biology – Becoming Human

The web of life

Verified on Po.et

April 5th 2018, 15:15

Many of us I guess are used to the idea that we are interconnected with all life here on the planet, and that what affects one ecosystem, even seemingly far away, affects us all. It may, however, seem a little abstract, even pious for some.

In fact, this interpenetration is way more basic than we realize. This was brought home to me by listening to Dr Mark Davis on Chris Ryan’s podcast recently talking about the gut microbiome. We do not only consume other organisms, rely on them for regulating atmospheric CO2 levels or depend on them in some other metaphysical way. They are inside us – in excess of 90% of the DNA in our bodies is non-human (mostly bacterial) DNA. A whole new order of life was recently found living in our guts. Bacterial cells (because they are much smaller and simpler) outnumber human cells in our bodies by orders of magnitude. Bacteria and other microbes perform essential functions in human physiology: we have “outsourced” many jobs to them. The mitochondria in our own human cells, and many other cellular bodies, were once bacteria or viruses.

So the web of life penetrates our own bodies very deeply. But more than this: it actually IS our bodies. It would be perfectly artificial and not make much sense to define a human body as consisting only of human cells containing human DNA. Those cells are only part of a much greater whole. The consciousness we possess does not reign over an exclusively human organism, but a massive ecosystem predominantly composed of organisms which are genetically unrelated to the human brain cells which supposedly run the show. And just as endogenous neurotransmitters began evolutionary life as exohormes, communicating between rather than within organisms, so mechanisms we have developed – thought, speech, behavior and probably other communicative functions – link the entity we call ourselves into the wider whole. I am not, of course, saying that the skin is not a relevant boundary, but it is not an absolute one.

So it is not really that we are connected to the web of life or dependent on it. In fact we are the web of life, one manifestation of it; and when we disturb it, as becomes increasingly clear, we do not have to wait generations to see the consequences because they are indirect. They are right there inside us.

Telling The Truth

Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, an account of the pick-up artist (PUA) subculture which I discussed in an earlier post has just published his new book, The Truth. The book describes, as I understand it, with a great deal of candour and personal courage, his process of transitioning from what we might call an obsessively promiscuous lifestyle to a committed open (or at least, not fully closed) relationship with his wife Ingrid. It’s Strauss’s journey, but also – certainly by the provocative title – seems to purport to be more than that.

I should say that these remarks are not based on a reading of the new book, but mostly just on what he said in his recent podcast with Daniel Vitalis. It may be, therefore, that I misrepresent Strauss to a certain extent (which I’ll gladly correct if I can be convinced of it); but in any case, what I will go on to describe and then criticize in this article is a position, I think, that many men are adopting, from whatever angle they come at it, in response to certain obvious facts of our social biology, namely our non-monogamous nature and our desire nevertheless to form deep and intimate bonds with members of the opposite sex, combined with the cultural reality they encounter. This is therefore not a book review, but a critique of that position. It isn’t necessary to listen to the podcast to understand my comments, though I do encourage you to.

Many of Strauss’s erstwhile PUA fans will no doubt be ready to poo-poo the book as a cave-in, and Strauss himself states in the podcast that some have seen it as a defense of monogamy, even a repudiation of his earlier persona, which he insists it is not. That’s fair, though he does bear responsibility for this inevitable media spin (which he doesn’t seem to have been too concerned to avoid). Strauss’s point seems to be that obsessive promiscuity is unsatisfying and successful polyamory hard to pull off, polyamory itself being, in a certain number of cases, a lifestyle choice or label which covers up an inability or unwillingness to go deep in relationships. This being so, Strauss might best be seen as a “pragmatic monogamist” who construes the term not as prohibiting extra-dyadic sex but as requiring, as I understand it, such sex to take place, if it does, on terms which are mutually agreed within the couple and transparent. He puts this forward in the discussion simply as the position to which he has come, not as a universal model, though given this his marketing seems disingenuous. I interpret him as not being opposed to polyamory, but simply skeptical of it in practice.

It might seem that Strauss and I share a lot in common; I too have written about some important misgivings related to the way polyamory is conceptualized and lived in practice (or, let us say, some of the practices which the word is used to cover) and I agree with him on the importance of commitment, communication, transparency etc, at least in that ideal world in which we decidedly do not live.

There is, however, something rather unexamined, it seems to me, in Strauss’s discourse. Vitalis illustrates this in the podcast when he speaks of his sense of shame at hiding extra-dyadic dalliances from his partner, a position he is very uncomfortable being in because he feels it lacks integrity. I would certainly agree with this, but even if we have to live our life as best we can within the constraints we have inherited, it still behoves us to examine this sense of shame critically, something neither Strauss nor Vitalis in the podcast hints at doing. Vitalis, however, offers himself a clue as to the origin of his sentiments in describing his attitude as a child towards his mother: ever fearful she would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, he was very careful to avoid doing anything which might provoke such an overreaction. As children, of course, we seek to please our mothers because we need their love. Our mothers, on the other hand, often simply take from us what they want, being far more skilled and better placed to obtain it due to being adults and in a monopolistic position of authority. We need to be very careful to avoid the widespread error of reproducing this asymmetry in our adult relationships, and especially of doing so unconsciously, failing to recognize this as a cultural construct rather than an innate difference of social biology.

It will inevitably happen from time to time, in a dyadic relationship, that some courses of action in which the man is inclined to engage may cause discomfort to the woman. This should (ideally) be discussed, of course, and it also needs to be recognized that the woman may have insights into this situation which the man lacks; these should be listened to. However, it cannot be that the man simply does not engage in actions which make his partner uncomfortable; that she has some kind of veto on his behavior (or he on hers). The position of discomfort has a lot to teach us, and ensuring the comfort of the other at all times is a very unrealistic demand to place on oneself. This applies no less in matters sexual than in any other sphere of life. If one backs off from confrontation simply because one fears it, then one loses an essential part of ones freedom and ability to live an authentic life. We cannot rescue monogamy with the artifice of imposing upon it unhealed parent-child patterns of behavior.

In my life, I have seen that it is important to listen and communicate, but it is also important to be brave: not only important for oneself, but also for the relationship and the other. An implicit and festering situation of subordination strikes me as a major risk factor for relationship longevity. I share their desire to be open, though I do not think this is an ethical commandment; indeed, sometimes (as Dan Savage never tires from pointing out) exactly the opposite may be true. However, I am also going to do things which make my partner uncomfortable if those are things which I am convinced I need to do. I will take into account her vulnerabilities and the long run, but they are only factors among others.

There is no inherent reason to be ashamed of ones interest in pursuing any kind of relationship with another person, nor of actually doing so where this does not constitute a material and real (rather than unilaterally imagined) threat to the investment each partner has made in the primary or reference relationship. In this regard, it is irrelevant whether this behavior causes discomfort and even whether it brings about the end of the primary relationship entirely. One may certainly refrain from a course of action in order to avoid those outcomes: but consciously, not based on shame. One must, at the same time, also understand that change and challenge brings growth and new opportunities. If one shies away from this out of fear, the relationship will stagnate and may anyway eventually perish. One would want to be quite confident that in the long run the asymmetry in the relationship is not going to give rise to resentment, the rising tide of which may – and I think often does – pass unperceived under the radar of ones social identity until it is too late.

Strauss argues that we have neuroplasticity and our biology is not the last word. Of course this is correct. But any ability we may have to pursue any sort of relationship which may loosely be called monogamous still begs the question of why we should do so. There may be pragmatic grounds – including that it is a better personal choice than a life of obsessive-compulsive unsatisfying sexual liaisons and that it is a socially stable reference point, an available (if adaptable) paradigm: the path, in other words, that it sounds like Strauss has trodden. But such grounds are no more than that; they are not “The Truth”.

Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être”

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

The fetishization of control

Here are a number of apparently unrelated behavioral conundrums. In general we take them for granted, but this in itself is curious.

Why is it that there is so much uncertainty as to the basic physiology of female sexual arousal and response: can’t women just tell us?
Why does mainstream pornography cater almost exclusively for men and focus on the performance of sex acts where even the pretence that the female participants find them enjoyable is a matter of little, if any, cinematographic concern?
Why, notwithstanding copious evidence that our species is in no way predisposed to monogamy, does it seem that many women not only retain a social preference for it, but actually eroticize it to such a degree?
What’s up with jealousy? Is it sufficient to rationalize it as fear of abandonment in order to explain its intensity and prevalence?
Why, in general, do we find it so hard to break destructive patterns of behavior, and not only sexual ones?

The argument associating the sexual subjugation of women with the rise of settled agriculture and associated property rights is convincing as far as it goes. Nevertheless, it does not explain the tenaciousness of these phenomena, their psychodynamics, which cause many phenomenologists with insufficient insight into mental processes to suspect that there must be more to them than culturally revisionist accounts of human origins allow. If the eroticization of control is not innate notwithstanding its pervasiveness, how has it come about?

When a phenomenon which is not “intrinsically” erotic acquires a subjective erotic charge, we speak of fetish, kink or paraphilia. At its most general, a fetish is simply a member of the subclass of subjectively conditioned stimuli (CS) which give rise on the part of the subject to a pleasurable erotic response; further distinctions relating to the intensity of that response (“turn-on”, “preference”…) are merely a matter of degree. As such, fetish is merely the erotic subclass of a more general set of pleasurable conditioned stimuli, which in turn is a subset of all stimuli with a subjective conditioned response, i.e. also those stimuli which elicit fear or pain, which we refer to as phobias. For expositional clarity, I will speak here only of fetish, but it is useful to bear in mind that exactly parallel reasoning applies to all conditioned stimuli.

It follows that a fetish is a subjectively acquired mental association, resulting either from frequent exposure or from exposure under highly emotional conditions, between a particular stimulus and an erotic response. [1]

For the sake of argument, at least, let us assume that there are also stimuli which give rise to an unconditioned erotic response, so-called “unconditioned stimuli”, US. It should be noted, however, that the categorization of a stimulus as conditioned or unconditioned is not at all self-evident; whilst there do exist truly unconditioned stimuli such as manual stimulation or electric shocks, which are handy for experiments, most stimuli are conditioned to some degree, and even unconditioned stimuli can be subject to a degree of overlaid conditioning which influences the response. Some associations may seem more objectively relevant than others and therefore be frequently and cross-culturally learnt, but they are still learnt behavior. For example, the fact that you salivate when you smell mum’s (or dad’s) baking at home may not seem like a learnt response, but in all likelihood to a substantial degree it is. Unconditioned responses are very much the exception: in more complex matters such as socialization and sexuality, almost everything of relevance is in fact learnt behavior.

This is just classical conditioning and it is a consequence of how our brain works with emotion; how, in fact, emotion and cognition are tied together. The subject who has acquired a conditioning will have a tendency to seek out the conditioned stimulus, believing it will lead to pleasure, even when it no longer does. That is to say, the initial temporal association between the CS and the US, even if it was completely arbitrary, has led to a cathexis of the CS, anticipating the pleasure of the unconditioned response (UR). For example, imagine that society was able to make and enforce a rule whereby all cakes were red, and the use of red in any other context was prohibited. If then the latter rule were abrogated, the sight of the color red alone would still stimulate salivation. This mechanism has been shown in numerous animal studies.

For the sake of argument let us assume that the scent or appearance of cakes stimulates salivation unconditionally (although as just stated this is debatable). The conditioned response (CR) and the unconditioned response are then identical. This, however, in general need not be the case, and even when it is the case the utility of the association is not the same: the response to the scent of baking confers nutritional advantages and additional pleasures which the response to the color red does not. In fact, one might wonder whether salivation in itself actually is pleasurable and not merely a prelude to some other pleasure, in its turn acting as stimulus input to another system which in order to achieve reward prompts certain action, namely the appropriation of the source of the salivatory response. As philosophers have noted, anticipatory pleasure does not require actual anticipation of pleasure. [2] The associations which we make between stimulus and response, while they may give rise to pleasure, creating it in a way ex nihilo, are not, therefore, innocuous – they may lead us astray, perhaps even in ways which we fail to grasp.

In this light, I conjecture that the eroticization by both sexes of control has the character of an endemic fetish. I choose the word “endemic” rather than simply “pervasive” because the fetishization of control is self-reinforcing, the result of a cultural disposition, namely patriarchy, which as we know is highly resistant to inflection even notwithstanding significant underlying changes in the conditions of its cultural production. At the same time, biology is not entirely lost and the body not simply a blank slate on which anything can be writ. In fact, any strategy of resistance to patriarchy has to start with the body because, even if its echoes may be faint, it is an incontrovertibly different and competing reality.

Now, it may seem to us that an association between, say, the color of the walls of a room and the pain of an electric shock is entirely arbitrary; but if that color has always been seen in that context, and never outside of it, to make the association is entirely natural. There is nothing in the logic of the situation which determines what is a relevant and what an irrelevant harbinger of pain or pleasure; we know from analyzing the world that the sound of the lion’s roar is indicative of the presence of an actual lion and that other sounds are not, but the brain works according to instinctive mechanisms which are merely based on temporal association (occurrence together) and specificity (failure to occur in isolation) within lived subjective experience, particularly in heightened states of consciousness. Causality does not need to be established or understood to become hard-wired in emotional response.

When we label certain sexual behaviors as fetishes and others as normal, we make a value judgment which is also not based on any sound understanding of causality. Examples of conditioned behavior which in the past were almost universal, or are so in other societies today, abound, and yet in our contemporary society these patterns of stimulus and response have in many cases been attenuated or entirely lost. Even in the lifetime of an individual, it is quite easy to reprogram many of these associations: for example public nudity is often associated with shame, and yet many subjects have over time completely overcome this. This shows, if any proof were necessary, that statistical near-universality is no proof at all of necessary biological priming.

A fetish, therefore, does not have to be uncommon in order to partake of the characteristic psychodynamics of fetishism; and by the same token the frequency of occurrence of a certain behavior may be a necessary condition of its potentially being innate, but it is very far from a sufficient one.

It is probably clear to everyone reading this blog that, even if they continue to experience some degree of residual shame, nudity is in fact innocuous; that it is not associated with any necessary negative (or indeed positive) consequences even if in certain social contexts it may well be. Though obvious to my readers, though, this is anything but obvious to most inhabitants of the planet, who may feel the acutest pain even from showing a few square centimeters of flesh in an “inappropriate” context. And so, I invite these same readers to observe that the expressed longing towards monogamy in relationships on the part in particular of women, and also certain common attitudes of passivity and subordination in the sexual realm, may have nothing biological in them at all. No more than the type of male sexual behavior portrayed in pornography which probably seems to everyone (again, meaning all of my readers) in very many respects implausibly to characterize “natural” human behavior.

In a social context which canonically links sex to romantic interest, courtship and love, and which makes it very difficult to obtain in any other way, it is not surprising that these notions end up being associated and therefore eroticized. Whilst I am not arguing (or of the view) that this is the sole reason for the eroticization of control – which also has a biological priming in attraction and pair-bonding – it seems to me that it is certainly sufficient. And so, “normality” is just another form of kink; one which is produced, as it were, by the banal operation of pervasive social norms. We also see, in this light, that the frequent claim that many more men then women are fetishists is based on an excessively narrow as well as patriarchal understanding of fetish.

Again, this may all seem obvious but where I think this insight becomes truly significant is when it comes to the right attitude to adopt to these endemic fetishes. In the sex-positive community, we are encouraged to be tolerant of kinks and to seek to indulge them to the maximum extent possible, to find mutual accommodations rather than to force kinksters into searching for the most statistically improbable compatible partners. When the kink is something relatively trivial (to anyone else) and it does not get in the way of other forms of expression of the relationship important to the other partner(s), then this is not particularly problematic. However, for endemic fetishes and phobias like possession, exclusivity and jealousy this is much harder to do if one does not have the “matching” disposition (assuming there is one). In this case, whilst one may have compassion for it, one cannot and should not necessarily indulge it without reflection; if the relationship is not to run aground and the partners are incapable or unwilling to make the necessary psychological accommodation, then the fetishes in question will need to be adjusted.

This may or may not be easy – we simply don’t know because we usually don’t, in the space of a single lifetime, try. However, it seems to me in any case that there are plenty of examples of its being successfully effected, and that these tend to follow the classic schema of deconditioning, namely, on the one hand, exposure to the unconditioned stimulus in the absence of the conditioned one in order to establish, by virtue of the biological reality of the unconditioned response, the cognitive possibility of these stimuli not being associated, and, on the other, exposure to the object of phobia whilst observing the lack of actual threat, thereby progressively disarming the phobic response. In other words, what is needed is a conscious, intentional and progressive confrontation of one fears to reality, not in a theoretical way but in actual experience.

In my view, reprogramming sexual response is valuable in itself. A fetishist may lose all interest in “unconditioned” stimuli, but then he or she forfeits the pleasure of the “unconditioned” response. Pornography for example can take sometimes entirely displace the desire for actual sex, but it obviously does not afford the same rewards. There seems to be a pleasure premium from aligning ourselves more closely with our biology. Moreover, the fetishization of control represents an attachment to an impossible ideal, a relationship state which at best may be simulated for a few years but is impossible to maintain or, at the very least, subject to severe biological stress. Relatively quickly, it is to be anticipated that an indispensable condition of arousal will wither away, and the subject is then left with a stunted erotic profile (and all of its physiological correlates).

There may be other advantages of deconditioning too. It is astonishing that we know so little of innate patterns of female desire, even on the physiological level. It would seem likely that we are looking in the wrong place. As feminist cultural theorist Luce Irigaray argues, the fetishization of control is testimony to the almost total absence of the feminine in social organization, an absence which has colossal collateral costs. Female sexual models, indeed even the actual physiology of female arousal, are calqued on patriarchal conceptions of male sexuality (the only kind, obviously, with which patriarchy is actually concerned) and taught to girls through socialization. Biology is soon only a faint echo, so faint and so deeply buried that we cannot recover enough of it to say anything with confidence about it; we are only guessing or basing ourselves on intuition. Irigaray says that, culturally, there is only one sex, the male: and the female is just the non-male. It is a terra incognita, peopled by mythical creatures straight out of our subconscious. The theory of endemic fetish which I have outlined offers an explanation as to how and why this eminently curious state of affairs has arisen.

The take-away is: “normal” is just a consecrated type of kink. But it may well be in our best interests to deconsecrate it; it may even be imperative to our survival as a species.

Notes

[1] “All the forms of sexual perversion…have one thing in common: their roots reach down into the matrix of natural and normal sex life; there they are somehow closely connected with the feelings and expressions of our physiological eroti[ci]sm. They are … hyperbolic intensifications, distortions, monstrous fruits of certain partial and secondary expressions of this eroti[ci]sm which is considered ‘normal’ or at least within the limits of healthy sex feeling“, Albert Eulenburg (1914), Ueber sexuelle Perversionen, Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Vol. I, No. 8., translated in Stekel, W. (1940), Sexual aberrations: The phenomena of fetishism in relation to sex, New York: Liveright, p. 4.

[2] Iain Morrison (2008), Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action, Ohio University Press, ch. 2

Playing the Game: What Pick-Up Artists Do and Don’t Know about Human Nature

In recent months I have been renewing my acquaintance with some of the work of those writers and coaches which aim to help men get on dates with women, often known as “pick-up artists” or PUAs. When I first encountered the PUA subculture, about ten years ago, most of the writings were underground, self-published and reviewed only on similarly underground internet forums. Each of the big names had their admirers and detractors, and there was quite a personality cult around each of them and rivalry between them.

The scene started to grab public attention with the publication in 2005 of Neil Strauss‘s semi-autobiographical The Game. Strauss, then a journalist, initially entered the PUA world with the objective of writing about it, but got more sucked in than he expected. He now runs a dating school, Stylelife Academy, though he has also continued his writing career. I was introduced to Strauss through Chris Ryan‘s podcast Tangentially Speaking, and got curious enough to buy the book, which is not entirely a training manual and in fact quite a good read, not without some worthwhile philosophical reflections on the experiences which turned him from being an average guy (“AFC” or Average Frustrated Chump in the lingo) into a guy who could date celebrities with ease. I later went on to study some of the material in his sequel Rules of the Game, and some of the online courses of the Stylelife Academy, before discovering another coach, Nick Savoy of LoveSystems, author of the dating guide Magic Bullets. Savoy, a Harvard MBA graduate, took over from Strauss’s mentor, known by his pseudonym Mystery, and is probably the most prominent exponent of the field today.

I have no particular desire for a lifestyle involving the dating of endless streams of beautiful women – well no more than the next guy anyway 😉 – but the material attracted me nonetheless. Savoy, Strauss and others have gathered together material which can have a considerable impact on ones self-confidence, self-image, and life. Although the stress remains on dating, they are also aware of this wider dimension, without which the whole enterprise really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whilst some of the criticism has been predictable (claims that the material teaches men to manipulate women), the PUAs strongly defend their corner. This is material, they say, to make men into better men and therefore is good for women and men alike. Whilst individual cases may vary, on the whole this claim seems to me justified. A dating coach does not offer a complete program of personal self-transformation, but he certainly may help men to overcome one of their major self-esteem issues. And that is definitely a step in the right direction, as this article by a traveller on the PUA path shows.

The infant science of dating for men, it seems to me, has as much of the potential for self-transformation which Daniele Bolelli, in his poetic and provocative book The Way of the Warrior, ascribes to the martial arts. Bolelli argues that the martial arts offer a way for us to confront our fear of physical force being used against us, and, by means of this concrete channel, also a host of other, less tangible fears. The argument may be a little overstated, but it is clear that the dating arts, i.e. the art of erotic encounter, addresses another core fear which dominates the psyche of many men: that of being unattractive, rejected and abandoned by women. Facing your fears and the lies about yourself which you have absorbed is always a path to personal growth. Certainly, the PUA path, at least as currently articulated, also plays into other male fantasies of multiple, uncommitted sexual relationships and endless youth, and may, if reports are to be believed, enable those fantasies to be extended almost indefinitely; but that is no more a reason to reject this body of knowledge and the discipline that might attend it than the testosterone-soaked glorification of violence in certain martial arts circles is a reason to reject the martial arts themselves.

Unlike the martial arts, however, the dating arts are in their infancy, and they have not been founded by figures who have surpassed their ego and are merely in the service of mankind. At least, their founding fathers make no such lofty claim. The dating arts are more at the stage of trial and error of what works in the field, with only a limited degree of codification.

The lack of codification and of serious cross-cultural study are to be expected in the infancy of a science, and may indeed to a degree be inevitable. Indeed, even the martial arts have no universal fighting techniques, despite what some may claim: opponents adapt and so must your strategy. This is true many times over in the dating world, which, even if there is a biological layer, is quintessentially cultural. A student of the dating arts would do better to follow the Taoist philosophy of Jeet Kune Do founder Bruce Lee, rather than the Confucian and Shinto precepts underlying many classical martial arts. Learning is useful but only if it is internalized and put at the service of a personal goal: only, indeed, if once learnt it is forgotten. The techniques of dating artistry are doubtless best used as scaffolding, not as a temple. As Lee said, “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot”.

But my purpose here is not to review the PUAs’ materials and approaches. Nor is it to do more than suggest that readers might find them, even if they remain rudimentary, a useful component on their path of personal growth – they are worth exploring for this reason alone. However, I want to look at this phenomenon firstly as a source of evidence as to sexual and social bonding behaviour patterns which we manifest, but are unaware of. In principle, the PUAs and their many acolytes are sitting on a ton of experimental data which, unfortunately, no one in academia seems so far to be taking seriously and investigating.

This evidence of course is weakly structured and heavily framed in terms of certain underlying assumptions which act as axioms within the systems and are therefore not falsifiable. Whilst most of society has preferred to ignore the PUA phenomenon or has ploughed into it in terms of the usual old-feminist male stereotypes, a few observant authors have noted that the account given by the PUAs of evolutionary biology, and which underlies their systems, is oversimplified and wrong in a number of particulars (see for instance here). This begs the question of how not only the techniques, but the whole philosophy of the dating systems might change if they were brought better into line with not only our dominant forms of social conditioning, an American version of which they reflect reasonably well, but also our actual biological nature.

Thus in chapter 3 of Magic Bullets, Savoy treats us to a very Dawkinian account of natural selection, effectively ignoring the fact – although he acknowledges it elsewhere – that individuals do not survive well in groups which have perished. Rage as many evolutionary psychologists might, there is overwhelming evidence that human behaviour is cooperative. The biological basis of mate selection is unlikely to be antagonistic to this trait.

For the purposes of this article, let’s ask the following question: how would Savoy’s theories of attraction fare if our underlying biology is not akin to Dawkin’s caricature, but more accurately portrayed in Sex at Dawn, including perhaps my own thoughts regarding ancestral mate selection? Indeed, society does not operate even remotely on the cutthroat basis that Savoy proposes, certainly not now and probably not in the remote past either. Men and women may be bad at meeting each other, but eventually they end up doing that and nearly everyone gets a slice of the evolutionary pie. They may not get the slice they would have wished for, but their genes do not die out. That genes, at any point in human history, have died out in significant numbers because of failure to mate (other than as a result of death) lacks, as far as I am aware, any evidence in its support. So there is a process of preference at work, which eventually results in sexual selection of genes, but it is not of the cutthroat nature Savoy portrays.

The same can be said of the idea that the father plays a significant role in raising and protecting offspring and that the extent to which he successfully acquits himself of this role predicts the procreative success of his progeny. In agricultural societies, it may be that this factor contributes to the ultimate social status of progeny, and the ultimate destiny of their genetic traits, but not their immediate reproductive success. In hunter-gatherer societies, and hence in our underlying biology, this factor is probably not relevant at all. In other words, mate selection is, to a large extent, learned behavior.

Some might say, so what: whether cultural or biological, isn’t the effect the same? Well, learned behavior exhibits much more variety and changes much more quickly, so it is dangerous to assume that it is universal in the way that the PUAs do. But more fundamentally, it seems to me that this formulation is inconsistent with what it is that PUAs actually do in the field and with the whole logical structure of their methodologies. In fact, dating artistry consists of two phases, logically sequential but temporally superimposed. In the first phase, the PUAs try to play off learnt behavior: for example the signals of status which certain behaviors, attributes and accessories convey. These create interest and attraction. However, attraction is not mate selection in the way that the PUAs conceptualize it: it is much more ephemeral. Much of it is about making excuses to ourselves for behaving in the way we are biologically programmed to: that is, promiscuously. This becomes evident in the later stages of seduction, until the social context rears again its head and relationships need labels. So in fact, what the PUAs do is exploit weak spots in female social armoring in order to activate underlying impulses which do correspond to more universal biology, but this biology has little in common with their account of it.

Correcting the assumptions might not necessarily change very much for those who merely want to overcome their shyness with girls and become, in this sense, more in control of their own destiny. For such people, an accurate account of social conditioning and a vague idea of the biological nature which underlies it (such as the actual desire of women for sex) are enough.

But this is just entry level. For those who question whether the goal of having one or more desirable women on ones arm is intrinsically as opposed to merely socially valuable and are more curious about human relationships and their potential, however, a better understanding of the processes may change a lot: it may fundamentally change where you end up and what you get out of it.

Indeed most of us have ambition to graduate beyond a game. Games are fun, up to a certain point; but mating is a key part of our biological makeup and we need to respect its deeper mysteries, because it has a lot to teach us. Indeed, master PUAs may have immense success in the initial stages, but, many, like the tragic example of Mystery in The Game, find it afterwards even more difficult than others to be content with the relationship institutions which society has preordained for them. This is not only, as many would caricaturise it, a reflection of the male desire for multiple partners and sexual variety which, being potentiated, becomes even more difficult to resist. It is also a reflection of the – equally important but frequently ignored – male desire for commitment and depth, within the confines of arrangements which respect this biology. Attracting partners using a discourse which is incompatible with this goal, but rather relies on the dominant social mores, seems in this case to be a recipe for short-term success, but long-term failure.

So how does an ethical non-monogamist, or whatever your favourite label is for someone who has figured out what kind of creature we all are, play this game if it is based on assumptions which he does not share?

Damned if I know. Perhaps one day enough people will have enough field experience with trying to answer this question that someone will be able to write the book about it, and move mankind beyond its erotic infancy. In the meanwhile, it’s an exciting voyage of discovery.

The fear of rejection and the power to say no

If you have a fear of rejection, it is very likely that you also have a difficulty to say no to people and to take your life in your own hands.

This is not simply because, by saying no, you fear rejection by the person who (at least implicitly) asked you for something. It is because you have lost touch with your own power to reject.

This follows from the insights of object relations theory, whose best known theorist and advocate was Melanie Klein. Essentially it works like this. Human potentiality includes a wide repertory of emotional resources, but some of the less “pleasant” of these, like the ability to drive through a personal agenda single-mindedly, we reject at an early age: because they seem to us to be associated with the failure of a caregiver to attend to our emotional or physical needs. Because these attributes are perceived properties of the neglectful caregiver, we disqualify them as properties of ourselves. Essentially, biology presents us with a full palette of emotional resources, but we select from these some and exclude others in order to construct an ego ideal (i.e. a mental representation of our ego) which provides us with comfort by reassuring ourselves that we are not like our tormentor.

In the process, however, we alienate from ourselves an innate part of our emotional repertory. This is not to say that we necessarily do not express those emotions at all (and therefore neither is it to say that we cannot repeat exactly the same emotionally destructive process with the next generation). However, these unwanted emotions remain isolated within the psyche and cannot ally themselves with the part of ourselves which we do accept and which corresponds to the ego ideal. When we express those emotions, we do so in a way which is monochrome and does not serve our goals, and we experience guilt, shame and regret.

The rejected emotions which are separated out from the ego and assigned to the neglectful caregiver contribute to form the Object which is the core concept of the theory. In order to minimize the painfulness of similarity, we deny to the Object the “positive” emotions which we find in ourselves. Thus the Object is completely other and unrelated to ourselves. However, the Object is not the caregiver, but merely a mode in which the caregiver presents him- or herself, at certain times, to the infant. When the caregiver gives the infant what it wants (i.e. his or her behavior is ego-syntonic), he or she remains represented as an object of trust. The caregiver is therefore mentally represented by two Objects, one of which is categorically desired (the libidinous Object) and the other of which is as categorically rejected (the rejected Object).

The infant is initially unaware of any overarching concept of personality of the caregiver, but merely perceives and experiences one or other of these modes. Anyone who has small children will know that at one moment they can be all over you, tender and loving, and in the next moment mad at you if they do not get what they want. This characteristically infantile reaction is possible because the infant still lacks the concept of singularity of personhood and it certainly persists until the age of five or six, and frequently goes on to characterize stressful reactions to the other throughout adult life.

As cognitive development allows a more complex representation of the caregiver to take root, these Objects remain in the preconscious mind as incarnations, on the one hand, of those parts of our emotional repertory which we embrace and, on the other, those parts which we reject. The libidinous Object becomes the later object of romantic desire, that is, it extends its role from ego-ideal to “alter-ideal”. The alter-ideal, of course, because it is imcompatible with biology, is as impossible to realize as the ego-ideal, and therefore destined to cause the inevitable shipwreck of souls and relationships. Meanwhile the rejected Object is in a very real sense the alter-ego, containing within it that part of our biological repertory from which we have cut ourselves off.

The alter-ego manifests itself in multiple ways. When developmental factors have given rise to a strong alter-ego, it is imbued with extraordinary, frightening powers. The alter-ego is able to threaten us in ways far more menacing than the caregiver ever could, because it is constructed solely from the “negative” (i.e. ego-dystonic) material we found in the caregiver, with none of the ego-syntonic “good”. It surfaces as a monster in our nightmares, denying us the opportunity to appropriate any of its attributes as part of ourselves. But it also lurks behind every instance of ego-dystonic social behavior which we encounter growing up and in our adult lives. Minor setbacks and modest, negotiable obstacles, to which the healthy ego is resilient, become repeated proofs to us of the reality of the menace posed by the alter-ego and its absolute power over our lives. We no longer represent situations or the disposition of their protagonists realistically, determining to what extent they are favorable or unfavorable and solliciting a measured neo-cortical response. Instead, each situation is a manifestation of those immanent demonic forces which no more than tolerate our vitality within their own predetermined limits. Provoke them, and we are not merely disadvantaged, but ruined.

The key to disarming the alter-ego is realizing that it is a concoction of our own minds, and simultaneously as much an abstraction, as remote from actual human subjects, and as significant a force in our behavior, as the ego-ideal. The alter-ego is constructed out of those elements of our biological repertory for which we as small infants found no use, like left-over bits of Lego whose place in the puzzle we could not devine, and which we have accordingly moulded into a grotesque, residual form. This omnipotent demonic force could only be formed in such a way; nothing in real life corresponds to it. If it is able to menace us in ways in which no real human being could, it is because we have given it the force to do so, simultaneously denying that force to ourselves. That is why we fear rejection, equating it to a cataclysmic annihilation of our selfhood, and it is the same reason why we cannot say a healthy no to others.

It seems that this trick of splitting the ego which we play on ourselves also has its limits. We know that we do not conform fully to our ego-ideal, and secretly we intuit the truth that the demon is actually part of us, and suspect that we are as unlovable as it is. That is why, as the cartoon (courtesy of atrandomcomics.com) illustrates so well, the person whose alter-ego towers over her ego needs constant reassurance that she is accepted by others, and yet never really believes it. The ego-ideal is frequently designed to procure acceptance, and so held in place by both carrot and stick. Although it seems primary, because a failure to bond effectively with the caregiver has such damaging effects for ego development, it may also be that the fear of rejection is only one of the fears that can be expressed in this way. For the moment, however, I know too little of others’ demons to feel myself on firm ground speculating further.

In conclusion. When you encounter your demon, don’t run away; stop, and admire its force. It has, as you surely realize, amazing powers, even if, stranded as they are in an incorporeal mental representation, unempowered by embodiment, they serve no purpose other than gratification of its infinitely sadistic desires at your expense. The demon is extremely scary, but it is also magnificently beautiful. It invites to contemplation in awareness of its having been composed, Frankenstein-like, from left-over bits of yourself. You have given it the superhuman powers it has over you; they are your own powers, so invite them home. Alienated from you, yet dependent for its existence upon that alienation, and existing only in your mind, the demon can only threaten you. It is unable to act in any other way. Reincorporated, however, its powers are available to you for all of the purposes you design. It is no longer condemned to an autistic, emprisoned existence but can become part of an harmonious whole.

The Will to Power

I have recently been thinking about what Nietzsche referred to as the Will to Power.

Nietzsche’s concept expresses, glossed in modern terms, the intuition that there is, in our biological constitution, a source of self-becoming which is identifiably and subjectively moral and yet individual and innate.

Nietzsche was dissatisfied with Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and with the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest. For all that he challenged in German moral philosophy, he remained convinced that man had an innate, if often latent, moral drive and that this was biological in nature. Had Nietzsche lived later, he would surely have found Freud’s “pleasure principle” just as reductionist. The Will to Power itself is amoral in nature and its biological foundations are not really explored: morality is a second order effect that Nietzsche expects to emerge from affirming this basic drive rather than repressing it. What a world would look like in which people lived in accordance with the will to power is not Nietzsche’s concern, and at first sight the notion seems as compatible with altruism and benevolence as it does with despotism and misanthropy. On closer reflection though, the charge of misanthropy must be a misunderstanding, because the superman derives no benefit or pleasure from subjugation of others; he speaks “badly of man but not ill of him”. As for subjugation of nature, Nietzsche views it as an intrinsic folly.

So the question is, what is the biological basis of the will to power? It seems to me that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin in imputing to him a necessary dependence on utilitarian notions. From at least a modern perspective, this seems not really to underlie Darwin’s discoveries. All that really would seem to matter is that I pass my genes on, and not that I am happy with my life.

Nietzsche posits that vitality is the root of man’s creativity and the best of which he is capable. As such, the will to power seems to rest, biologically speaking, upon the drive to procreate. It is this, seemingly so basic, drive, and which can undeniably also be experienced as entirely trivial, that at the same time is so inextricably linked to our most compelling experiences of dissolution and ecstasy. Whereas Freud thought that moral effort was needed to channel sexual energy into the achievements of civilization, Nietzsche is much more trusting in the natural propensity of this creative energy to overflow into the entirety of man’s social and inner experience: it does not need to be directed, it only needs to be unleashed.

The will to power and the drive to procreate or to experience dissolution are not, however, precisely the same thing. If this were so, the will to power would be everywhere; it is hard to imagine how societal forces would keep it in check. Descriptively however, few people seem to embark on the journey to which their vitality invites. For those people, and I count myself among them, allowing societal forces to prevail over ones inner sense is simply an impossibility; it is inherently immoral, however noble might be that to which one is exhorted. The only moral being one possibly can be is the one that one is. Of course one exercises judgment, discernment, in practical action but this is really not very difficult because one is not at war with the outer order of things, one is simply awake to the opportunities to change it that may arise. All else is tension, and counter-reactions to it are assured. If morality arises from the natural state of man, moral crusades can never lead anywhere. All I need to do and all I can do is to take you, if you are ready, by the hand and lead you to places which can trigger your own awakening. Force is available to me, but it is useless. As I have written before, meditation is my only moral imperative.

But, you may protest, if I see injustices of which I am not the author, do I not have to act?

No. But at least I may. If I embrace the will to power, I am no longer powerless, no longer trapped in knee-jerk reactions to external events, reactions which are almost entirely determined by my own inner struggles. I am serene. I can act. My power is available to me and I have clarity as to the potential rewards of my action. And as such, I am finally a moral subject. Certainly, good deeds may contribute to mankind’s well-being, but they do so proportionately to the inner serenity of their authors.

Ultimately, it remains a mystery why most of mankind, like the animals from which we are descended, is in a state of more or less deep sleep. The will to power, in conscious form, seems to characterize only the few and at this stage of our social and perhaps biological evolution it is a pure leap of faith to imagine it as potentially characterizing the many. We are left with the mystery of consciousness, this quality which suffuses nature and yet is distinct from it, seemingly, in an evasive sense, superordinate to it; which erupts into human minds and human history more as a messenger from another realm than as an expected basis for our being. It is alien to us, yet our deepest nature; we long for it, but have mostly no idea where to look. Humanity as animal plus consciousness is an aspirational equation, even a self-delusion at times. Grounded in our biological nature, the will to power necessarily impels us not simply to recreate the conditions of a more natural life, although this is a precondition, but to be something which, so far and with rare exceptions, humanity has not been.

The Repression of Empathy

Empathy is a natural human faculty that is repressed by powerful social forces.

I have written in a previous post about the conjecture that the human mirror neuron system forms the biological basis for empathy, and also alluded, in discussing pornography, to the role of empathy in sexual experience.

There are utterly compelling reasons to consider that empathy is a fundamental constituent of the experience of being human, a sixth sense without which our species would have failed miserably in its evolutionary struggle. Nevertheless, we repress and deny huge parts of this faculty, and relegate what is left to the paranormal or the unexplained. Even despite this, episodes of empathy characterize the life experience of all of us.

This repression takes place as much on the side of the person whose sensations are experienced by another through empathy as on that of the person experiencing those sensations vicariously. Why is this? We know, in fact, that we cannot hide our fears, sadness, anger, or other emotions from those close to us. But we can pretend to. We can enter into a Faustian bargain with the other, and this happens very often. I will pretend not to know what I know about how you are feeling, provided you do the same. I don’t press your buttons and you don’t press mine. Probably we all know many couples whose domestic life is characterized by silent cohabitation, with no conflicts apparent on the surface, but where you can cut the tension underneath with a knife.

Such a conspiracy of silence leads to a very deep alienation. The basic goal of connection that people strive towards in relationships is undermined. In fact we are still connected to the other. The human animal is always connected to its environment. But we must pretend not to be. Thus in the place where we most wish to realize union, we are most required to deny it. This is easily a recipe for spiritual death.

Responsibilities for this state of affairs are equally divided. On the one hand, people are of course afraid to let down their masks and show what they are feeling. On the other, people are also inhibited from showing empathy by the idea that feelings are private and that it is inappropriate and impolite to mirror these feelings, enquire after the person’s emotional state, offer support, or act on the mirrored impulses in order to alleviate the source of pain.

This is entirely misconceived, because emotions have a fundamentally social dimension. Human connection and sharing in emotions are part and parcel of the same thing.

When it is put to the person whose emotion is sensed that they are in a particular emotional state, they frequently also respond by denying this is the case. This again is most unfortunate. Not only does the person concerned miss an opportunity for connection and healing, but also we are all taught to mistrust our instincts to the point where we lose all alignment to them and forego, in fact, the basic drivers of our natural social behavior. The end of this process of reinterpretation is to relegate to the realm of the paranormal an essential aspect of being human.

We all need to recognize that we never interact with people without eliciting in them some flicker of perception of our emotional state. And really we want this state to be perceived. We should not lie to ourselves and, especially, not to our interlocutor, for whose own cultivation of this sixth sense we should have a great deal more respect. It is also a learning process and it relies on feedback and observation to be refined. If we have the slightest regard for our collective human potential, we should stop hiding behind our masks and provide that feedback as honestly as we can, by acknowledging our inner state, at least to those persons worthy of trust and who care for us.