Loosely paraphrasing Lichtenberg, the 18th century German physicist: “We cannot possibly feel for others, we feel only for ourselves. This sounds difficult, but isn’t if it’s rightly understood. We do not love father or mother, husband or wife, son or daughter, god or gun, but the pleasant sensations they cause in us.” Consider the possibility that nature deceives us - we’re manipulated by our brain’s reward circuit into playing the role of caring parent, devout spouse, grateful child, or loyal friend only to accomplish nature’s bidding, survival and proliferation of the species. We naively confuse the pleasurable sensations we feel around certain people for caring about them, though it’s actually just hedonism under the guise of selflessness. Ironically this guise is closely linked with selfishness and vanity. ‘Of course this person cares about me! It makes sense that they would. I’m so beautiful/handsome, smart and talented. Surely the world couldn’t go on without me!’ – Those who believe humans to be capable of loving others flatter themselves this way. Anything that offers a solution to their meaningless existence is appealing. Imagine a world where people have to love themselves before they can mistakenly perceive to love someone else; where one must overestimate one’s own benevolence before one can overestimate the benevolence of others. The altruistic illusion is built on a house of cards, mutually supported by each partner’s skewed perception of themselves and the other. The spell breaks once the feelings diminish, and both parties are seen for the selfish things they are. At that point any ‘caring’ becomes a transparent and loathsome charade. Imagine if love were a greatly romanticized ideal, and realistically it were just a turd that evolution and certain propaganda organizations have polished to fool us, because being fooled that way increases our propensity to produce offspring. The pure altruistic ideal they propagate exists only in the mind, as a concept, the same place imagined pink elephants and unicorns do. That would be a horrible dystopian world to be born into! Anyway happy father’s day.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:16:08 +0000
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