I understood everything you said. It's just wrong is all. Desire of one person over another is not a condition that is governed by social mores, desirable traits are. IE: In certain societies big boobs might be more desirable, in others giant asses might be, etc etc. The main influence to desire is purely biological in nature, as in, governed by hormones. And here I'm not speaking about love, but purely the desire to mate, since you seem to be conflating the two ideas.
It is absolutely governed by the norms of a society. Biology plays a part, but it is not exclusively biology. You just said it yourself about boobs to asses. It's conditioning by a society, thought patterns that tell you
whatto desire.
Your feelings, from hormones, are not generated wholly on a biological level, but a psychophysiological one.
Just look at history. What's considered attractive has changed and does change. Look at the the Venus of Willendorf statue. Why are men in suits attractive today? If you took a man in a 21st century suit and placed him in Ancient Greece, would he be as attractive? He's only attractive because women are conditioned to see the suit as such in the context of our society.
Also, your contention about people possibly becoming equal over a long enough timeline is wholly irrelevant to mating, even if we assumed it might be true (which it isn't). Human females have a finite time in their lives that they can reliably produce children. As they age, the chances rapidly start to decrease for successful childbirth. This places a relatively higher value on their child bearing years than their non-child bearing years. From the perspective of a man who wants to create strong and healthy progeny, situations are not equal based purely on this factor, let alone all the other myriad factors that go into choosing a mate for procreation (or the procreative process, IE fucking, banging, boning, the horizontal mambo, bumping uglies, etc).
Any time you are dealing with finite resources (acceptably desirable females of child-bearing age), imbalances are created. Some get enough, others do not. Some get more than enough.
Given a large enough population and time (a long period as new females constantly enter and approach 'the wall' as the rational male states it), it won't really look like a ladder, where one male sits on a higher rung than another for the whole time, all the time. it's more circular, as one fatass bum might get a 'higher status' female than the guy in the suit sometimes. But what you're talking about here is not purely biological either. Biology always plays together with social status, and that status is imparted by society.
If this logical reasoning isn't enough to convince you of your error, how about empirical evidence? By your own statements, or Fromm's, you say that millions of people are sick. Nearly everyone is. Everyone is so sick that nowhere in the world does your model of everyone loves each other equally actually occur. (If this does occur somewhere in the world, please do share.) Since humans are an innovative bunch, you would think that if this system was so great, some people somewhere would have tried it, found it to be awesome, and adopted it successfully. (Again if this has happened, please point it out to me). I can't think of a single society in the world now or throughout human history where this system took root and was successful for a long period of time (several generations). Based on this empirical evidence, the conclusion I can draw is that your utopian equalistic social structure is unfeasible.
They don't
knowthey have a mental neurosis. That's the point. No one does. They think their 'normal' is what's most mentally healthy for them and those around them, and it obviously isn't.
And I don't think they're that innovative. When you talk about ways to organize, sociopolitical and economic systems, what we have, have had, and tried are all pretty terrible. The only reason we say capitalism is the best is because it somewhat works here and now, and just because of that fact, we say it's the best there is.
And with the system, come the habits of thought patterned into people. There are many, and they're taught at home, in school, and in everyday culture. Greed is good, be selfish, the modern idea of love, and everything else was taught to you, not some base biological trait inherent in every human being.
Could it change? Could we have a better society conducive to a real idea of love? Where people are treated as people, not as commodities on a market? Absolutely, but again, what you're asking is not 'trying this idea' but trying an entire different way of life, from how we work, exchange, and interact. You can't just 'try' it - you have to completely reorganize the entire socioeconomic structure. It has been tried to some extent, some of the French communes have organized themselves around the idea of free association of work.
One last point, regarding love. I don't know how much you read over at the Rational Male site, but I read an interesting article there about the idea of love itself. In the article it states that Romantic love, as we know it today, was invented from whole cloth sometime around 1200ad in the feudal courts of western europe. Before that time, the notion of love between the sexes was defined completely differently than as we know it today. The article is an excerpt from a book iirc and goes into much greater detail. Assuming this is true, isn't it possible that the very bedrock (love) of the society that you're proposing as the ideal, is based upon a lie perpetrated by 13th century feminists in the throes of hypergamy? Or, another way to look at it: DESIRE is the thing that is ingrained in us biologically, and the idea of love is the thing that we are conditioned to believe, not the other way around.
Sure, and I agree with lots on that site. Every society defines it a little differently. We still harbor some of those old remnants and combine it with modern ideas that work for us. I'm not talking about the idea of courtly love: my love is completely different. Romantic love is a small part of what love should be, and remember I said you can't just love a person, one person, which is what the feminists are trying to instill. You have to love all, everyone, else it's just some form of neurotic attachment to a person as some kind of object that fulfills your desire.
Desire is not love. Desire for sex is biological absolutely, but what is attractive changes per a given society. This, of course, leads to infatuation, erotic love, romantic love, often neurotic attachment to a person as an object (again, because that object fulfills another's desire).
I do agree with a lot of that site. It is true that the feminists have imparted ideas onto society like courtly love, and the white knights are sorta the infantry in their little army. The usefulness of it, however, is in the context of our modern society. That is to say, it's helpful insomuch as society is sick. It helps you succeed, but you're, we're all still mentally ill.
Don't get me wrong Dumar, I think you're a smart guy, and I respect the fact that you consider your opinions and articulate them well, I just happen to disagree with you.
Thanks, some quotes for more perspective:
Erich Fromm_sl said:
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.
[...] Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.
[...] Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world as a whole, not toward one object of love.
[...] Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.
[...] The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.
[...] Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.
These traits, this 'ordination of character' as Fromm puts it, is not taught or imparted by our modern society. We're not taught, trained, or made to understand what it means to love another, to love all. We're
taughtto be greedy, to be selfish, and hence, that greediness and selfishness is made understood by things like the 'sexual market value' chart and plate spinning. It's useful to be successful, but from a mental health perspective, those concepts and the reason behind those concepts should not exist.
