John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

If I spend my free time with you, it is because I find value in spending time with you, because there is something I get from spending time with you and perhaps something more I hope to get from it in the future. If I cease to spend time with you, it is because the value I found in you seems diminished to me or because it has become clear that the things I had hoped for will not be attained.

How unpopular it is to express such thoughts! We are so afraid of being this clear about the inescapable facts of our interactions, facts confirmed by our every experience. We feel that the man who thinks such things must know no love for anyone but himself. But the words above are not a description of a life in which there is love: the feelings I have described, insofar as they are unconsciously felt, are the very sustenance of love — perhaps they are even the entire substance of love. We simply fear consciousness of such thoughts: while they remain unconscious, we still can live in self-deception about our true motives.

In the end, there is the simplest of rules for all relations with others: if you want to be loved, be worth loving.

There are already far too many men worth hating because they do not live by the ideals they profess: I am far more interested in meeting men worth hating because they do live by their ideals.

A fascinating passage I read today:

One economist in an unusual situation showed how the physical fallacy does not depend on any unique historical circumstance but easily arises from human psychology. He watched the entire syndrome emerge before his eyes when he spent time in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Every month the prisoners received identical packages from the Red Cross. A few prisoners circulated throughout the camp, trading and lending chocolates, cigarettes, and other commodities among prisoners who valued some items more than others, or who had used up their own rations before the end of the month. The middlemen made a small profit from each transaction, and as a result they were deeply resented — a microcosm of the tragedy of the middleman minority. The economist wrote: “[The middleman's] function, and his hard work in bringing buyer and seller together, were ignored; profits were not regarded as a reward for labour, but as the result of sharp practises. Despite the fact that his very existence was proof to the contrary, the middleman was held to be redundant.”¹

Above all else, I am interested by the common pattern of behavior described in the last sentence, a pattern responsible for the numerous failed idealist movements in history, movements too often pursuing goals basically at odds with what experience would teach us, pursuing visions of society far too lacking in detail to be practicable.

We think changing society is far easier than it is: we fail to realize how complex the organization of modern society is and how many points of equilibria have already been reached after centuries of allowed conflicting human desires to compete. We cannot simply reconstruct society into any shape we can imagine: first, because our imagination always lacks detail; second, because our imagination is seldom bound by the complex restrictions that human nature imposes.

Too often we hate institutions we have built and sustained ourselves, institutions that do correspond to our actual desires. If we would prefer communism to capitalism, we should cease to buy iPods and the other things capitalism has given us and possibly only capitalism can give us.

To continue our growth, we must cease to allow our actions to belie our dreams.

1. Steven Pinker : Blank Slate : Out Of Our Depths↩

Love without trust is the one of the bitterest forms of slavery.

Love is the conviction that you could never meet anyone better than your partner — that a better person may be imaginable, but likely does not exist and quite possibly never could exist.

I always thought that there would be this girl and she’d be just like me, but not like me.¹

I guess when you’re young, you just believe there’ll be many people with whom you will connect with. Later in your life you realize it only happens a few times.²

Amazingly, these short, simple passages seem to sum up most of my sense of what love is.

1. Jonah Matranga : Juloo (Never Run)↩
2. Before Sunset↩

There is a common theme in my favorite stories — in Hamlet, Dune, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Lawrence Of Arabia, The Crow, Conan The Barbarian, V For Vendetta and so on –: that theme is revenge.

Why such an intense love for this theme in stories? Because only in stories are we still allowed to unabashedly revel in the joy we instinctively experience in taking revenge upon our enemies, an instinct I think is especially strong in me. Often it is too strong for my own good, but it is also an instinct without which I could not survive, a source of belligerence that allows me the liberty to show the enormous generosity I show to those I consider worthy. Deny me the ability to be cold to some and you deny me the ability to be warm to others. I could not take such risks without being sure of my ability to insure that I become no one’s victim. As we progressively deny humans the ability to exact vengeance, we progressively deny them the intimacy and the depth of love they once felt. We head towards mediocrity in all of our feelings towards others. The capacity for hatred is the price of true love.

Nearly everything we teach our children about the world is false — and much of what we teach them we know to be false even as we teach it. We lie to our chidlren because we fear causing them pain by telling them the truth about the often dire conditions holding in the world in which we live. I do not refer to our lying to children in telling them that there is a Santa Claus that gives them presents on Christmas or in telling them that there is an Easter Bunny who brings them candy eggs, but the lying we do in our attempts to shield our children from the reality that humans are unequal and will always be treated unequally, the reality that we are not all special, that reality that we are not all beautiful.

The sooner one comes to accept the conditions of the world, the sooner one can focus on what one actually is under one’s control. Or, as Nietzsche said,

The goal of philosophy is to determine all of those things that cannot be changed so that we can focus all of our effort upon all those things we can change.

Better than our habits was the way of the Aztecs, who said to their newborn children, “cry, cry: for you have been born to suffer”.

Best of all — my true pinnacle of humanity — is the view of life found in Duke Leto’s dying words in Frank Herbert’s Dune: “still, it had been good, much of this life”, an attitude that does not demand that life be ideal for it to be worth loving.

All of this is a general instance of the pattern in humans by which increased levels of civilization lead the civilized to attempt more and more to remove all forms of discomfort from life until one has removed so much discomfort from life, so many momentary discomforts, that one creates more severe, more lasting sources of suffering unwittingly. Suffering cannot entirely be eliminated — a certain quantity of it is absolutely inevitable in the education of a being capable of functioning in a world that is not ideal. What is called for is simply finding the absolute minimum with reference to a set of goals we establish.

Almost every single experience in life proves that humans are driven not by carefully considered reasons, but by emotions, instinctive reactions and habit — and that nearly everything thus far called rationality has been merely impulse disguised — that is say, misrepresented — as the result of rational analysis.

My ideal relationship at the moment can be summarized in the words, “I neither expect nor ask for you to love me: I only want to have sex with someone I can go out to dinner with on Friday nights and watch movies together with.”