Julia Galef with Sage Advice

There is another purely rational reason for this way of looking at success, and it is that real problems are never the fault of the subject alone, but always due to the "situational logic" in which that person finds themselves. Problems of addiction, for example, don't lie solely with addict, they are a result of the addicted person's everyday life being interconnected with a social and economic network of other people, so the individual, to be successful in overcoming addiction, will need to change that whole network, not just themselves. And typically we are not conscious of the effects of this background, so the repeated failures are the process of learning more about this background of causality, and as they learn more, they get better at changing it. And it works even better when others around them can consciously assist in making those changes. Then you see why being able to free ourselves of the economic and consequent psycho-social rigidity that modern economics creates is going to be the greatest advance in mental and physical health that humanity is ever going to know. This is going to make the germ theory of disease and antibiotics seem like a minor improvemment in medicine.