fighting over the ruins are nothing but frauds.
As dire as the situation may seem, our own neurological pathways offer a hopeful parallel. Though it may sound counter-intuitive, pain eventually restores balance after reaching the state of anhedonia. The suffering we must inevitably endure after excessive indulgence rots our core is the body’s way of readjusting. It begins with abstaining from constant pleasure and continues with enough effort to seek out better ways of being.
If we wish to nurse our state back to health, we will first need to purge the democratic body of institutionalised greed.
