Pleasure Effect

A long time ago, I read a novel called Ringworld by Larry Niven. In it, I vaguely remember that there was this two headed creature that looked a lot like an ostrich. I don’t remember exactly who did what to whom, but there was a scene in the book where there was an attempt to influence the creature by beaming pleasure at it. Every time it looked at this person, they had the mental ability to induce pleasure directly into the creature’s brain, and the person turned this up whenever the creature did something associated with the person. Very quickly, the person had complete control of the creature because they controlled its pleasure center.

I remember at the time thinking, how is this different than an addictive drug? It sure seems like a perfect description of addiction. When it gets down to it, turning pleasure on or off in a person would be the ultimate control. Besides taking drugs, or the other less chemically induced ways we produce pleasure, we already do this in a huge variety of ways. What I’m describing is no different than the effect a pretty woman sometimes has on the men around her. She throws some positive attention around and men on the receiving end will stumble all over themselves in order to experience some of it. I used to fantasize about having this kind of power when I was young. I had heard about the concept of a love potion or a spell, and thought that would be great to have that kind of power.

Wouldn't this also be an excellent way to retrain a person, or help them learn. The obvious use of the power would be to simply seduce someone, but think about what else could be done with such a power over other people. Of course, this kind of thing is used in less direct and more subtle ways all the time. People are always seeking to persuade people or sway the crowd.

I flipped the concept on its head and was thinking, which is better? to use this power on someone or have it used on you? If someone cast a spell on you to make you happy or in love - why would this necessarily be bad? It's looked upon as scary because you lose control, but if you're truly happy, what does it matter what the source is? If you can overlook the subversion of your free will, the result is pretty good. You may or may not have reached the state of loving or craving the other person without the spell, but my point is, maybe you would have eventually reached that state anyway. I suppose the true limit you would put on this fictional power is something akin to what I had heard about hypnosis. I heard that you could not be made to do something under hypnosis that you would not have done anyway. The hypnosis just lowers your inhibitions and removes your embarrassment so that you will do the things that you were already capable of in front of a crowd without embarrassment. I suppose it is similar when it comes to succumbing to your desires.

The obvious place people usually take the fantasy of complete control is to see someone enslaved by this pleasure control. Such a strange concept. On one hand, you are enslaved, with all the negative connotations of that word. You are not in control of yourself, you do not call the shots, you have to do what someone else tells you to do. On the other hand, you’re happy, so what difference does it make?

In normal circumstances, the pleasure is dampened and self-limited if the negative consequences to succumbing to the lure are larger than the pleasure you get from it. Of course, this is the downside of drug abuse and the nearly impossible condition to protect people from. The DARE program, which is designed to keep young people away from drugs, along with all the other anti-drug programs (as well as abstinence programs, for that matter) always seemed so fake to me. They fail to tell you the truth about sex and drugs or alcohol. The truth is that if you try this, you might love it so much that it will soon be the only thing you want to do. You can lose control of your own free will through your love or irresistible appeal of your addiction. No doubt most people reading this are thinking about the possibly fictional story about the lab rats that were given a bar they could depress in their cage that would deliver cocaine to them. The story goes that the rats would sit there and press the bar continuously until they died. They would not eat or sleep or groom themselves, they just took cocaine until it killed them.

We as a species, in fact, all life probably to some degree, are prone to this. Knowing this, it is probably best to avoid the things in life that you know you will not be able to resist unless they help you. If you could find a way to become addicted to exercise or eating right or reading and learning, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? I suppose it wouldn’t be too much to ask to open yourself to enjoy the pleasures of experiencing and getting to know someone. To have the attitude that each person is there to be appreciated so they can enrich your life would be an accomplishment that would surely lead straight to a mostly happy life.

I’ve often thought it would be great to be the person standing up in front of a classroom making the young minds in your charge feel pleasure in and find an addiction to learning things.

We’re subject to this pleasure effect, we might as well be aware of it and filter the effect to let in the positive addictions and resist the negative ones.

Who's in Control

I realize that inspiration for some ideas don't always seem related, so bear with me here. I was listening to the Savage Love podcast, an online broadcast of a sex advice column by Dan Savage. Savage Love is the name of his popular newspaper based advice column that has been around for years, usually in some little local newspaper you find in a rack next to the gum machines in your favorite Bar & Grill.

What I heard in passing in the middle of a explanation was a bit of a revelation. The idea resonated with me and later evolved into a different train of thought. Dan was saying, "This is about control and dominance, so much of sex really is, isn't it? ...humans are all about domination and control. Human society is all about domination and control, why shouldn't human sexuality [also be about domination and control]...." He mentioned marking your territory, taking possession, submitting to someone else's authority, and demonstrating control over others. The context here was sexuality, and Dan Savage didn't dive into the way that this mirrors society as a whole or human traits in non-sexual situations, but you could immediately see the connection.

Later, on a long road trip, my wife and I were talking about how parents try to control their children. I told her that I thought that parental control was only an illusion. You can try to shape your children's behavior, but you can't control their thoughts and desires. You can exert influence, and you can modify behavior through punishments and rewards, but you can't change what they think or what they want to do. We acknowledge that people grow up and are given their own freedom and independence gradually over time, but what many parents don't recognize is that their children have already developed their own way of doing things and thinking long before the parent finally realizes this. We also discussed abuse (parental and spousal), which is a sick twist on control, but that is another subject.

Human society is all about control.

My wife recently graduated from nursing school and started working at a university (teaching) hospital. Before graduation, she was required to shadow a working nurse. She was assigned to a hospital in a system in our city has struggled to maintain profitability. Their hospitals have a reputation as horrible places to work. The atmosphere is bullying, and management never offers the carrot, but is always quick to use the stick - or maybe the sledge hammer. This was a health care system being run primarily as a business, and failing miserably.

While there, basically as an unpaid intern, they started bullying her to come to work for them. This period, just prior to graduation, is when most of my wife's class was busy searching for a job, sharing their experiences with each other. My wife was certain of one thing, she did not want to work for this hospital. It wasn't just that the atmosphere was dismal, it was also that the pay and benefits were nowhere near as good as other hospitals, and the workload was higher. Things kept getting creepier. Managers would "announce" to groups in front of my wife that she was going to work for them, when she wasn't. She finally had it out with the HR manager, when he wouldn't leave her alone. She listed all the better benefits with the hospital she was going to work for. He remained unconvinced, which was his own fatal flaw. If he couldn't see the problem, how could he hope to correct it?

I told her that it was all about control. They mistook the temporary control they had over her during the intership as the same complete control they thought they had over their own employees. They thought that they could just dictate to her to take a job with them because she was assigned to go there like she was working for them. That's the way they treat their employees, so why should they treat her any differently? They were so lost in their warped mindset of controlling others that they didn't understand why she didn't do what they told her to do with her life.

Although she is working for an educational hospital now, and she doesn't get bullied, it is still all about control. This is a different type of control. The school/hospital tries to teach their nurses everything that they will need to know, so that they will understand the best way to do things. This is a more subtle kind of control. They seek to control the way people think through their influence. Given enough free access to information, they trust that people will learn the truth. Understanding should make employees do what is right without being told every step and it will also make them better employees. This is a better type of control, one that recognizes that the person being controlled must ultimately come to the same conclusions themselves and agree that their duties are the best course of action.

And I think this speaks to the great divide in our country right now. I believe the blue/red, republican/democrat, or conservative/liberal debate is also one of freedom versus control. Look at what conservatives attack nowadays. "Liberal" professors on campuses trying to subvert young people's minds. "Liberal" media trying to bring down the conservatives. Attack conservatives are people that are trying desperately to maintain the control of the worst aspects of capitalism in our society.

Capitalism in it's pure form means everyone is voting with their pocketbooks, and only economically viable ideas survive the Darwinism of the marketplace. But excesses and breakdowns in our form of capitalism make it easy for people with lots of money to exert too much control over government and society. In an overly controlled workplace, you see this with a tough profit minded boss trying to dictate what all the employees say and how they act. In our society, you see big companies trying to bend government to their will, restricting regulation and lowering taxes. They don't want any government control of business's behavior. All the while they demand government supports them handsomely with tax breaks and subsidies. We have anything but a pure form of capitalism when you consider that everything goes easily in favor of those that already have the overwhelming majority of the capital. They usually get the best government money can buy.

So the people that support this system (most notably those that benefit handsomely from it) would like everyone to believe that taxes are always bad, regulation is crippling society, our education system is trying to imprint a liberal way of thinking on our youth, and the media is actively against everything they stand for. It's all about control. If you try to impose any kind of control over them, taxes or regulations, for example, they scream bloody murder. If you try to let people explore the truth about the world, and they read up or educate themselves and then learn that things aren't that great, they get really angry. They feel themselves losing the control that they are seeking to impose on society.

My wife summed this up quite simply: one seeks to keep you down, the other seeks to lift you up.

This reminds me of several parallels. Remember how the Soviet Union sought to control their population through oppression, fear, misinformation, and propaganda? In the end it didn't work. Religions don't want you to think too hard about or question what they say, they want you to blindly believe in their gospel so they will continue to have control over you. And look at the way that the interpretation of Islam is used control women in Muslim countries. The common thread here is that people with free will are able to learn the truth. They will then act from the lessons learned and take control of their own lives. This will remove the illusion of control from oppressive governmental, business, and religious leaders. Those that think they are in control now stand to lose everything they care about. Desperate people will say anything to stop from losing that control.

Fear and Control

When Heath Ledger died last week, it was unexpected. I remembered him mostly from A Knight's Tale, where he was pretty funny. Everyone remembers that Heath was in Brokeback Mountain. No one I know watched that movie. I didn't even know what it was about. The movie got awards and recognition, so that usually tells you that it's good, but I wasn't about to walk up to the counter at Blockbuster video rental and plop down a "gay flick".

I heard the scenery in the movie was beautiful, but I thought it was a gay romance film. When Heath Ledger died, I decided to rent the movie. My wife and I watched it last night.

Spoiler alert. You may want to skip the next 3 paragraphs if you haven't seen it. It was a good movie. It was sad. I kept thinking that it didn't seem realistic that they were really in love, it seemed just like actors playing a role. That's true for most Hollywood movie romances, as far as I'm concerned. We kept waiting, wondering where the movie was going. I did not know it was set in 1963 up to the late 70s/early 80s. The movie was about suppressed romance. The two characters were gay, but couldn't come out of the closet, or truly express their love for each other or live together.

Then, Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist dies. When Heath's character Ennis Del Mar contacts Jack's widow and parents you see the true cost of their actions. They denied themselves their whole lives until it was too late.

It wasn't clear to me what happened to Jack. Earlier, Ennis had told a story about some gay ranchers being tortured to death, possibly by his father, that set the tone for the whole movie. Ennis was scared to go public because he had seen clearly what can happen to gay people in his world. I missed a brief part where they showed Jack being beaten by some guys in a field. Before my wife told me that, it was not clear if Jack actually died by accident or was killed for being gay. It seems clear that Jack's parents knew their son was gay and his mother at least was sympathetic about her son's plight and Ennis's grief. I guess that's part of what made it so sad. This guy loses his lover and can't even properly mourn for him. Jack's parents even told Ennis that Jack wanted to live with him on a ranch out there, so they knew that Ennis was Jack's true love. The father wasn't very pleased about it, but he also was not overly hostile toward Ennis.

It's odd that in the movie, Heath lives, and in real life, he died. Some of the tone of the movie, the tragic death of someone before their time, parallels real life. Who knows what Heath Ledger would have been like if he had lived.

Talking about the movie afterwards, I remarked that fear of homosexuality wasn't always around. The Greeks were fairly open about male homosexuality, and there was no stigma about it. My wife pointed out that Christianity imposed the restrictions. It's all about fear and control. You're supposed to be afraid of the consequences, and that's how the church maintains their control over you.

On one hand, things seem to be changing. There seems to be more understanding and a greater tolerance by society at large about homosexuality. However, the church is fighting back, as they see their control slipping. The ability for men to be openly gay gains ground a little bit each year.

I was also thinking about female heterosexual sexuality. Islamic fundamentalism has sought to suppress this aspect of life, with little true success. We in the west don't have much problem seeing this as restrictive, against human nature, and inherently wrong, but we turn around and apply the same restrictions to gays.

I guess we still have some growing up to do.