How ‘bread-and-circuses’ government and perverse culture create dependency epidemic.
Recently the London Telegraph reported that rising numbers of toddlers are so addicted to iPads they are unable to play with toy building blocks. Young kids increasingly “lack the motor skills needed to play with building blocks because of an ‘addiction’ to tablet computers and smartphones,” revealed the story, citing school teachers’ observations that “many children aged just three or four can ‘swipe a screen,’ but have little or no dexterity in their fingers after spending hours glued to iPads.”
Another shadowy category of casualties of the digital revolution, video-game addicts, attained official recognition in January when a new mental condition, “Internet Gaming Disorder,” was added to psychiatrists’ “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” used for diagnosing mental illness. “When these individuals are engrossed in Internet games,” says the updated fifth edition, (“DSM-V”), “certain pathways in their brains are triggered in the same direct and intense way that a drug addict’s brain is affected by a particular substance.”
Previously, video-game addiction broke into the news cycle only when it led to horrible crimes – such as when 16-year-old Daniel Petric shot both of his parents in the head, his mother fatally, for taking away his Halo 3 game, or when Rebecca Colleen Christie allowed her 3-year-old daughter to starve to death because mom was so obsessed with playing World of Warcraft online. Most recently, Santa Barbara mass murderer Elliot Rodger, known to be obsessed with the same game, was reported to have been “mimicking a specific character from the violent Warcraft video game.”
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