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Our cherished ideals—peace, love, nobility, altruism—are inherently romantic yet historically fraught with failure.
Embracing these causes, despite their impracticality, has a romantic allure; we often find ourselves championing the losing side. This tendency towards romantic idealism is as irrational as it is compelling.
Ironically, we place our hope in science as the savior from our own idealistic excesses, believing it will rectify the very failures bred by our romantic inclinations.
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Freud says the analyst evokes transference of love from the patient because of their ability to reduce complexities: the analyst discerns a kernel of truth, which guides the process, and grateful for this path, the patient forms a unique attachment they consider love.
Applied to artificial intelligence, AI’s summarization skill mirrors the analyst’s reductive approach: generating simplified core truths as guides for alignment. This normalization (through guided reduction) ‘cures’ the individual.
The reduction excites echoes love: a simplification that allows directed yearning to please and happiness with the self for discovery.
In an additional step, the term “science” derives from the word Skei, which means “to cut.” Thus, scientists slice apart reality to achieve reductions, which allows comprehension, which can feel like love.
This insinuates love is not about ‘complexity’ per se, but founded upon sustained artificial simplification, which is indeed complicated if not complex.
(Freud insight from Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour podcast)
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Mediation introduces an external influence that alters your natural inclinations and desires.
This influence, whether from capitalism, love, or family obligations, diverts you from your inherent path towards a culturally shaped outcome.
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Relationship fights tend to get caught up in an “instance.” There are moments of disagreement; both sides pitch themself as rational, the other as hurtful or inconsiderate, and a list of details and grievances unfolds.
You can choose to make war, but the details are irrelevant. You could get past them in a second if… if something else more fundamental was repaired.
Someone (maybe both parties) doesn’t feel loved. What if you choose to love them so thoroughly that they stop acting out? Would loving them, instead of focusing on your pain, also heal you?
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There is a gentleness in being around people you love who love you. When profoundly content, self-regulation can soften.
This can mean we treat those we love worse: we relax our guard, and our inner asshole makes an appearance. This is all the more reason to work through your issues so you can relax when you relax.
Equally, when surrounded by loved ones without the need for competitive rivalry, we can drop politeness, sycophancy, or bitterness. Without mediating or acting out, we might slip into our best self.
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There is an “uncanny valley” of caring: something close enough to your passion but distant enough to be at odds with your taste. You can’t pretend to care what you carefully despise.
Something completely “other” is a field/subject/person you can not have a desire for, so the introduction is fascinating: the distance makes it easier to care, and yet you do not have enough care to hate.
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To be in love, like the faith of being a true believer, is to suddenly comprehend all of the insanity the outside world cannot grasp: when you are in it, the contradictions are beautiful epiphanies.
When you are on the outside, it is all idiocy.
Only by doing it can you access the perspective that shifts irrationality into truth.
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Commonly we hear: The amateur creates out of love. The professional creates for money.
This, however, is a false distinction. If the amateur loved what they did even more, they would do it for money.
If anything, the amateur overidentifies with what they create, declaring their identity as an artist, poet, or actor, while the professional considers it their job, and realize while it is what they do it is not how they identify who they are.
This is what allows the professional to continue to create, while the amateur is overly anxious and sensitive to any feedback or criticism, to the extent that they will not produce or release their productions. It is as if the amateur will lose “who they are” if this hobbyist love was taken from them, while the professional has no such illusions.
From Steven Pressfield, the war of art
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Jordan Peterson decries Marxism by considering “the great leap Forward” in China, which cost 40 million lives. Peterson asked whether or not that change was due to “love or hate” and claimed it was instead due to delusional ignorance.
I agree, and he is right to escape the moral value binary.
Applied to Western societies, nationalism, capitalism, and Christianity also manifest deadly delusional ignorance.
However, from a stance of Buddhist detachment, everything can be declared “delusional ignorance,” which may simply be the state of man no matter how far we assume we have progressed.
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Amidst real, detrimental, and untenable problems, we seek to overcome them. While desperation and survival may drive us, for emotional (psychological) overcoming we require a lack of strife, and preferably love.
With an emotional foundation internally, you can more clearly react and develop the prowess and motivation to tackle the external.
