In some of last year’s articles I described my Let-Self-Change journey, the process of paying attention and appreciation, opening and letting go, loving, having fun, relaxing, focusing, slowing down, self-managing, exploring, improvising and being resilient — that allows you to learn, discover and self-adapt, to self-evolve in positive, healthy and evolutionary ways, to come to be who you really are.

In the process of loving and Letting-Myself-Change I have learned some important new things about love, and about myself. I don’t know if they are useful to anyone else, but I thought I would share them anyway. These are complex, subtle, paradoxical discoveries, so please think about them before you judge what I’m saying:

1. I have learned that I tend to idealize the people I love, to make them larger-than-life. I imagine them to be astonishingly emotionally intelligent, sensitive, strong, perceptive, mature, wise, aware. If I have not met them physically I imagine them to be extraordinarily beautiful. I suspect this is because I want them to be these things. I’m a romantic, an artist, a dreamer, and kind of immature emotionally, and I do have an exceptional imagination, so perhaps this tendency is understandable. In any case I can’t seem to change it, to just see and accept people for what they really are, warts and all. So when they turn out to be different from what I’ve imagined I tend to be shocked, disappointed, disillusioned. This is not fair to them. I wonder if this tendency to idealize those one loves is common to all artists, and hence perhaps why artists are so difficult to love. I also wonder if this is why I’m so infatuated with Second Life — it enables and encourages me to idealize and romanticize the people I meet more than in Real Life.
2. I have learned that it is who I imagine people to be that I really love, more than who they really are. This is a kind of corollary of the above. But I suspect it is rather more universal than the above. I don’t think we can ever hope to even begin to know who other people really are, so we can only know who we imagine them to be. When I watch two people in love with each other (even when one of them is me), I get a strong sense that their love is as much self-love as love-of-other. They can only really know themselves, so what they perceive the object of their love to be is largely a projection of what they know, what they can imagine, who they are or know they could be themselves. You may be surprised to learn that I think this delusion is very healthy, for two reasons: (a) It makes it easier for us to love others, and (b) It makes it easier for us to love and feel better about ourselves. Delusional or not, these are both good, aren’t they? But it’s a double-edged sword: when the person we love lets us down, it becomes harder for us to love others, and we also become disappointed with ourselves.
3. I have learned that, despite appearances, women are usually the ones who precipitate both the beginning and ending of loving relationships. Although our society encourages men to make the first move, it is almost invariably women who decide whether a new relationship will be a loving one. The woman is the one who gives permission for love to begin. That’s an enormous responsibility, but it’s probably fortunate, because women are, I think, usually more sensitive and more connected with their emotions, so their judgement is likely to be better than the man’s. And because they are more in tune with their emotions, they also seem to know when love has run its course, when it is no longer healthy and the relationship should evolve or end. Ask the couples you know who have divorced, and you’re likely to find that regardless of who walked, it was essentially the woman’s decision. And when it seemingly was the man’s, that’s often because another woman recognized the relationship had failed and took him away. There are of course exceptions to this, but I think it’s usually true.
4. I have learned that women are often extraordinarily generous and accommodating of men who they love or intend to love. Most men I know are intoxicated by love, self-preoccupied and selfish, and rather more demanding than women in loving relationships. It is up to the woman, usually, to adapt, to accommodate, to Let-Self-Change, to become more what he wants her to be, to love him more generously, to give him more room. I suspect this is nature’s way of encouraging stability and allowing love to flourish and endure when the circumstances are far from perfect. I don’t think this is a conscious willingness to adapt by women; it is just who they are.
5. I have learned that most women are more monogamous than most men. A more precise term would be monoamorous (“loving intimately only one person”). This seems to be more a practical accommodation by women than something that is inherent in human nature. Loving relationships are difficult to manage, and it is women who usually (see discovery #3 above) accept the responsibility to manage them. The more relationships there are to manage, the more challenging this task becomes. When lovers lack maturity and experience, more complex relationships can get messy and their emotional fallout can be devastating. Our society as a whole frowns on such relationships because of strong cultural conditioning and religious dogma. Recently I’ve written about polyamorous (“the desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved”) relationships, as being more natural and healthy than monoamorous ones. I believe that a community of, say, ten women and ten men in a consensual polyamorous relationship with each other would be blissful — providing an abundance of love instead of the scarcity, jealousy, possessiveness and loneliness that pervades our current society and causes so much pain and violence. But if we’re to get there, I think women need to take the lead. I think this is possible, but will take a lot of effort and practice to make it work. The principles for such communities are known (polyfidelity, trust and respect, mutual support, communication and negotiation, compersion, empathy and non-possessiveness). I’ve written a story and a short play and a utopian fantasy about polyamorous communities to describe how they might work, and the challenges they present. But I think they would be worth it. I am increasingly convinced that the reason today’s Intentional Communities are so limited and fragile is because they are unnaturally monoamorous. And I believe the creation of successful models of Intentional Community is essential to the future of our species, so there is a lot at stake. And love underlies it all.

The lessons in this learning for me are pretty obvious. I need to learn to curb my imagination a bit and see and love people more for who they are, so I can be more accepting of them, and even more open to love without illusion or condition. I should recognize that love is inherently mutually self-delusional, but that that is OK, and that my attitude to love should be more playful and fun and not so terribly intense, once I acknowledge that it is abundant, unlimited. I should respect that women tend to control loving relationships for perfectly good reasons, and work with them to open them to the astonishing possibility of polyamorous relationships, and perhaps encourage them to be a little less accommodating of unreasonable and demanding males, and a little more selfish about meeting their own desires and realizing their own, more completely fulfilling, loving relationships.

A lot here. Does it make any sense to you?

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

What I Know About Love: Most of which I’ve learned in the last month.

Coping With the Strategy Paradox: I met recently with Michael Raynor, who wrote The Strategy Paradox. He’s now looking at what else we can do to deal with this paradox, and he poked some holes in my argument that what we need is resilience, not planning.

The Evolving Role of the Information Professional: Since I listed the five major ‘products’ of my new employer, some people have suggested that this list might define the new role of the information professional in all sorts of organizations.

Why We Need a Public Persona:The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. How can we make this public persona as thin and transparent as possible? This is a follow-up to my recent article on how how we look affects who we perceive ourselves to be.

Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics: Observers of the now decade-long intractable genocides and civil wars in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Zaire and other African nations describe the same gang phenomena repeated endlessly: Men horrifically tortured and slaughtered, women systematically and repeatedly raped, children kidnapped and forced into slavery and military duty, animals and other resources stolen, and villages burned to the ground. What is it about human nature that so many can perpetrate such atrocities for so long without remorse?

Vignette #7

Blog-Hosted Conversation #4: Inevitably, my fourth podcast will be about love and/or Intentional Community. Not sure who it will be with, yet.

Possible Open Thread Question:

What do you know about love?

Surowiecki on the US Dollar and Reckless Subprime Lending: I had the chance to meet and chat with James Surowiecki, economics columnist for The New Yorker and author of The Wisdom of Crowds, at the recent KMWorld conference in San Jose. I was surprised that he recognized me and knew my blog. Two of his recent columns are especially worth a look: Greenback Blues explains why the collapse of the US dollar is not (yet) hitting the US pocketbook. And Performance-Pay Perplexes explains the dangers of rewarding people for taking unreasonable risks.

Are We Hard-Wired for Empathy?: Fascinating article by Gordy Slack in Salon explains the concept of ‘mirror neurons’ that help us sense and sympathize with others’ emotions. They may also explain our adeptness at and fascination with analogy and metaphor.

Model Intentional Farming Communities: Global Village Construction and its Factor ‘E’ Farm pilot are proposing a model for self-sufficient farming communities. They’re looking for volunteers. Thanks to reader Jerome for the link.

Fixing Early Childhood Education: For those who enjoyed my recent podcast with Rob Paterson and would like to know more, he offers a report card on the state of young children today, and their ability to learn, with some ideas on how to fix the system.

Why We Think We’re OK: The inimitable Joe Bageant explains how, through music, the media spiff up and glorify and then sell back to us the image of ourselves as heroes. We all want to be reassured that what we think and do is right, and, for the price of our obedience and acquiescence (plus this week only $14.99 at Wal-Mart), the media are more than willing to reassure us. And in his latest essay he explains what happens as this cost, spurred on by individual greed in a world of scarcity, accumulates: “The national mindset of ‘I want all I can grab for myself and I want it now, even if it has to be on credit,’ constitutes a much bigger crisis than class in and of itself, and is the driver of our unfolding national catastrophe.”

Conserving Water: Enci at Illuminate LA suggests some ways to save water, especially if you’re living in drought-stricken or fire-ravaged areas. They seem impossibly modest, but every bit helps. To those angry at me for not prescribing more ambitious solutions to the End of Water in my Thursday post, I don’t think there are any, or I would have put them forward.

Setting an Example of Economic Irresponsibility: In Vanity Fair, Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz excoriates the Bush regime for its reckless excessive borrowing and for encouraging corporations and citizens to do likewise by artificially suppressing interest rates, with devastating consequences for so many. Excerpt at HTWW explains that, as usual, the world’s poor and future generations pay the biggest price for the cruel incompetence of today’s rich.

Clean Efficient Biofuels: My friend Dale Asberry has a wiki up to explore, collaboratively, how to identify sources and process ‘waste’ biologicals to produce clean efficient fuels. If you have something to add or want to know more, take a look.

Why the Iraq War’s Failure is Your Fault: William Astore explains the Bushies plan to shift blame for the criminal failure of their inept invasion and occupation on a public that’s not willing to support the troops and is soft on terror and crime in general. Classic conservative ploy. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link and the one that follows.

Why We Can Never Repay Our Debts: Fascinating article on the basis of money and how monetary policy introduced in the 1970s yokes us to perpetual indebtedness, servitude to global corporatists, and environmental ruin.

Canadian Government Terminates Climate Research: Having reneged on Canada’s commitment to Kyoto, Harper is now canceling support of research that might show how inadequate his right-wing government’s program for reining in global warming pollutants really is. Thanks to Mike Yarmolinsky for the link.

Thought for the Week, from Tom Robbins in Still Life With Woodpecker:

Last month I spoke to blogger Rob Paterson, advisor to NPR and other media and educational institutions, about the future of education and essential competencies. I started by asking Rob what he thought were the competencies we need to acquire to succeed in the world, and to make it a better place?

Rob: I think they’re the same. We don’t need masses of PHDs in English. We need people who can cope with adversity, pull together, with real skills that are pragmatic and practical. We need pioneers. I say that because I think we’re going to be facing some truly disruptive and difficult times and all our current views of how the world works are going to be turned right over. I’m looking for the types of competencies or competences that are both social and pragmatic. At the moment the schools do none of this. They teach people to be obedient, compliant. In school kids don’t learn any social skills worth having either. I think we have a complete mismatch between the education establishment and the kind of people we will need to get through peak oil, overpopulation, all those kind of things.

Dave: If we can’t get these through the education system, how do we acquire these competencies?

Rob: I think reforming the education system is too titanic and difficult a task. My son for example left school at 14, attended Central Tech in Toronto where they have a wonderful art program, and he became an artist. And I think this is leading practice. I’ve met several boys recently in the 14-16 year age group who are so disenchanted with school, boys with strong talents in the kinetic sense. One of them who I met in North Caroline recently — any piece of machinery that you give him he could fix. He could make a very good living at this, but he’s forced to go to high school. I met another boy who is incredibly clever but is so bored at school. I’m focused on boys at the moment, because they tend to be very kinetic, they have to move around, they like and need to see things,  touch things, do things. They are completely turned off by their experience in the system and so my recommendation to them is to leave school.

Dave: Do we scrap the school system entirely then and leave it up to everyone to find more effective ways of learning?

Rob: I’m recommending that Holland College,  a technical school here on Prince Edward Island (PEI) open its doors as a middle school choice, as an alternative to junior high — and let young people have the choice to become a carpenter or an auto mechanic or something like that. I’d love to talk to U PEI and recommend they set up something like UTS (University of Toronto Schools) and say to kids in middle school (because it’s in middle school — junior high — where we lose them) — I’d like to talk about early education in a second — But if U PEI could say “If you really want to have an accelerated path we’ve got the school for you. I think that would throw such a spanner (wrench) in the works that there might actually be some change.

There’s another side to this that’s even more important. Our behaviour and our worldview and our ability to learn anything is set before we arrive in school. At the moment in Canada 30% of children are already incapable of learning or behaving in a social manner that would equip them to do anything in life, when they start school. In South Korea this number would be less than 7%. That’s bvecause of how we’re all living today — children are objectified, and they don’t get the attention they need from the people who are most important to them — their parents. This is a growing trend. You can see it in the obesity, lack of academic progress and so on.

What we’re beginning to learn is that it’s about genes but it isn’t — it’s about what is called the epigenome. Let’s say you and I were twin brothers. We’d be born at the same starting point, but at the age of 20 we’d have about a 30% difference in genes, and by age 70 about an 80% difference. Various experiences that happen to us when we’re young switch off or switch on various genes. The most important aspect here is the fight-or-flight response — More and more children are not being given the environment at home that is essential for small primates. All the genes that are necessary for them to cope, to learn, to feel OK about themselves and the world are being compromised.

So we have to work in the early childhood area and we have to work in middle school, because when the 30% come in they’re so disruptive that being a teacher is a bit like being a lion tamer. You’re lucky not to be killed. We all get pulled by our social networks, so that by the end of middle school, about 70% of the kids, well, they’re done. They’ll never be able to hold a decent job, and they live in a kind of fantasy world.

We end up with a school system now with 70% who will not be able to be competent citizens.

Dave: Do you think it’s that hopeless? I’m thinking of the work of Gustavo Esteva who worked with young people of Southern Mexico in the Open University in an unschooling system and found that, after goofing off for awhile, they took responsibility for their own learning and applied themselves to learn useful things. Isn’t it possible young people could bounce back and learn how to learn given the right freedom and space?

Rob: I’m not writing off the whole 70%. I’m saying that without doing anything, we have at the moment a 70-80% failure rate in our schools. And the 30% who arrive in Grade 1 in that state are probably beyond help by then. They’re the ones who are pulling down the rest, forcing the rest of the school to cope with that disruptive element. It’s like your immune system. If you have a small infection it’s manageable. But if you have an open wound your whole body is working full tilt to deal with that infection, so that nothing else can get done. That’s why the scale of the problem, and the initial conditions, affect the whole school system. So I don’t have any hope for the system.

Dave: So it seems to me then the answer is to just scrap the school system and let people try different experiments and watch to see which ones work, and allow people to learn from that. Wouldn’t you say?

Rob: I think I would. It can’t be any worse. In 1900, 90% of children in Canada and the US were literate. Now over 50% of Canadians and Americans are basically not literate. It’s shocking. And in Atlantic Canada we’re going to have almost no young here. We have a very low birth rate, and all our bright kids leave. In fifteen years more than half the population will be over the age of 65. This is a crisis.

Dave: What would you do if you were the parent of a five-year-old today?

Rob: I would homeschool them. That doesn’t mean the parents have to be at home all the time. You could set something up with other parents, like Chris Corrigan has done in Bowen Island. Unschooling. School is one of the most terrible things we’ve inflicted upon humanity. And I enjoyed school.

Dave: If we did that, tried out experiments and came up with some workable unschooling models, do you think we’d still need standardized testing to gauge whether certain essential skills had been acquired?

Rob: Absolutely not. You’re connecting education to a job and a resume. We don’t get any work because we have a piece of paper, we get it because people know we can do something. That’s the world we are going to go back to. The idea of all these people working in cubicles and pushing paper around is a fantasy about what the future will be.

Dave: Do you think we could have reached the stage where we are recognized for our credentials if we didn’t first have a piece of paper that gave us the opportunity to work in an environment where we could acquire those credentials in the first place? What if I as an executive need someone to do research — what would give me the confidence that an unschooled, untested young person would be capable of doing that research, and pick them over the person with the piece of paper?

Rob: First, if they’re brand new, you apprentice them, and find out if they can really do the job. I have friends working in such organizations now and no one is full time until they’ve apprenticed for six  months there. You have to prove you can do it. An interview only confirms the intuition that a person might work out. It takes six months to see whether the person has the skills and temperament to fit into the organization. If they don’t they’re gone.

Dave: But most organizations today would argue they’re operating under such tight constraints they can’t afford to bring people on as apprentices. They would say that’s what the education system is for.

Rob: They can afford it, because you can pay them minimum wage or nothing. Society has now outsourced the business of education, which worked quite well for four million years, to institutions.

Let’s talk about the skill sets at my local university here (U PEI). Most of the best, graduate business school students I taught are still waiting on tables here. Most of them have at least $30,000 worth of debt. And while they’re very nice and clever people, they actually don’t have any skills. They know how to do a marketing plan for Coca-Cola, but they’ve never sold anything. They know how to do strategic finance for IBM, but they don’t know basic bookkeeping. They know absolutely nothing.

Let’s look at science. I’m doing work here with the university labs. But the professors tell me the absolutely worst person to hire is a Bachelor of Science. They do know how to operate machinery though, and if they started there, and built up a reputation working in the lab, then they could take a Bachelor of Science. We’ve got it the wrong way round. People do a BA in Business and they know absolutely nothing. And the poor kids are debt-laden with a piece of paper that’s worth nothing.

Dave: So if you don’t have standardized testing, how do you develop a framework or program for self-learning?

Rob: Why? Why not just let them self-learn, become brilliant at what they want to do? In Atlantic Canada there’s a new Hibernia field opening up right now in Newfoundland. If every Newfie working out West came home there’s still be a shortage. And Irving are going to build a gas terminal on the Atlantic coast. The demand for skilled labour — welding for example I’d agree you’d have to have a piece of paper. Though if you said you were a skilled welder and I was a skilled welder it would take at most an hour or so for me to tell if you were really good.

The ‘currency’ of the (university degree) paper needs to be challenged now. You have to prove that you can do it. My software friends here don;t pay any attention to degrees. And if people aren’t pleasant to be around you don’t want them. The temperament issue is very important. We seem to think that skills are merely the technical ones.

One last story. If you wanted to join an elite unit in Greece in the Pelopanisian War, you’d have to fight alongside the unit for free until they decided you were qualified. In the US submarine service today, except for the captain (who goes through a ruthless peer review process) you are on probation for a year and can be voted off the boat even if you’re an executive officer, by the crew. They know any one person on a submarine can kill them all. That’s a high-performance technical environment and a very good model.

Dave: OK. You’re the czar, the Education Minister responsible for the new unschooling unsystem. How would you make it work?

Rob: I’d stay out of the unsystem and do three things to improve the system. Offer three-year in-home support for parents of young children having trouble coping, to help them develop their parenting skills. I’d shift the resources for the first years of life from baby-sitting to a focus on early learning. Pushing a lot more resources into preschool year support and involving parents extensively in that.

Secondly, I’d open up the standard curriculum in the schools, to open up opportunities for kids to go off and do what interests them. Unschool the school.

Lastly: My school, Harrow, is nearly 500 years old, with a social structure that has evolved from trial and error. So while there are 800 students in the school, far beyond the 150 top Dunbar number, all the boys are in houses of between 60 and 80. Everything is competing with the other houses. So you get a great deal of social cohesion there. The discipline of the school is run entirely by the boys themselves, some of whom have positions of significant authority. I’d be looking at models like that.

So if you have a 3000-kid high school (not uncommon), with no formal structures, it will be run like a prison. Cliques and gangs and bullying and all those kinds of things. The social environment of the school needs to be well thought through, so the discipline issues go away.

Dave: What do you do with the students who don’t want to go to school at all, who think that environment is part of the problem. Could they opt out and just choose to learn at their own pace outside the system?

Rob: Absolutely. We couldn’t do any worse than we’re doing now.

Dave: What role would technology play in this new school environment?

Rob: Technology isn’t really an issue. Its current popularity is about the desire of people to be connected in a more human and natural way. Technology can facilitate that. Today you have a lot of people teaching in school who basically don’t know anything. How to teach, or their subjects.

What’s interesting about Bowen Island is that in the community there are a lot of people who know a lot about certain things. Let’s say little Dave is really interested in astronomy. This technology would allow you to hook up with other people and not be confined by geography, other people who wanted to help teach you.

We’re seeing this in music, where more and more music teachers are teaching using Skype, with the video on, remotely. Remember what school was like 100 years ago. The women running for senior office today — Hillary Clinton — would have been teaching school. Today’s bank presidents would have been teaching school. By contrast, the calibre of teaching today is, I think, outrageously low. Technology would allow students and good teachers to find each other all over the world, and coalesce around people who are very gifted.

The school then becomes an agency for facilitation, rather than a force pounding ‘knowledge’ into children’s reluctant heads.

Dave: What if we don’t do any of this? What will we be looking at in the next fifty years?

Rob: Sometime in the next few months or years the full impact of Peak Oil will roll over us. Our whole way of life will be turned upside down. It will be accompanied with changes in climate, increases in conflict etc. So we’re going to hit a hugely turbulent time in the lifetime of the children at school today. Kids who are not resilient, who can’t cope well, who have no skills, will fall badly, and societies dominated by people who have no skills are going to fail utterly.

The stakes are larger than they’ve ever been.

[Rob provided the following epilogue to the conversation after I stopped recording:]

Many thanks for the opportunity to talk about my extreme views of education. They, my thoughts, have been influenced by a growing sense of why all aspects of modern life are so unnatural – that is we tend us use kinetic force is a machine way to act upon. Hence broadcasting was a one way deal with the broadcaster holding all the cards. War is a kinetic thing whereby until recently force alone was enough.

These one-way force-laden kinetic approaches no longer seem to work well. The paramount example is how we see our education system and child rearing – we  knock stuff into our kids. They are objects and so is knowledge. I offer up 3 books that have helped me see a practical way of seeing the child as a natural learner whose primary learning process is curiosity, observation and trial and error.

Are we not moving from an object oriented and externally motivated world to a relational and intrinsically motivated world? If so then education and child rearing has to go there too – is this not what you have been so passionate about? A more natural approach?

The first is the Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff – Liedloff observes how indigenous people raise children. The book is of course deeply offensive to many women today. It’s primary thesis is that the infant requires a close physical attachment to the mother for the first year while paradoxically it also requires that the adult remain focused in the adult world. So lots of touch and lots of observation by the infant but no giving the child the illusion that it is in charge. The opposite of how we raise kids today in the west. The baby’s need for touch – the key pathway for all development – is maximised as is the ability to observe the adult world. This is the key foundation for all development – touch and literacy are tightly coupled.

The second is the culmination of a lifetime of work by the late John Holt – Learning All the Time - All of Holt’s books are worth reading – but this is a quick summary and full of how you might be able to help a child do really well. For instance he is clear that it should not take more than 30 hours to teach a child how to read – provided you do the right thing! The book is based on the idea, as is Liedloff, that we are natural learners who are most shut down when the thrill of learning is taken away from us. The book is very practical and is the bible for all who seriously want to home or un school – when you read it you may see why I feel so badly about school as it is.

My last choice is – Punished by Rewards – by Alfie Kohn.  Kohn points out how destructive any extrinsic system of reward is. Liedloff also makes this point when she points out that in traditional societies no one talks down to a child – School is all about marks and bits of paper and is not about the reality of learning – also school reinforces a helpless view of the world where satisfaction comes from outside and not from within.

Dave the Cynic: Look at you! Pathetic. Goofy smile one minute, heartbroken and teary-eyed the next. Dave the Blogger has already explained that each person is nothing more than a watery bag of organs, organs that collectively co-evolved the body and the brain to help look after their mutual survival. Our brain is just a feature detection system, their early warning system for potential dangers, and their navigation control and information processing system.

Our belief that this brain is somehow ‘us’ is sheer vanity. What ‘we’ are is merely a figment of reality, a complicity, an emergence of the pandemonium of the body’s semi-autonomous processes. That’s what an organism is. That is our unromantic purpose. You, all giddy with love, are merely doing what your body commands you to do by flooding your brain with hormones.

Thought you’d got past all that, eh, Mr. How to Save the World? There you were behaving rashly, ready to toss aside all the programming your body had invested in you over all these years. Now look at you. An addict to your body’s chemicals, to love and that Second Life fantasy world. You think you’re actually connecting with people through those ‘avatars’, little cartoon characters, with your soppy romantic lines and your ridiculous notion to practice Intentional Community in a place that doesn’t exist.

Dave the Romantic: At least I feel something, not like you, you smug zombie. I’ve learned as much about myself in two weeks of opening my heart and soul to the people in this strange, wonderful world, people who are looking for ideas, connection, meaningful conversation, friendship and, yes, love, than I’ve learned in twenty years of sterile study of how the world really works and better ways to live and make a living.

Without love, there is nothing, no meaning, it’s all abstraction, rhetoric. In Real Life everyone (except the fools) has given up on change, on possibility, on imagination. Most people just sleepwalk through life, content with not feeling anguish or pain. Except for the few brief moments they feel real, ecstatic love. That love is so scary everyone in Real Life who has it is terrified to lose it. And they usually do.

Second Life may be an artificial world but it is a liberating one, ripe with possibility, limited only by the imagination and not the dreary constraints that have us in a stranglehold in Real Life. Second Life gives you a second chance, to try something completely different without fear of loss or failure, to be really yourself, aching, vulnerable, exposed.

And the rewards, of finding others on a similar bold journey, go far beyond love. They include genuine friendship, much deeper and faster than is possible in the real world where everyone hides behind their persona, their mask of conformity and respectability, and never comes out. The real world is a place of fear, cruelty, emotional and imaginative poverty.

Dave the Cynic: You self-righteous bastard! Who the hell are you to say what other people feel, to judge them for who you think they are. You’re just projecting your own emotional shallowness on others. Just because you’re intelligent, informed and imaginative, doesn’t mean you have one inkling about others’ feelings, or the depth of them.

What you do in Second Life you could do even more fully in Real Life, if you had the courage. Let me tell you something about love that goes beyond the simple chemistry Dave the Blogger explained yesterday. No one knows anyone else. No one knows what it is like to be someone else, or how they feel. What you love in other people is your idealistic imagining of what you want them to be. And if they say they love you, they’re really saying they love who they imagine you might be, who they wish you were. All that chemical soup is just the lubrication for the illusion you want to believe, what your body wants you to believe.

Reread the words you said to her, and hers to you, in the stark light of day. Look at the picture of the two of you, cuddling. What a fraud. At least she’s smart enough to know it’s all a fantasy.

Dave the Romantic: You seriously mean to tell me you believe the people who fall in love in Real Life have something that’s more real?

Dave the Cynic: Not at all! That’s exactly my point. Both in Real Life and in Second Life, we love who we imagine the object of our affection to be. We have no idea who they really are. Our bodies drug us with the chemicals of love, so that we believe all the sentimental crap about ‘touching souls’ and ‘two becoming one’. It’s just our bodies’ way to get us to procreate, to stay together, and to keep us in line so we don’t do anything risky, threatening to their well-being. ‘We’ just do what they tell ‘us’.

Dave the Romantic: So how do you explain the fact that, since I’ve been filled with these chemicals of love, I’ve learned so much about myself, about what’s been missing in my life, and I’m more aware of others in Real Life too, and strangers in Real Life look at me differently, as if I’ve melted. And I care about people more. Yesterday I cried, all-out, for the first time in years. If these chemicals are to further a fantasy, why do I feel so much deep, real-world emotion?

Dave the Cynic: When the chemicals of love take control, you lose your ability to judge what’s really happening, and you trust people more than you objectively would or should. You become hugely vulnerable, so when what you thought someone you loved felt turns out to be utterly different from your romantic imagining, you’re devastated. As an artist and idealist, your imagination is especially strong, you invent a great fantasy, and when it’s shattered you fall especially hard.

Face it, who are most of the people in Second Life? They’re the same motley crew you’re not terribly fond of in Real Life. Lonely middle-aged men and women looking for something to fill the emptiness in their lives — most of them in loveless marriages, or separated (the chemicals of love only last so long).

Young people with low self-esteem: The men trying to make conquests they know they couldn’t make in Real Life. The women yearning to be noticed, called pretty, lusted after, possibly for the first time in their lives. Deeply unhappy, needy people. Bored people whose Real Lives are so unbearably bland they escape to Second Life because anything seems better than the monotony and monochrome of their imagination-less ‘reality’.

You don’t care about such people in Real Life, do you? So why do you care about them behind their masks in Second Life? Because they flatter you with their attention, with their cute little cartoon faces and perfect skin and flawless figures and scanty clothes? Because they are so willing to let you fuck their unreal cartoon bodies for hours just to get the attention and appreciation no one else will give them in Real Life? Because when they cry on your character’s shoulder or giggle in its ear in Second Life you can’t see the desperate, pathetic looks on their real faces, the boredom in their real eyes, the imperfections of their unglamorous real bodies, and they can’t see yours?

Ask yourself why you can’t bear to listen to their real voices, and speak to them with yours, hiding instead behind the fantasy of text messages you can both read as coming from lovely young voices with perfect, unhesitant articulation? Do you hate the real world so much?

Dave the Romantic: Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I do love the natural world in Real Life and loathe the civilized world of seven billion mostly-pathetic humans — most of them ugly, voracious, stupid, ignorant, emotionally crippled or dead, devoid of imagination and racked by personal insecurities that make them dysfunctional. Real Life is a world of misery and anger and thoughtless devastation and horrific scarcity, scarcity even of love, and all the petty jealousy and greed and possessiveness and deprivation and heartbreak that brings.

So what’s wrong with wanting to live in a world where there is no violence, no scarcity of anything, including love, no ugliness, no poverty or deprivation. Of course many of the people in Second Life are dysfunctional, but many, with their brave disguises, seem merely unfulfilled emotionally, looking for love and, given a second chance, open to it and generous with it. And of course I’m disturbed that so many people bring their emotional baggage into Second Life with them. You can work around them.

I don’t care if it’s idealism and fantasy and illusion. You argue that what we imagine we love in Real Life is no different. And maybe as you say the feelings we feel for others are largely the result of imagining them to be, and feel, what we want them to be and feel, not who they really are, in both worlds. What’s so terribly wrong with that? What’s so great about reality, anyway?

If it fills me with feelings of love and has the same effect on them, why is that any less ‘real’ than love in the real world? My polyamory Intentional Community idea is a model, and of course it’s not a completely realistic simulation of what such a community would be like in Real Life, but what of that? We can learn from it, experiment, make it up, have fun with it. Live in our own collective fantasy novel. Much of what makes, and challenges, an Intentional Community is the social interaction, and we can certainly simulate that. Is that really so pathetic? If two people in Second Life have real feelings, deep affection, as if they’ve forged a true, intense friendship, who’s to say that’s not real?

You say I should be doing something in Real Life for others instead, and helping them, being an activist, making the world a better place. But if I make someone happier, wiser, feel better about themselves in Second Life, why is that not just as valuable? We only accomplish anything in life through what we impart to those we meet, one on one, those we touch. I’ve touched those I’ve met in Second Life, and they’ve touched me. We’ve learned, cared, helped each other, and made love more abundant in the process. I love them as surely as if I’d met them in Real Life.

So, if this is just a dream, a fantasy, show me that it’s any less so than Real Life, or that the self-changes and the changes I can evoke in others in this beautiful dream world are any less real and important than what I could do in Real Life. Tell me, with a few scavenged late night hours each day, what would you have me do instead?

If I’m destined to be addicted to love, what does it matter which dream world I choose to be addicted in?

What we are learning is that the chemistry of erotic love is different from that of the intellectual, emotional and sensual aspects of love. Erotic love also seems to be quite different in men than in women: in women it is less provoked by visual stimuli, and takes longer to arise in the first place and then longer to be slaked. The chemicals of erotic love are testosterone and estrogen, and their function is to provoke desire and arousal. When we love someone erotically, these chemicals will keep us coming back for a long time. What’s more, erotic love appears to be self-reinforcing and addictive — the more we get, the more we want. Our bodies seemingly don’t build up a resistance to these chemicals’ powerful appeal. There is evidence that pheromones, the subtle chemical signals our bodies emit when we seek erotic companionship, stimulate testosterone and estrogen production powerfully, but erotic desire can occur without them in the presence of visual, imaginative (the mind’s eye) or other sensory stimuli.

Other aspects of love, from the intellectual love of ideas and of imaginings and of learning, to the emotional love of friends and partners and children and nature, to the sensual, aesthetic love of beauty, art and music, tend to me closely interwoven, less ‘separable’ from each other than from erotic love.

This kind of love can be provoked, like erotic love, by visual, imaginative or other sensory stimuli (especially olfactory and tactile), and they can also be provoked by empathetic stimuli — the presence of a helpless child or animal, someone suffering, or the infectious allure of someone extremely happy, passionate, and/or playful. Such love is a consequence of a veritable cocktail of at least four different chemicals being released by the body, in an astonishing number of locations. Each of these chemicals produces a different set of ‘love’ emotions:

• Phenylethylamine gives us the feeling of unbounded euphoria and energy we feel, especially when we first ‘fall’ in love. The systems are familiar: dancing on air, sleeplessness, and a craving for more of what provoked the feeling in the first place. This appears to be the most addictive ‘love’ drug. Once we get it, we can’t get enough. When we lose it, we go through what can only be called withdrawal. It is possible that post-partum depression is the result of acute withdrawal of this hormone as the body adjusts to the new role of the mother. It also probably accounts for the craving of some people for unlimited amounts of new and varied love, to keep this ‘high’ going. The consequence is often a broken heart when a jilted lover no longer meets the addict’s craving. Phenylethylamine then sets off the body’s production of…
• Dopamine and neopinephrine give us the less ecstatic feeling of well-being and bliss, that wonderful mellow feeling that all’s right with the world. yet they also give us a feeling of intermittent excitement when in the presence of who or what we love, perhaps to reinforce the connection and to produce more phenylethylamine to resume the intensity of the new love. Dopamine in turn sets off the body’s production of…
• Oxytocin is often called the ‘cuddling’ hormone — it is what makes us want to touch, caress, embrace and protect the one we love. It also increases the nurturing urge, and lowers our trust threshold, sometimes with disastrous results when we find that trust betrayed. The cuddling and caresses in turn increase the production of phenylethylamine, dopamine and neopinephrine, so the self-reinforcing overdose of these hormones can be overwhelming, transformational.

Alas, nature (and our bodies) won’t allow this state to last too long, lest it interfere with more mundane duties that may accompany love, such as parenting and making a home for those we love. Cruelly, over time, our bodies build up resistance to these four chemicals, and, except for those so addicted they abandon those they love to seek new thrills that start the cocktail over again, we begin to go through a slow withdrawal. We re-become our old selves.

At this stage, to wean us off these ecstatic drugs (some studies suggest that the drug Ecstasy prompts the body’s production of phenylethylamine), the body starts producing more of another group of hormones, endorphins. These drugs instill a sense of contentment, and a strong sense of attachment to what we have and what we love (even if less powerfully than before). This is the mature stage of love, and it has its advantages. It is this drug that prompts us to stay with those we love for a lifetime, or at least until the kids have grown and flown the nest.

Nature, and our bodies, having hooked us with the mind-blowing cocktail, now keep us hooked with a more enduring, low-key, matter-of-fact addictive drug. Testosterone and estrogen add the spice to reinforce that attachment, to keep us connected to the same people instead of wandering. Sometimes, anyway.

That’s all we seem to know so far. But it’s enough to suggest that we can’t help ourselves — love is not something our minds have any control over. That’s both delicious and terrifying, which is perhaps why so much art, literature and music is about love. We sing paeans to it because we simply have no choice. We do what we must.

And when we lose it, like an addict going through withdrawal cold turkey, there is no greater agony.

(part two of this article will present a debate between Dave the Romantic and Dave the Cynic about the nature of love, and whether it is essential to a healthy, meaningful life, or just our body’s way of taking control of our behaviour… or perhaps both)