Programmable Mammals & Pleasure Monopolies
How to be a zookeeper
We might be gods underneath it all, but we humans are also animals. Animals with nervous systems and hearts and emotions. Our brains reward us in certain situations and punish us in others according to a kind of expectation of the evolutionary utility to our genes. The apparent logic being that the animal probably did something to get itself in that situation and rewarding or punishing it will adjust the probability that the situation happens again.
The brain rewards the body for a variety of quite ordinary behaviours, eating, sex, resting, learning something new, gaining social status, being a part of a group, and so forth.
But it turns out the brain also rewards the body for “being right”, which is of a different quality. This concept of being right is not so rooted in the body. Instead it seems to measure one part of the mind against another. “Being right” can mean making accurate prediction, comparing expectations with sensory experiences, but it can also mean conforming to a societal expectation or an ideology, which is comparing our behavior with some externally defined standard.
The comparison with an externally defined standard is what hackers call a “backdoor”. “Being right” is more a concept than a bodily sensation. It is programmable. An authority figure can change your ideology, and change what activities you enjoy and avoid.
If internet culture has taught us anything, it's that memes are alive. They are co-evolving with us and want to live long and prosper like everyone else. So let us imagine an ideology-meme that tried to monopolize pleasure. A pleasure monopoly, once secured, would confer nearly perfect control over the meme's host, so driven are humans by pleasure. But for the ideology to have a monopoly, it would have to overcome its competitors, in particular, bodily and social pleasures, suppressing them with whatever tools available to it, whether guilt, shame or violence.
Perhaps you can think of some ideologies that try to do that. This is perhaps why sexuality is consistently the most hotly contested ideological battlefield. Not only is sexuality a major source of pleasure and therefore a competitor to ideologies, but control over sexuality confers nearly guaranteed reproduction of the ideology itself into the fertile minds of children. Parents are gods to their children and therefore also transmission vectors.
So let us cast off these chains on our furrowed brows, these dark commands whispered in dreaming mind’s eyes! Let us diversify our portfolio of pleasures! Like greedy kings, let us search for treasure in every moment, in the bodily sensations of breathing, in the color of light caressing our retinas, in the formless sensuality of water on our skin! No story is more true than the one we tell ourselves, we are the gurus, the popes, and the precedents! Let there be light!
Sat Chit Ananda