The moral code thus functions as a rationalized exploitation of the life energy of the masses, through a calculated distortion of values. The illusion proffered is that the more hellish one’s life, the more heavenly will be one’s reward. This distorted coupling of pleasure with suffering has produced a morally perverse social milieu, in which pain becomes associated with pleasure. In this atmosphere, the extreme alternation of suffering and euphoria that typifies addiction becomes at least provisionally tenable in a deadly antisocial game of winning and losing the forbidden high.
