[GUEST] Desires, Porn and Envy

What is easier than wanting things? Wanting nothing at all.

Note from Gabe:

This is a Guest Article written by Daniel Clothiaux (remember).

It explains a few concepts introduced in the book “Sadly, Porn”. The book is not well-written, but it deals with a dark type of psychoanalysis with which only a few authors dare engaging.

My friend Daniel decided to review it, in order to distill its essence and package it in a way that is approachable by others.

This is very different from my usual articles, most notably in register, it is much more vulgar than the usual Cognition Cafe article.

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One of the critical points the author Edward Teach makes in the psychoanalytic book Sadly, Porn is that we struggle to have positive desires. We struggle to have positive fantasies for ourselves and our futures.

Desires are scary. Desires mean we want things, things we don’t have right now. Unfulfilled desires feel bad in the moment, as we haven’t succeeded in fulfilling them yet. Failing to achieve our desires is painful.

To avoid pain and feeling bad, it is easier to replace positive desires with porn (other people’s desires and fantasies) and envy (wanting to deprive people of what they have). Yet not having our own positive desires also feels bad; who wants to admit they are an envious degenerate? To avoid feeling bad, we hide our lack of desire, degeneracy and envy from ourselves, using various forms of misdirection.

Teach presents this set of models in completely universal tones. We don’t have desires, and that includes you. I think it’s better to understand these as common patterns people (including you and I) follow, at least some of the time.

Teach also expresses this (and everything else in Sadly, Porn) very vulgarly. I will be vulgar, here too. I think it is an important element to better convey the vibe of his models. But unlike the book, there won’t be lengthy descriptions of sexual acts in this essay.

Desires

Like I said, having desires, things that you want, is scary. You could fail to achieve your desires, which would feel bad. You could persistently be failing, which would feel even worse.

One easy trick to avoid feeling bad about failing is to never want anything at all. So many people often do not want anything. We suppress our desires so we cannot fail. To avoid failing to achieve our dreams, it is easy to not have dreams and fantasies at all.

There are many, many ways this avoidance mechanism instantiates itself.

Teach often presents vulgar examples. Asking a girl (or guy) out is scary; you might fail. Fucking someone is hard work. Easier to jerk off in your room.

Starting a company is scary. You could fail at many, many points along the way. You could fail to get funding, build a product, find customers, monetise, or scale your product. Much easier not to want to pursue becoming wealthy in the first place.

Publishing blog posts and book reviews is scary. Maybe nobody will read them. Maybe someone will come by and tell you your writing is shit and call you mean names. When I started writing, it was obvious that my writing was (and is) bad. Much easier to just lurk and never want to become an established writer.

In general, much easier to avoid the pain of wanting things by wanting nothing at all.

Porn

If we try to avoid desires, what do we do instead?

One easy way to avoid having desires is to replace them with facsimiles of other people’s desires.

If you jerk off fantasising about yourself fucking a hot girl, this can become a goal of yours. Worse, it is a goal you are currently failing at, as you aren’t fucking a hot girl.

Instead, you watch porn, which is someone else fucking a hot girl. Rather than taking that as a launch pad to your own fantasy (imagining yourself fucking said girl), it replaces it entirely.

According to Teach, porn in a more general sense is something you consume, in order to replace the work of having a fantasy or having a desire yourself with somebody else’s fantasy about somebody else. It’s not even your own fantasy. Because it isn’t your own fantasy, you will never act on it. Do enough porn, and real things start feeling unreal and porn real.

Teach emphasises over and over again that this is cuckold porn, specifically. You are replacing your fantasy of fucking a girl with someone else’s fantasy of someone else fucking a girl. This is pretty literal cuckoldry. Contrast this with a cuckold fantasy where you imagine yourself watching someone fuck a girl; that would be a cuckold fantasy but not cuckold porn.

Many examples he gives are sexual, but not all of them. A lot of modern fiction is similarly metaphorical (cuckold) porn. A standard hero’s journey fantasy story replaces the desire to take action and become a hero yourself with a story of someone else becoming a hero. People love cheering on others as heroes and would often rather replace fantasies of being heroes themselves with the fantasy of cheering on a great hero.

This pornographised replacement is much easier than having desires. It is easier to cheer for your sports team than to fantasise about being the star player. If you fantasise, it will hurt because you are not, in fact, the star player. Even desire is easier than the painful training it takes to become a star.

At this point, everyone who is creating porn also do not have desires, as they also have completely pornified brains. So you get your desires from society and the media, which get their desires from society and the media. It’s copies of copies, none of which are anyone’s internalised desires.

Envy

Another way to easily avoid desires is to feel envy instead. It is often easier to deprive someone else of something than to get it yourself. It is easier to want to destroy things than to build them. This negative emotion is envy, not jealousy. Jealousy is wanting what they have for yourself, but it is harder because you would then need to want something.

Many people want to be desired, but becoming super desirable yourself is hard work, and you could fail. Instead, better to be envious of other people for being desirable. Teach gives a very crude example of a husband envying his wife for being desirable. He could want to become desirable himself, but that is harder than envying his wife.

Resentment and envy toward successful people are very common. Many cultural tropes touch on them. The nerd who envies the jock, his easy popularity and success with women. Ugly women who envy beautiful women and how much easier they have it. Money is another common area where people envy the successful. Rather than make a billion dollars yourself, it is much easier to feel envy towards billionaires and want to deprive them of what they have.

Envy leads us to try to deprive others, and often in very lazy ways. We’d deprive the billionaires of their wealth if we could. Actually depriving billionaires of their wealth is a hard political goal. If we can’t do it, there is another step many people take: imagining they must be miserable. This lets you feel vicious envy without having to do any work. The husband could actively make his wife less desirable, but that is hard work. Easier to deprive her of that desirability indirectly, say, by watching porn instead of fucking her. That lets him make her feel unwanted as lazily as possible.

Misdirection

But admitting you are a degenerate, envious creature addicted to porn would be very painful. Most people lack the courage to look at this directly.

Instead, we bury our lack of desires under layer upon layer of misdirection. We then seek ways to validate our misdirections. Teach basically sees much of psychology from Daniel in the Bible to Freud and modern psychologists as giving people excuses to hide their true desires.

The example of Daniel he gives is one of the clearer ones, though a bit insane. His reading of Daniel is that a king wanted his kingdom to be his forever. He would rather see it ruined than pass it to some inadequate child of his. He couldn’t admit that, and a prophet named Daniel knew that. So he gave him cover by saying that if his kingdom falls, it will fall to the kingdom of God or because God wills it. The king could cheerfully let his kingdom decline out of spite and not feel bad about wanting to deprive his successor.

I’m not sure how real his version of the biblical story is, but there are many more grounded examples. If you are watching porn instead of having your own fantasies and trying to go out and fuck hot people, that would suck to admit. Instead, you will tell yourself “oh, I have a porn addiction” or “I am too tired”, not “I am afraid of desires”. If you envy your spouse and try to deprive them, you will tell yourself, “I’m not fucking them because I’m watching porn because of addiction”, and not “I envy them and want to deprive them of feeling wanted”.

If you post on social media to make other people feel envious of you, you’ll frame it as being addicted to social media. If I am envious of someone with more money than I have, I’ll frame taking their wealth as promoting equality. When I state something that could be a desire, I’ll wrap it in detached irony so it is clear that I don’t actually mean it. Then if I fail, I didn’t want it anyway!

If you envy and despise rich people, your justifications will be “fairness”, “equality”, “the rich are all evil”. If you envy hot, fit people, you will tell yourself, “I am not that shallow”.

All of this to avoid seeing our internal motivations, because that would be painful.

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Conclusion

These models are quite ugly.

I didn’t justify them beyond a handful of examples or try to built mechanistic models of them.

Yet I personally have found these concepts useful. To varying degrees, they have helped me understand what happened in my life, both in myself and in the people around me.

I have struggled to articulate and pursue my desires, and I’ve seen many people struggle to tell me theirs.

I see people consumed by media teach would consider porn, and lots of vicious envy.

Not having desires is very bad. Teach touches on some of the downstream consequences of lacking desires.

I will deal with this, and what exactly we should do with this (and the other dark models from Sadly, Porn) in other essays.

With that, as Gabe would finish his essays, cheers!