Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  mind— an unassailable libido-position which we ourselves spring, mourned for him, have since abandoned. and cut off their hair in tribute to their brother. The —SIGMUND FREUD wood nymphs mourned him too, and Echo sang her refrain to their lament. • The pyre, the tossing 74 • The Art of Seduction torches, and the bier, were Keys to the Character now being prepared, but his body was nowhere to be found. Instead of his corpse, they discovered a According to the popular concept, Coquettes are consummate teases, experts at arousing desire through a provocative appearance or an al-flower with a circle of white luring attitude. But the real essence of Coquettes is in fact their ability to petals round a yellow trap people emotionally, and to keep their victims in their clutches long af-centre. ter that first titillation of desire. This is the skill that puts them in the ranks — O V I D , M E T A M O R P H O S E S , of the most effective seducers. Their success may seem somewhat odd, TRANSLATED BY MARY M. INNES since they are essentially cold and distant creatures; should you ever get to know one well, you will sense his or her inner core of detachment and self-love. It may seem logical that once you become aware of this quality you Selfishness is one of the will see through the Coquette's manipulations and lose interest, but more qualities apt to inspire love. often we see the opposite. After years of Josephine's coquettish games, — N A T H A N I E L HAWTHORNE Napoleon was well aware of how manipulative she was. Yet this conqueror of kingdoms, this skeptic and cynic, could not leave her. To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first The Socrates whom you understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you see has a tendency to fall in pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away. Too much at-love with good-looking tention can be interesting for a while, but it soon grows cloying and finally young men, and is always in their society and in an becomes claustrophobic and frightening. It signals weakness and neediness, ecstasy about t h e m . . . b u t an unseductive combination. How often we make this mistake, thinking once you see beneath the our persistent presence will reassure. But Coquettes have an inherent un-surface you will discover a degree of self-control of derstanding of this particular dynamic. Masters of selective withdrawal, which you can hardly form they hint at coldness, absenting themselves at times to keep their victim off a notion, gentlemen. . . . balance, surprised, intrigued. Their withdrawals make them mysterious, He spends his whole life pretending and playing and we build them up in our imaginations. (Familiarity, on the other hand, with people, and I doubt

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  New Prudes are secretly oppressed by their correctness and long to transgress. Just as sexual prudes make prime targets for a Rake or Siren, the New Prude will often be most tempted by someone with a dangerous or naughty side. If you desire a New Prude, do not be taken in by their judgments of you or their criticisms. That is only a sign of how deeply you fascinate them; you are on their mind. You can often draw a New Prude into a seduction, in fact, by giving them the chance to criticize you or even try to reform you. Take nothing of what they say to heart, of course, but now you have the perfect excuse to spend time with them—and New Prudes can be seduced simply through being in contact with you. These types actually make excellent and rewarding victims. Once you open them up and get them to let go of their correctness, they are flooded with feelings and energies. They may even overwhelm you. Perhaps they are in a relationship with someone as drab as they themselves seem to be—do not be put off. They are simply asleep, waiting to be awakened. The Crushed Star. We all want attention, we all want to shine, but with most of us these desires are fleeting and easily quieted. The problem with Crushed Stars is that at one point in their lives they did find themselves the center of attention—perhaps they were beautiful, charming and effervescent, perhaps they were athletes, or had some other talent—but those days are gone. They may seem to have accepted this, but the memory of having once shone is hard to get over. In general, the appearance of wanting attention, of trying to stand out, is not seen too kindly in polite society or in the workplace. So to get along, Crushed Stars learn to tamp down their desires; but failing to get the attention they feel they deserve, they also become resentful. You can recognize Crushed Stars by certain unguarded moments: they suddenly receive some attention in a social setting, and it makes them glow; they mention their glory days, and there is a little glint in the eye; a little wine in the system, and they become effervescent. Seducing this type is simple: just make them the center of attention. When you are with them, act as if they were stars and you were basking in their glow. Get them to talk, particularly about themselves. In social situa- The Seducer's Victims— The Eighteen Types • 153

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  To take just one example, we argue that women’s seemingly consistent preference for men with access to wealth is not a result of innate evolutionary programming, as the standard model asserts, but simply a behavioral adaptation to a world in which men control a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. As we’ll explore in detail, before the advent of agriculture a hundred centuries ago, women typically had as much access to food, protection, and social support as did men. We’ll see that upheavals in human societies resulting from the shift to settled living in agricultural communities brought radical changes to women’s ability to survive. Suddenly, women lived in a world where they had to barter their reproductive capacity for access to the resources and protection they needed to survive. But these conditions are very different from those in which our species had been evolving previously. It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers. So in order to trace the deepest roots of human sexuality, it’s vital to look beneath the thin crust of recent human history. Until agriculture, human beings evolved in societies organized around an insistence on sharing just about everything. But all this sharing doesn’t make anyone a noble savage. These pre-agricultural societies were no nobler than you are when you pay your taxes or insurance premiums. Universal, culturally imposed sharing was simply the most effective way for our highly social species to minimize risk. Sharing and self-interest, as we shall see, are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, what many anthropologists call fierce egalitarianism was the predominant pattern of social organization around the world for many millennia before the advent of agriculture. But human societies changed in radical ways once they started farming and raising domesticated animals. They organized themselves around hierarchical political structures, private property, densely populated settlements, a radical shift in the status of women, and other social configurations that together represent an enigmatic disaster for our species: human population growth mushroomed as quality of life plummeted. The shift to agriculture, wrote author Jared Diamond, is a “catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”6

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Now that we’re discussing how concepts work in the brain, we must acknowledge that concepts are predictions. Early in life, you build up concepts from detailed sensory input (as prediction error) from your body and the world. Your brain efficiently compresses the sensory input it receives, just like YouTube compresses video, extracting similarities out of differences, eventually creating an efficient, multisensory summary. Once your brain has learned a concept in this manner, it can run this process in reverse, expanding the similarities into differences to construct an instance of the concept, much as your computer or phone expands the incoming YouTube video for display. This is a prediction. Think of prediction as “applying” a concept, modifying the activity in your primary sensory and motor regions, and correcting or refining as needed. Imagine that you’re in a shopping mall, as I was with my daughter, strolling from store to store. The mall is filled with sounds, people are bustling about, the shop windows are overflowing with tempting products for sale, and your brain is busy issuing thousands of simultaneous predictions as usual. “There is motion in front of me.” “There is motion to my left.” “My breathing is slowing down.” “My stomach is rumbling.” “I hear laughter.” “I am calm.” “I am lonely.” “I see my neighbor.” “I see that nice guy who works at the post office.” “I see my Uncle Kevin.” Let’s say that those last three predictions about people are instances of a concept for “Happiness,” having to do with feeling connected to friends. Your brain simultaneously constructs many instances of this concept, based on past experiences in similar situations when you have unexpectedly bumped into friends. Each instance has some probability of being correct at that moment. Let’s give our focus to one of those instances, your prediction that you see your beloved Uncle Kevin unexpectedly in a shopping mall. Your brain issues this prediction because, at some time in the past, you saw Uncle Kevin in a similar situation and experienced sensations that you categorized as happiness. How well will this prediction match your incoming sensory inputs right now? If it matches better than all the other predictions, then you will experience this instance of “Happiness.” If not, then your brain will adjust the prediction, and you might experience an instance of “Disappointment.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Ours is a very young species. Few of our ancestors faced the unrelenting scarcity-generated selective pressures envisioned by Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin. The ancestral human journey did not, by and large, take place in a world already saturated with our kind, fighting over scraps. Rather, the route taken by the bulk of our ancestors led through a long series of ecosystems with nothing quite like us already there. Like the Burmese pythons recently set loose in the Everglades, cane toads spreading unchecked across Australia, or the timber wolves recently reintroduced to Yellowstone, our ancestors were generally entering an open ecological niche. When Hobbes wrote that “Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe,” he was unaware of just how cooperative and communicative wolves can be if there’s enough food for everyone. Individuals in species spreading into rich new ecosystems aren’t locked in a struggle to the death against one another. Until the niche is saturated, such intraspecies conflict over food is counterproductive and needless.15 We’ve already shown that even in a largely empty world, the social lives of foragers were anything but solitary. But Hobbes also claimed prehistoric life was poor, and Malthus believed poverty to be eternal and inescapable. Yet most foragers don’t believe themselves to be impoverished, and there’s every indication that life wasn’t generally much of a struggle for our fire-controlling, highly intelligent ancestors bound together in cooperative bands. To be sure, occasional catastrophes such as droughts, climatic shifts, and volcanic eruptions were devastating. But most of our ancestors lived in a largely unpopulated world, chock-full of food. For hundreds of thousands of generations, the omnivore’s dilemma facing our ancestors lay in choosing among many culinary options. Plants eat soil; deer eat plants; cougars eat deer. But people can and do eat almost anything—including cougars, deer, plants, and yes, even soil.16 The Despair of Millionaires Poverty…is the invention of civilization. MARSHALL SAHLINS A recent New York Times article under the headline “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich” begins, “By almost any definition—except his own and perhaps those of his neighbors here in Silicon Valley—Hal Steger has it made.” The article notes that although Mr. Steger and his wife have a net worth of roughly $3.5 million, he still typically works twelve-hour days plus another ten hours on weekends. “A few million,” explains Steger, “doesn’t go as far as it used to.” Gary Kremen (estimated net worth: $10 million), founder of Match.com, an online dating service, explains, “Everyone around here looks at the people above them.” He continues to work sixty to eighty hours per week because, he says, “You’re nobody here at $10 million.” Another executive gets right to the point, saying, “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.”17

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The disappointment I must now register (as I gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread that ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on the trim turf of old-world mountainsides, on the innerspring moss, by a handy, hygienic rill, on rustic benches under the initialed oaks, and in so many cabanes in so many beech forests. But in the Wilds of America the open-air lover will not find it easy to indulge in the most ancient of all crimes and pastimes. Poisonous plants burn his sweetheart’s buttocks, nameless insects sting his; sharp items of the forest floor prick his knees, insects hers; and all around there abides a sustained rustle of potential snakes— que dis-je , of semi-extinct dragons!—while the crablike seeds of ferocious flowers cling, in a hideous green crust, to gartered black sock and sloppy white sock alike. I am exaggerating a little. One summer noon, just below timberline, where heavenly-hued blossoms that I would fain call larkspur crowded all along a purly mountain brook, we did find, Lolita and I, a secluded romantic spot, a hundred feet or so above the pass where we had left our car. The slope seemed untrodden. A last panting pine was taking a well-earned breather on the rock it had reached. A marmot whistled at us and withdrew. Beneath the lap-robe I had spread for Lo, dry flowers crepitated softly. Venus came and went. The jagged cliff crowning the upper talus and a tangle of shrubs growing below us seemed to offer us protection from sun and man alike. Alas, I had not reckoned with a faint side trail that curled up in cagey fashion among the shrubs and rocks a few feet from us . It was then that we came closer to detection than ever before, and no wonder the experience curbed forever my yearning for rural amours. I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutory storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The problem is that women taking birth control pills don’t seem to show the same responsiveness to these male scent cues. Women who were using birth control pills chose men’s T-shirts randomly or, even worse, showed a preference for men with similar immunity to their own.10 Consider the implications. Many couples meet when the woman is on the pill. They go out for a while, like each other a lot, and then decide to get together and have a family. She goes off the pill, gets pregnant, and has a baby. But her response to him changes. There’s something about him she finds irritating—something she hadn’t noticed before. Maybe she finds him sexually unattractive, and the distance between them grows. But her libido is fine. She gets flushed every time she gets close enough to smell her tennis coach. Her body, no longer silenced by the effects of the pill, may now be telling her that her husband (still the great guy she married) isn’t a good genetic match for her. But it’s too late. They blame it on the work pressure, the stress of parenthood, each other…. Because this couple inadvertently short-circuited an important test of biological compatibility, their children may face significant health risks ranging from reduced birth weight to impaired immune function.11 How many couples in this situation blame themselves for having “failed” somehow? How many families are fractured by this common, tragic, undetected sequence of events?12 Psychologist Richard Lippa teamed up with the BBC to survey over 200,000 people of all ages from all over the world concerning the strength of their sex drive and how it affects their desires.13 He found the same inversion of male and female sexuality: for men, both gay and straight, higher sex drive increases the specificity of their sexual desire. In other words, a straight guy with a higher sex drive tends to be more focused on women, while higher sex drive in a gay guy makes him more intent on men. But with women—at least nominally straight women—the opposite occurs: the higher her sex drive, the more likely she’ll be attracted to men and women. Lesbians showed the same pattern as men: a higher sex drive means more women-only focus. Perhaps this explains why nearly twice as many women as men consider themselves bisexual, while only half as many consider themselves to be exclusively gay.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But while Darwin and Wallace made excellent use of Malthus’s dire calculations, there’s a problem with them. They don’t add up. The tribes of hunters, like beasts of prey, whom they resemble in their mode of subsistence, will…be thinly scattered over the surface of the earth. Like beasts of prey, they must either drive away or fly from every rival, and be engaged in perpetual contests with each other…. The neighboring nations live in a perpetual state of hostility with each other. The very act of increasing in one tribe must be an act of aggression against its neighbors, as a larger range of territory will be necessary to support its increased numbers…. The life of the victor depends on the death of the enemy. THOMAS MALTHUS, An Essay on the Principle of Population If his estimates of population growth were even close to correct, Malthus (and thus, Darwin) would have been right to assume that human societies had long been “necessarily confined in room,” resulting in “a perpetual state of hostility” with one another. In Descent of Man, Darwin revisits Malthus’s calculations, writing, “Civilised populations have been known under favourable conditions, as in the United States, to double their numbers in twenty-five years…[At this] rate, the present population of the United States (thirty millions), would in 657 years cover the whole terraqueous globe so thickly, that four men would have to stand on each square yard of surface.”5 If Malthus had been correct about prehistoric human population doubling every twenty-five years, these assumptions would indeed have been reasonable. But he wasn’t, and they weren’t. We now know that until the advent of agriculture, our ancestors’ overall population doubled not every twenty-five years, but every 250,000 years. Malthus (and thus, Darwin after him) was off by a factor of 10,000.6 Malthus assumed the suffering he saw around him reflected the eternal, inescapable condition of human and animal life. He didn’t understand that the teeming, desperate streets of London circa 1800 were far from a reflection of prehistoric conditions. A century and a half earlier, Thomas Hobbes had made the same mistake, extrapolating from his own personal experience to conjure a mistaken vision of prehistoric human life. [image file=image_rsrc688.jpg] Estimated Global Population7

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Gould, author of The Lifestyle, a cultural history of the swinging movement in the United States, interviewed two researchers who’d written about this Air Force ritual. Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.”* The practice continued after the war ended and by the late 1940s, “military installations from Maine to Texas and California to Washington had thriving swing clubs,” writes Gould. By the end of the Korean War, in 1953, the clubs “had spread from the air bases to the surrounding suburbs among straight, white-collar professionals.”14 Are we to believe that these fighter pilots and their wives were “naïve”? It’s true that many high-profile American forays into alternative sexuality in the 1970s ended in chaos and hurt feelings, but what does that prove? Americans also tried, and failed, to reduce their reliance on foreign oil in the 1970s. By this logic, it would be “naïve” to ever try again. Besides, in intimate matters, discretion and success tend to go together, so no one really has any idea how many couples succeeded in finding their own unconventional understandings by experimenting with low-key alternatives to standard, off-the-shelf monogamy.15 What isn’t debatable is that conventional marriage is a full-blown disaster for millions of men, women, and children right now. Conventional till-death-(or infidelity, or boredom)-do-us-part marriage is a failure. Emotionally, economically, psychologically, and sexually, it just doesn’t work over the long term for too many couples. Yet while few mainstream therapists would contemplate trying to convince a gay man or lesbian to “grow up, get real, and just stop being gay,” these days, when it comes to unconventional approaches to heterosexual marriage, Perel points out, “Sexual boundaries are one of the few areas where therapists seem to mirror the dominant culture. Monogamy,” she writes, “is the norm, and sexual fidelity is considered to be mature, committed, and realistic.” Forget about negotiating alternatives: “Nonmonogamy, even consensual nonmonogamy, is suspect.” The notion that it might be possible to love one person while being sexual with another “makes us shudder,” and conjures “images of chaos: promiscuity, orgies, debauchery.”16 Couples who turn to a therapist hoping for guidance on ways to loosen—but not break—the bonds of standard monogamy are likely to be offered little but defensive condemnation and stilted bromides like this advice from an evolutionary psychology based self-help book called Mean Genes: “The temptations we all face are deeply ingrained in the genes of our hearts and minds…[but] as long as we remain interesting dynamos, there will be no conflict between monogamy and our infidelity-promoting mean genes.”17 Interesting dynamos? No conflict? Sure. Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Well into the 1800s, much of rural England was considered commons—property owned by the king but available to everyone—like the open range in the western United States before the advent of barbed-wire fencing. Using the English commons as his model, Hardin purported to show what happens when a resource is communally owned. He reasoned that in “a pasture open to all…each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible.” Though destructive to the pasture, the herdsman’s selfishness makes good economic sense from his personal perspective. Hardin wrote, “The rational herdsman [will conclude] that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” This is the only rational choice because all will share the cost of the degradation to the land from overgrazing, while the profit gained from additional animals will be his alone. Since each individual herdsman will come to the same conclusion, the common ground will inevitably be overgrazed. “Freedom in a commons,” Hardin concluded, “brings ruin to us all.” Like Malthus’s thoughts on population growth relative to agricultural capacity, Hardin’s argument was a hit because (1) it features an A+B=C simplicity that appears to be inarguably correct; and (2) it is useful in justifying seemingly heartless decisions by entrenched powers. Malthus’s essay, for example, was often cited by British business and political leaders to explain their inaction in the face of widespread poverty in Britain, including the famine of the 1840s in which several million Irish people starved to death (and millions more fled to the United States). Hardin’s articulation of the folly of communal ownership has provided cover repeatedly to those arguing for the privatization of government services and the conquest of native lands. One other thing Hardin’s elegant argument has in common with that of Malthus: it collapses on contact with reality. As Canadian author Ian Angus explains, “Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self regulation by the communities involved.” Hardin missed the fact that in small rural communities where population density is low enough that each of the herdsmen knows the others (the actual case in the historical English commons and in ancestral foraging societies), any individual who tries to game the system is quickly found out and punished. Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s studies of commons management in small-scale communities led her to conclude that, “all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.”6

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Plath cuts her finger and experiences revelation. But Hollywood insists on imagining the artist as a dreamy-eyed matinee idol with a flowing bow tie, Dmitri Tiomkin’s music in the background, and a violent orange sunset above his head—and, to some extent, all of us (even those of us who should know better) try to live up to this image. I was still, in short, tempted to take off with Adrian. And Bennett, sensing this, trundled me off to Freud’s house at Berggasse, 19, to try (once more) to bring me back to my senses. I agreed with Bennett that Freud was an intuitive genius, but I did not agree with the psychoanalytic doctrine of His Infallibility: geniuses are always fallible; otherwise they’d be gods. And who wants perfection, anyway? Or consistency? After you outgrow adolescence, Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and the belief in your parents’ transcendent evil—you shouldn’t even want consistency. But alas, so many of us do. And are ready to tear our lives apart just for the lack of it. Like me. So we walked through the Freud house in search of revelation. I think we half expected to see Montgomery Clift dressed and bearded like Freud and exploring the eaves of his own dank unconscious. What we saw, in fact, was disappointing. Most of the furniture had gone to Hampstead with Freud and now belonged to his daughter. The Vienna Freud Museum had to make do with photographs and largely empty rooms. Freud had lived here for nearly half a century, but there was no scent of him left—just photographs and a waiting room reconstituted with overstuffed furniture of the period. There was a photograph of the famous consulting room with its Oriental carpet-covered analytic couch, its Egyptian and Chinese figurines, and its fragments of ancient sculpture, but the consulting room itself had vanished, along with a whole era, in 1938. How strange, somehow, to pretend that Freud had never been driven out, or that with the help of a few yellowing photos, a world could be recreated. It reminded me of my trip to Dachau: the crematoria torn down and tow-headed German children running and laughing and picnicking on the newly seeded grass. “You can’t judge a country by just twelve years,” they used to tell me in Heidelberg.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then when it happens again we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think: “this one is stronger, this one is better…” because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before. “Why don’t you forget about love and just try to lead your own life?” Adrian had asked. And I had argued with him. But maybe he was right after all. What had love ever done for me but disappoint me? Or maybe I looked for the wrong things in love. I wanted to lose myself in a man, to cease to be me, to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings. Isadora Icarus, I ought to call myself. And the borrowed wings never stayed on when I needed them. Maybe I really needed to grow my own. “You have your work,” he’d said. And he was right about that too. Oh he was right for all the wrong reasons. At least I had a lifelong commitment, a calling, a guiding passion. It was certainly more than most people had. I took a cab to the Gare du Nord, checked my suitcase, changed money, and inquired about trains. It was already almost four o’clock and there was a boat train that night at ten. It wasn’t one of the fast trains with a fancy name, but it was the only train to London I could get. I bought my ticket, still not really knowing why I was going to London. All I knew was that I had to get out of Paris. And there were things to do in London. That agent to see and various people to look up. Other people lived in London besides Adrian. How I lost the rest of the afternoon I’m not entirely sure. I read the paper and walked and had a meal. When it got dark, I returned to the station and sat writing in my notebook while I waited for the train. I had spent so much time writing in train stations when I lived in Heidelberg that I was almost beginning to feel at home in the world again. By the time the train pulled in, little clots of people coagulated on the platform. They had that forlorn look which travelers have when they are departing from somewhere at their usual bedtime. An old woman was crying and kissing her son. Two bedraggled American girls pulled their suitcases on ball bearings. A German woman was feeding her baby out of a jar and calling him Schweinchen. They all looked like refugees. Me too. I lugged my enormous suitcase into the train and dragged it along the corridor looking for an empty compartment. Finally I found one which smelled of old farts and decomposing banana peels. The stink of humanity. And I was doing my part to help that stink. What I wouldn’t have given for a bath!

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The same argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity. In The Power of Scale, anthropologist John Bodley wrote: “The size of human societies and cultures matters because larger societies will naturally have more concentrated social power. Larger societies will be less democratic than smaller societies, and they will have an unequal distribution of risks and rewards.”9 Right, because the bigger the society is, the less functional shame becomes. When the Berlin Wall came down, jubilant capitalists announced that the essential flaw of communism had been its failure to account for human nature. Well, yes and no. Marx’s fatal error was his failure to appreciate the importance of context. Human nature functions one way in the context of intimate, interdependent societies, but set loose in anonymity, we become a different creature. Neither beast is more nor less human. Dreams of Perpetual Progress He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II Were we really born in the best possible time and place? Or is ours a random moment in infinity—just another among uncountable moments, each with its compensating pleasures and disappointments? Perhaps you find it absurd to even entertain such a question, to assume there’s any choice in the matter. But there is. We all have a psychological tendency to view our own experience as standard, to see our community as The People, to believe—perhaps subconsciously—that we are the chosen ones, God is on our side, and our team deserves to win. To see the present in the most flattering light, we paint the past in blood-red hues of suffering and terror. Hobbes has been scratching this persistent psychological itch for several centuries now. It is a common mistake to assume that evolution is a process of improvement, that evolving organisms are progressing toward some final, perfected state. But they, and we, are not. An evolving society or organism simply adapts over the generations to changing conditions. While these modifications may be immediately beneficial, they are not really improvements because external conditions never stop shifting. This error underlies the assumption that here and now is obviously better than there and then. Three and a half centuries later, scientists still quote Hobbes, telling us how lucky we are to live after the rise of the state, to have avoided the universal suffering of our barbaric past. It’s deeply comforting to think we’re the lucky ones, but let’s ask the forbidden question: How lucky are we really? Ancient Poverty or Assumed Affluence?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The Famously Flaccid Female Libido The female…with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male…. CHARLES DARWIN Women have little interest in sex, right? Despite Tiresias’s observations, until very recently, that’s been the near-universal consensus in Western popular culture, medicine, and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, popular culture has begun to question women’s relative lack of interest, but as far as the standard model is concerned, not much has changed since Dr. William Acton published his famous thoughts on the matter in 1875, assuring his readers, “The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences…. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”6 More recently, in his now classic work The Evolution of Human Sexuality, psychologist Donald Symons confidently proclaimed that “among all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to males.”7 In a foundational paper published in 1948, geneticist A. J. Bateman wasn’t hesitant to extrapolate his findings concerning fruit fly behavior to humans, commenting that natural selection encourages “an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females.”8 The sheer volume of evidence amassed to convince us that women are not particularly sexual beings is quite impressive. Hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have claimed to confirm the flaccidity of the female libido. One of the most cited studies in all of evolutionary psychology, published by 1989, is typical of the genre.9 An attractive undergraduate student volunteer walked up to an unsuspecting student of the opposite sex (who was alone) on the campus of Florida State University and said, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I find you very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About 75 percent of the young men said yes. Many of those who didn’t asked for a “rain check.” But not one of the women approached by these attractive strangers accepted the offer. Case closed. Seriously, this study really is one of the best known in all of EP. Researchers reference it to establish that women aren’t interested in casual sex, which is important if your theory posits that women instinctively barter sex to get things from men. After all, if they’re giving it away for free, the bottom falls out of the market, and other women are going to have a harder time exchanging sex for anything of value. Male Parental Investment (MPI)

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  What to do about it? Most modern couples aren’t as flexible about tolerating a variety of sexual partners as the Melanesians and many of the societies we surveyed in earlier chapters. After reviewing the broad literature on Western marriage, sociologist Jessie Bernard argued in the early 1970s that increasing men’s opportunities for sexually novel partners was one of the most important social changes required in Western societies to promote marital happiness.29 But this hasn’t happened yet and seems even less likely now, almost four decades later. Maybe this is why some twenty million American marriages can be categorized as no-sex or low-sex due to the man’s loss of sexual interest. According to the authors of He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore, 15 to 20 percent of American couples have sex fewer than ten times per year. They note that the absence of sexual desire is the most common sexual problem in the country.30 Combine these dismal numbers with the 50 percent of all marriages that end in divorce, and it’s clear that modern marriage is suffering a soft-core meltdown. In The Evolution of Human Sexuality, the ever-quotable Donald Symons pointed out that Western societies have tried every trick in the book to change this aspect of male sexuality, but all have failed miserably: “Human males seem to be so constituted that they resist learning not to desire variety,” he wrote, “despite impediments such as Christianity and the doctrine of sin; Judaism and the doctrine of mensch; social science and the doctrines of repressed homosexuality and psychosexual immaturity; evolutionary theories of monogamous pair-bonding; cultural and legal traditions that support and glorify monogamy.”31 Need we supplement Symons’s thoughts with a list of specific examples of men (presidents, governors, senators, athletes, musicians) who have squandered family and fortune, power and prestige—all for an encounter with a woman whose principal attraction was her novelty? Need we remind female readers of the men in their past who seemed so smitten at first, but mysteriously stopped calling once the thrill of novelty had faded? A Few More Reasons I Need Somebody New (Just Like You) Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). MILAN KUNDERA, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  You, your friend, and the stamping man each construct a perception by prediction. The stamping man himself might be feeling unpleasant arousal, and he may categorize his interoceptive sensations, together with those he predicted from the outside world, as an instance of “Removing Mud from My Shoe.” You may construct a perception of anger and your friend a perception of dejection. Each construction is real, so questions of accuracy are unanswerable in a strictly objective sense. This is not a limitation of science: it is just the wrong question to be asking in the first place. There are no observer-independent measurements that can reliably and specifically adjudicate the matter. When you can’t find an objective criterion to compute accuracy and are left with consensus, this is a clue that you are dealing with social, not physical, reality.17 This point is easily and frequently misunderstood, so let me be clear. I am not saying emotions are illusions. They are real, but socially real in the manner of flowers and weeds. I’m not saying that everything is relative. If that were true, civilization would fall apart. I am also not saying that emotions are “just in your head.” That phrase trivializes the power of social reality. Money, reputation, laws, government, friendship, and all of our most fervent beliefs are also “just” in human minds, but people live and die for them. They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers. … Imagine the feeling of reaching into a bag of potato chips and discovering that the previous chip you ate was the last one. You feel disappointed that the bag is empty, relieved that you won’t be ingesting any more calories, slightly guilty that you ate the entire bag, and yet hungry for another chip. I have just invented an emotion concept, and there is surely no word for it in the English language. And yet, as you read my prolonged description of this complex feeling, you most likely simulated the whole thing, right down to the crinkle of the bag and the cheerless little crumbs at the bottom. You experienced this emotion without a word for it. Your brain accomplished this feat by combining instances of concepts you already know, such as “Bag,” “Chips,” “Disappointment,” “Relief,” “Guilt,” and “Hunger.” This powerful ability of your brain’s conceptual system, which we called conceptual combination in chapter 5, creates your very first instance of this new chip-related category of emotion, ready for simulation. Now if I name my new creation “Chiplessness” and teach it to our fellow citizens, it becomes every bit as real an emotion concept as “Happiness” and “Sadness.” People can predict with it, categorize with it, regulate their body budgets with it, and construct diverse instances of “Chiplessness” in different situations.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Mathematical models indicate that under certain conditions, unregulated free-market economies do work well. But one of those “certain conditions” is that people are rational decision makers. I have lost count of the number of experiments published over the past fifty years showing that people are not rational actors. You cannot overcome emotion through rational thinking, because the state of your body budget is the basis for every thought and perception you have, so interoception and affect are built into every moment. Even when you experience yourself as rational, your body budget and its links to affect are there, lurking beneath the surface. 6 0 If the idea of the rational human mind is so toxic to the economy, and it’s not backed up by neuroscience, why does it persist? Because we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe ourselves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment—“thoughtless”—connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system,” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain,” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don’t have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows. “Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly,” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates.” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble. 6 1 Figure 4-7: The “triune brain” idea, with so-called cognitive circuitry layered on top of so-called emotion circuitry. This illusory arrangement depicts how thinking supposedly regulates feeling. The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception and affect, no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Reformed Rake or Siren. People of this type were once happy-go-lucky seducers who had their way with the opposite sex. But the day came when they were forced to give this up—someone corraled them into a relationship, they were encountering too much social hostility, they were getting older and decided to settle down. Whatever the reason, you can be sure they feel some resentment and a sense of loss, as if a limb were missing. We are always trying to recapture pleasures we experienced in the past, but the temptation is particularly great for the Reformed Rake or Siren because the pleasures they found in seduction were intense. These types are ripe for the picking: all that is required is that you cross their path and offer them the opportunity to resume their rakish or siren ways. Their blood will stir and the call of their youth will overwhelm them. It is critical, though, to give these types the illusion that they are the ones doing the seducing. With the Reformed Rake, you must spark his interest indirectly, then let him burn and glow with desire. With the Reformed Siren, you want to give her the impression that she still has the irresistible power to draw a man in and make him give up everything for her. Remember that what you are offering these types is not another relationship, another constriction, but rather the chance to escape the corral and have some ran. Do not be put off if they are in a relationship; a preexisting commitment is often the perfect foil. If hooking them into a relationship is what you want, hide it as best you can and realize it may not be possible. The Rake or Siren is unfaithful by nature; your ability to spark the old feeling gives you power, but then you will have to live with the consequences of their feckless ways. The Disappointed Dreamer. As children, these types probably spent a lot of time alone. To entertain themselves they developed a powerful fantasy life, fed by books and films and other kinds of popular culture. And as they get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile their fantasy life with reality, and so they are often disappointed by what they get. This is particularly true in relationships. They have been dreaming of romantic heroes, of danger and excitement, but what they have is lovers with human frailties, the petty weaknesses of everyday life. As the years pass, they may force themselves to compromise, because otherwise they would have to spend their lives alone; but beneath the surface they are bitter and still hungering for something grand and romantic.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  The same argument can be made concerning the tragic misunderstanding of human nature that underlies communism: community ownership doesn’t work in large-scale societies where people operate in anonymity. In The Power of Scale, anthropologist John Bodley wrote: “The size of human societies and cultures matters because larger societies will naturally have more concentrated social power. Larger societies will be less democratic than smaller societies, and they will have an unequal distribution of risks and rewards.”9 Right, because the bigger the society is, the less functional shame becomes. When the Berlin Wall came down, jubilant capitalists announced that the essential flaw of communism had been its failure to account for human nature. Well, yes and no. Marx’s fatal error was his failure to appreciate the importance of context. Human nature functions one way in the context of intimate, interdependent societies, but set loose in anonymity, we become a different creature. Neither beast is more nor less human. Dreams of Perpetual Progress He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II Were we really born in the best possible time and place? Or is ours a random moment in infinity—just another among uncountable moments, each with its compensating pleasures and disappointments? Perhaps you find it absurd to even entertain such a question, to assume there’s any choice in the matter. But there is. We all have a psychological tendency to view our own experience as standard, to see our community as The People, to believe—perhaps subconsciously—that we are the chosen ones, God is on our side, and our team deserves to win. To see the present in the most flattering light, we paint the past in blood-red hues of suffering and terror. Hobbes has been scratching this persistent psychological itch for several centuries now. It is a common mistake to assume that evolution is a process of improvement, that evolving organisms are progressing toward some final, perfected state. But they, and we, are not. An evolving society or organism simply adapts over the generations to changing conditions. While these modifications may be immediately beneficial, they are not really improvements because external conditions never stop shifting. This error underlies the assumption that here and now is obviously better than there and then. Three and a half centuries later, scientists still quote Hobbes, telling us how lucky we are to live after the rise of the state, to have avoided the universal suffering of our barbaric past. It’s deeply comforting to think we’re the lucky ones, but let’s ask the forbidden question: How lucky are we really? Ancient Poverty or Assumed Affluence?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  What to do about it? Most modern couples aren’t as flexible about tolerating a variety of sexual partners as the Melanesians and many of the societies we surveyed in earlier chapters. After reviewing the broad literature on Western marriage, sociologist Jessie Bernard argued in the early 1970s that increasing men’s opportunities for sexually novel partners was one of the most important social changes required in Western societies to promote marital happiness.29 But this hasn’t happened yet and seems even less likely now, almost four decades later. Maybe this is why some twenty million American marriages can be categorized as no-sex or low-sex due to the man’s loss of sexual interest. According to the authors of He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore, 15 to 20 percent of American couples have sex fewer than ten times per year. They note that the absence of sexual desire is the most common sexual problem in the country.30 Combine these dismal numbers with the 50 percent of all marriages that end in divorce, and it’s clear that modern marriage is suffering a soft-core meltdown. In The Evolution of Human Sexuality, the ever-quotable Donald Symons pointed out that Western societies have tried every trick in the book to change this aspect of male sexuality, but all have failed miserably: “Human males seem to be so constituted that they resist learning not to desire variety,” he wrote, “despite impediments such as Christianity and the doctrine of sin; Judaism and the doctrine of mensch; social science and the doctrines of repressed homosexuality and psychosexual immaturity; evolutionary theories of monogamous pair-bonding; cultural and legal traditions that support and glorify monogamy.”31 Need we supplement Symons’s thoughts with a list of specific examples of men (presidents, governors, senators, athletes, musicians) who have squandered family and fortune, power and prestige—all for an encounter with a woman whose principal attraction was her novelty? Need we remind female readers of the men in their past who seemed so smitten at first, but mysteriously stopped calling once the thrill of novelty had faded? A Few More Reasons I Need Somebody New (Just Like You) Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). MILAN KUNDERA, The Unbearable Lightness of Being