On the 28th of April, 1972, Jimmy Reid, a blue-collar shop steward at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Glasgow Scotland gave his inaugural address as the Rector of the University of Glasgow. The Rector is a senior official of the University, elected every three years to represent the interests of the students. It was a position traditionally held by the upper-class intelligentsia. Reid, who quit school at age 14 and learned as a reader, ran for the position and won. That inaugural speech titled “Alienation” (also known as the rat race speech) was reprinted in full by the New York Times and has since been referred to as one of the most outstanding speeches of the 20th century. Read the full text link and judge for yourself. An excerpt from the speech:
“The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, “Listen, you look after number one”. Or as they say in London, “Bang the bell, Jack, I’m on the bus”. To the students I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it “What does it profit a man if he gain the world and suffer the loss of his soul” (Reid, 1972).
In our current world, increasingly, we no longer even get to run the rat race.
That speech was over 53 years ago in a different world. A world that precious few are left to even remember. Modernization, particularly technology like robotics and artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming our world. We are becoming passive and purposeless mammals sitting around eating bananas. Is there any wonder why addiction, mental health conditions, violence and inhumanity are increasing across the globe?
There is a well-known series of experiments conducted by John B. Calhoun from the late 1950s to the early 1970s called the “Universe 25” study. It explored overcrowding, social density, rodent behavior and population dynamics, ultimately leading to societal collapse. Extinction within the enclosed environments. Rats with unlimited food and water but no purpose. Violence increased, some became lethargic and there were others who became obsessed with self-grooming. It led to colony collapse in which nearly all died.
As an article in The Scientist Magazine (2024) described “rodents born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking.”
As Reid noted in his famous speech, we are not rats, we are humans. Yet, we study rats because there are similarities, even beyond biological to what Calhoun studied which was social patterns. Do we face societal collapse similar to what Calhoun repeatedly found in his Universe studies? It would be imprudent to ignore similar patterns in those studies to dynamics present in our current era. I believe we have greater agency than rats. We are capable of more than hope, we have agency and can work towards a different outcome. For me, there is no other acceptable course of action. Perhaps the most significant recovery lesson in my life is that the only way to truly fail is to fail to continue to try.
We are moving into a technological age in which nearly everyone can be replaced and increasingly people are isolated by technology. We lack deep connections to other people. We have little purpose beyond seeking hedonistic comfort. The central question in human society should now be how we fulfill our innate need for purpose and human connection. There are few if any questions more important to civilization in our age than this one.
We are in the early stages of rapid societal change, arguably at a pace never seen before in human history. Algorithms shape what we see and who we interact with in ways that alter how we see ourselves and our society. It confirms our biases rather than challenge our beliefs in ways that foster connections. We face economic alienation as these technologies concentrate power, create vast streams of data that can be used in very dangerous ways, put the vast majority of people across society in perpetual precarity. Nothing seems certain in any moment. We are alienated from the worth of our labor, the products we make and consume, from ourselves and from each other. We see that these dynamics are driving up substance addictions, compulsions and eroding our mental health.
It seems hard to argue with the facts in front of us. We are going to need to reshape society in ways that are difficult for us to even consider. If fewer workers are needed, we will need to do something like Bill Gates has recommended, taxing machines that replace human workers to create a universal basic income. This kind of concept may be hard for people who have worked their whole lives to accept, until they consider that there will be no way to pay for social security or invest in a growth economy to support their retirement years unless some measures to gain revenue from robotics and AI are implemented. Beyond the income challenge is one of purpose. Societies with a lot of idle people, in particular idle young men do not fare well historically. It is nearly inevitable considering the rapid changes in technology in reshaping our society. It is a recipe for disaster and one that we will need to face head on.
My focus here is addiction and recovery. One of the key takeaways in respect to how people successfully sustain recovery is that they get involved in service to others. This is also true for families who have experienced the overdose loss of loved ones. The pathway forward in life often only makes sense if it includes working to not have what happened to your or your family happen to others. Purpose driven lives. This dynamic is a powerful clue to what we may want to look at in respect to recasting a vital society. Who better to emulate than people who have found their way back to life from addiction, which can be an alienating condition? People who have successfully navigated the road back to life.
Consumer society has also eroded connectivity and vitality within our society and even permeated our efforts to restore resilience in our communities. When we set up fee for service processes to help people to ameliorate a situation or condition, we rob communities of their own potential. We do things for them that they can do for themselves and erode their potential. As I wrote about in Restoring American Community – Recovery Community as a Catalyst, community building is an inside job. We should consider that:
- Communities can and do their best when they self-define their own manners of healing. External agents who prescribe solutions or only add in community members after plans are predetermined rob communities of their own inherent capacity to actualize. Stigma and bias often drive the externalization of goal development. Members are patronized, not empowered. There should be no wonder why addiction is having a greater impact on marginalized communities. Our systems treat them paternalistically as passive recipients and not formidable change agents in their own right. This is a form of theft. Resources remain outside of the impacted community. People are commodified instead of empowered. This is particularly true in respect to marginalized communities.
- If we want to strengthen community, we must change how we resource reparative strategies. We tend towards a service orientation, providing things to people rather than supporting collective problem resolution. In the recovery space, the original grants that focused on recovery community had a support orientation and were titled “Recovery Community Support Program” grants. It did not last long. Developing recovery community was shifted to serving the recovery community. The title changed to “Recovery Community Service Program” grants. The grants helped a lot of people, but we ended up with a service orientation, not a recovery community orientation. We failed to leverage the power of community more fully. Bill White warned in a 2013 address to the national recovery community and subsequent paper that “if the recovery advocacy movement morphs solely into a PRSS appendage to the addiction treatment system, the movement will have failed and will recreate conditions that will set the stage for a future revitalized recovery advocacy movement.” He ended up accurately forecasting exactly what unfolded.
- Community plays a vital role in a healthy society. The Edelman Trust Barometer suggests that lack of connection and trust is a global concern. Our nation was founded on the notion of voice and choice. We are strongest as a people when we build community and weakest when we allow it to erode. Building recovery community synergistically benefits society in ways beyond helping individuals heal from addiction. There is some evidence that just about everything we value like good health, economic growth and lower crime rates improve when people come together in recovery community and the things we do not want decrease. Communities are central to societal health, yet we do not focus efforts on building it, in the recovery sector or beyond. We must hold community up as a central facet of our collective wellbeing.
Consider the work of David Best and others focused on building community. In 2024, Dr. Best wrote the allegory of the lake: The implications of an Inclusive Recovery Cities model for prevention and early intervention. One of the primary benefits of this model is prevention. By focusing on recovery, we reduce addiction and when people do become addicted, they can find recovery more quickly. We should be building this kind of community scaffolding everywhere, in all communities. Communities focused on supporting young people into adulthood, older adults sustaining purpose in that stage of the lifespan and with all our various tribes of community supporting each other that we can foster.
As John McKnight eloquently stated in his book, Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, “Systems use relationships to produce products and services. Associations create relationships for their own sake. This has the effect of bringing forth the properties of kindness, generosity, and the rest.” I will not pretend here to have all the answers, but restoring community is vital to our future, and we cannot do it using our traditional service model. We must augment community to do so. At the advent of the great COVID Pandemic isolation in 2020, I wrote Let’s focus the recovery community on hope, connection, and purpose. I was worried about the vitality of the recovery community. One of the most amazing things that occurred in the very month I wrote that piece in March of 2020 was that recovery communities around the world moved vast amounts of social support and mutual aid online at a speed that would have defied optimistic predictions. This to me points to one of the vital facets of humanity. We are highly adaptable beings prone to ingenuity under pressure. We are in a different kind of duress than we have ever experienced before but I am optimistic we can prevail if we focus our efforts on doing so.
The “secret sauce” of recovery community organizations and mutual aid programs are harnessed capacity of people to collectively support their own healing and growth. Recovery Community Organizations, Collegiate Recovery programs, 12-Step & Mutual-Aid Fellowships, Secular & Evidence-Based Mutual Support Programs, Faith-Based & Culturally Specific Recovery Groups are effective because everyone has a role in making it work. They are not service modeled systems in which an expert is the key to improvement. They are communities helping each other. We need to build and support more community-oriented support models in our increasingly alienated world.
In a society in which people lack industry and purpose, perhaps we tax machines and provide a universal basic income and for those who have the capacity to work, require some level of public service or engagement in arts or some function that supports community. In this context, service-oriented people are the leaders we need to learn from. The people we need to emulate to leave the next generation with a functioning society. It seems obvious to me that this would inevitably be one of the solutions we will need to adopt in the world we are moving into.
I would love to hear what other people think – the more we are focused on solutions, the better off we will be. This in and of itself is a lesson of recovery, at least for me.
Citations
Best, D., Laudet, A. (2010). The Potential of Recovery Capital. Citizen Power Peterborough, RSA Projects. https://www.nbhnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/The-Potential-of-Recovery-Capital.pdf
Best, D. (2024, March 20). Recovery Review. The allegory of the lake: The implications of an Inclusive Recovery Cities model for prevention and early intervention. https://recoveryreview.blog/2024/03/20/the-allegory-of-the-lake-the-implications-of-an-inclusive-recovery-cities-model-for-prevention-and-early-intervention/
Edelman. (2023). Edelman Trust Barometer. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/trust-barometer
Magazine, S., Fessenden, M. Molinek. R. (2024, February). This Old Experiment With Mice Led to Bleak Predictions for Humanity’s Future. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experiment-with-mice-led-to-bleak-predictions-for-humanitys-future-180954423/
Melchor, A. (2024, May 28). Universe 25 Experiment. The Scientist Magazine®. https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941
Mancini, J. (2025, January 27). Bill Gates Wants To “Tax The Robots” That Take Your Job – And Some Say It Could Fund Universal Basic Income To Replace Lost Wages. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-233045575.html
McKnight, J., & Block, P. (2010). The abundant community: Awakening the power of families and neighborhoods. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Reid, J. (1972). Alienation: Rectorial address delivered in the University of Glasgow on Friday, 28th April, 1972. University of Glasgow Publication. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_167194_smxx.pdf
Stauffer, W. (2020, March 27). Recovery Review. Let’s focus the recovery community on hope, connection, and purpose. https://recoveryreview.blog/2020/03/27/lets-focus-the-recovery-community-on-hope-connection-and-purpose/
Stauffer, W. (2023, November 4). Recovery Review. Restoring American Community – Recovery Community as a Catalyst. Recovery Review. https://recoveryreview.blog/2023/11/04/restoring-american-community-recovery-community-as-a-catalyst/
White, W. (2013). State of the new recovery advocacy movement. Posted at Chestnut Health Papers of William White. https://deriu82xba14l.cloudfront.net/file/371/2013-State-of-the-New-Recovery-Advocacy-Movement.pdf
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