The Seductive Process
Phase One: Separation—Stirring Interest and Desire
1-Choose the Right Victim:
Everything depends on the target of your seduction. Study your prey thoroughly, and choose only those who will prove susceptible to your charms. The right victims are those for whom you can fill a void, who see in you something exotic.
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“Nothing existential gave me any great pleasure. And progressively, as my ideas developed, I had more and more a sense of loneliness. I felt a driving ambition, and in that sense it was pleasant, but I was enormously unhappy with my position at home; I did not like being a child, I did not like being attached to a family. I resented enormously the implication that anything to do with the family was binding on me—or anything to do with anybody—I had no obligation to unchosen values. Boredom was a cardinal emotion in rela- tion to the events available to me. I didn’t care about any of the immediate reality, there was nothing in it for me. My world was the future. Today, I would know that the difference between me and others was my romantic sense of life, my more heroic sense of life. My whole development was desiring and looking for things which are interesting, versus the boredom of the routine or the conventional, looking for the unusual or purposeful. The heroic concept of man: that’s what interested me.”
Sayfa 35
"Fear is the belief that something future is evil and so to be avoided; desire the belief that something future is good and to be pursued; pleasure the belief that something present is good and to be cherished; and pain the belief that something present is bad and a source of distress. Other species of passion are all subordinate to these four."
Christopher Shields
Great breakthroughs in our ability to understand the human mind are now available because of a marriage between two widely different fields: neuro-biology (the study of how the brain works) and computer science. The integration of these sciences has created the discipline of neuro- science. Neuro-scientists study how neuro-associations occur and have discovered that neurons are constantly sending electro-chemical messages back and forth across neural pathways, not unlike traffic on a busy thoroughfare. This communication is happening all at once, each idea or memory moving along its own path while literally billions of other impulses are travelling in individual directions. This arrangement enables us to hopscotch mentally from memories of the pine smell of an evergreen forest after a rain, to the haunting melody of a favourite Broadway musical, to painstakingly detailed plans of an evening with a loved one, to the exquisite size and texture of a newborn baby's thumb. Not only does this complex system allow us to enjoy the beauty of our world, it also helps us to survive in it. Each time we experience a significant amount of pain or pleasure, our brains search for the cause and record it in our nervous systems to enable us to make better decisions about what to do in the future. For example, without a neuro-association in your brain to remind you that sticking your hand into an open flame would bum you, you could conceivably make this mistake again and again until your hand is severely burned. Thus, neuro-associations quickly provide our brains with the signals that help us to re-access our memories and safely manoeuvre us through our lives.
Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.
Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer.
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Mashing the Pleasure Button
In humans, rats, and other mammals, the reward circuits is much more complex, as it is interwoven with brain centers involved in decision-making, planning, emotion, and memory storage. When we find an experience pleasurable, it sets in motion several processes with different time courses: (a) We like the experience (the immediate sensation of pleasure); (b) we associate both external seonsory cues (sights, sounds, odors, etc.) and internal cues (our own thoughts and feelings at the time) with the experience, and these associations allow us to predict how we should behave to repeat it; and (c) we assign a value to the pleasurable experience (from a little to a lot), so that in the future we can choose among several pleasurable experiences and determine how much effort we are willing to expend and risk we are willing to take in order to get them.
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"But in this case his past and future presence would be drawing all ordinary comfort out of the situation and replacing it with a pleasure that was tight and nerve-racking rather than expansive."
Sayfa 29
Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering. And what happens if one's groping for a meaning has been in vain? This may well result in a fatal condition. Let us recall, for instance, what sometimes happened in extreme situations such as
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Anlamlı İngilizce sözler ve anlamları (11-20)
11. If you’re absent during my struggle, don’t expect to be present during my success. (Eğer mücadelem süresince yanımda yoksan, başarım sırasında yanımda olmayı bekleme.)
12. Love the life you live. Live the life you love. (Yaşadığın hayatı sev. Sevdiğin hayatı yaşa.)
13. I need a six month
The Future of Pleasure
Tobacco is highly addictive, and smoking it kills millions every year, yet it is mostly tolerated. It's almost impossible to kill yourself with cannabis, yet it remains criminalized.
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The Future of Pleasure
Perhaps the hardest thing about imagining the distant future of pleasure is not the technology involved, but rather the social, legal and financial systems that will surround it. When anyone can precisely control his or her pleasure circuits with an inexpensive head-mounted noninvasive device, how will this ability be used, abused, commercialized, and regulated? If our past experience with psychoactive drugs is any indication, it will be an unholy mess. At various points in our recent past, alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and cocaine have all been legal, banned, taxed, and regulated by the government. Our drug policies reflect a complex web of competing interests.
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