A Streetcar Named Desire
I have heavily ignored this blog but no more! The once again new and improved Mike will attempt once again to use this blog regularly to educate you, the reader, of my explanations of our world…
Today’s topic at hand: the connection between emotions and desire.
My theory is this: all human emotion is based on desire (there is one emotion that may prove to be an exception which I will discuss in detail later). Now some of you may treat that as preposterous and others that may even accept it. For those that choose to accept it straight-up, heed warning that what I propose means that all emotion is technically one in the same and that if that one thing can be controlled, then we can master full control over all our emotional feelings.
Let me start with an analogy to compare my idea. If someone gets drunk then they usually experience a physical change in the way they act. They might become silly, violent, stupid, clumsy, etc. The point is that they are different from their “usual self.” Now say we never knew what a person was like when they weren’t drunk. Every time we had seen them they were always totally smashed. Also say that we didn’t know of the concept of being drunk or drinking alcohol. This would have us believe that that person was normally silly, giddy, etc and that was their personality and emotional spectrum. Although they act silly and weird, we like them because they’re a fun person to hang around and also seem “in good spirits.” Now say one day, someone explains the concept of getting drunk and drinking and that the person we always saw everyday was completely different when they were sober. The very next day the country goes prohibition like the 1920’s and our friend no longer has access to alcohol (aside from the black market of course). We have no idea what to expect of this new sober friend now. They could be more fun or less, but since they were a silly fun person while drinking, then we would probably assume they would lose those qualities and be rather boring, but again, we don’t know, we can only assume.
Now apply that same concept to reality and choose someone you know and replace the “alcohol” with “desire.” People in the world are drunk on desire and they could be totally different people without it, maybe good or maybe bad, we don’t know.
So given that small intro, let me go into detail of why I think what I do.
There are 5 basic emotions to which we all know (the key word is basic, not every possible emotion):
I will begin with love because I believe that love is desire in it purest and “naked” form. Love is desire, but desire is not love (i.e. one can say that water is hydrogen and oxygen atoms, but one cannot say that hydrogen and oxygen atoms are water because they can be something else that isn’t water). The interesting thing about love is that it is the only emotion to have such power over others. Each emotion has “sub-emotions” that it can control that fall under it, such as ‘anger leading to hostility’ or ‘fear leading to aviodance’ and so forth. However, anger cannot bring about happiness, fear cannot bring about love, happiness cannot bring about anger (yes, one could say that “fear leads to hate and then to anger” but that’s only if you watch Star Wars religiously as if it were scripture and Yoda is your Deity). Love on the other hand can do that. Love can bring anger, happiness, and sadness. In fact when you boil down to it, love only exists as other emotions. Have you ever heard of someone in complete love and wasn’t happy, sad, afraid, or angry? Love in a sense is the “master emotion” such as the “master key” in a group of locks. You can open each lock individually with its own key and you do not require the master key to open it, but never-the-less the master key has the ability to open all the locks. And what word can we use to easily describe what this emotion is? “Desire!” What do you feel when your in love or when you love someone? The desire to be with that person, the desire to make them happy, the desire to spend your life with them, the desire to have sex with them even. You desire things with that person more than anybody else, whether it be romance love or family love. Now that’s the ‘love-happiness’ scenario, what about if its a ‘love-anger’ relationship? You desire them to be in pain for hurting you, you desire to get revenge on them, you desire them to be miserable for hurting you. Love is desire in pure form, plain and simple. And sense love is desire in full blast, it makes sense that love has such power over other emotions. Love is like a virus: it can’t exist on its own and needs a host to survive. Love hijacks other emotions, such as happiness and sadness and uses them as its own. this also explains why love can usually bring about the greatest feelings of happiness, etc. Its weakness is that it doesn’t exist by itself but its strength is that it is truly powerful to the beholder.
Alright, so your probably saying that love is desire now but what about the other emotions? How can fear be labeled as desire?
I don’t think I need to go into detail about anger; anger is generally directed toward a specific thing, object, group of people, etc and the desire is generally negativity upon that source.
Fear simply put, is the desire for a particular thing, whatever it may be, to go away. It can also be the desire to be away from a situation. In general, fear is the desire to avoid something. If your in the African plains and your just chillin’ there doing your thing and and this big bad lion approaches you what do you feel? You feel the extreme desire to not die, to not get hurt, to get away from the lion, and for the lion to go away. I honestly don’t see any other way to explain it other than the desire for the situation to end and change. It might seem that desire in this sense is “negative desire” sense something is wanted to go away, but its still the same desire as with love and anger. The number 23 is still 23 regardless of whether there’s a negative or positive sign in front of it. It’s still there as 23. I guess as a way to put it into a mathematical perspective, the desire for something can be viewed as an absolute value of itself. Whether you desire something towards you or away, its still desire regardless.
Next up is sadness which might seem even trickier than fear. Some of you might think that I’m going to say that sadness is a lack of desire and back me into a corner thinking I’ve contradicted myself…but I’m sure you all know me better than that by now…sadness is actually another pure form of desire but not in the same exact way as love. I’ve probably got your head spinning with that one. Consider this: love needs to latch onto some other emotion to become powerful but sadness can exist on its own. Sadness is something love can hijack, but for the case of understanding the differences, I will use non-love related examples to illustrate my point. Sadness is pure desire for something, but also includes the acceptance that the desire will not happen. It is quite difficult to come up with non-love related sadness experiences but I’ll try my best. Say you owe a large sum of money to the government from a recent audit. If you cannot pay you will be arrested and imprisoned (I don’t know the law for sure but just accept it as part of the example). Say at your current job there is an opening for a position that pays much more than what you currently earn. The added income would allow you to pay the IRS in due time. Unfortunately for you, a new hot-shot employee is much more qualified for the position than you and you know for sure you will not get it (as you can see, this is not a love related scenario). You are now depressed and sad because you desire this new higher-paid position but know that that desire will not happen. Sadness is simply the acceptance that a desire will not come true. Regardless of whether or not you know if it will happen, you still desire it; that’s why you are sad when you know it won’t happen.
I’ve covered anger, fear, love, and sadness. Now on to happiness…but as you may have remembered from earlier in the post I stated there was one exception; happiness is it. Happiness can be viewed as either the lack of a desire or the state after a desire has been fulfilled (I mean pure happiness, not necessarily love-happiness. It can be included but it really depends.). For example, if you desire a new car and get it, your happy. Do you still desire that car? No, because you already have it. You may desire for the car not to get damaged, to stay clean, and to keep you safe in an accident. But in that split-second initial feeling of happiness when you got your new car, you were happy because that desire was finally gone. There is actually two ways of looking at that: 1) being that the happiness exists because we were granted our desire and got what we wanted or 2) the fact that the desire is finally gone and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. The second choice can lead to a number of interesting conclusions. Maybe we naturally don’t want to desire something, which explains why we seek to fulfill our desires: to simply end them. Maybe we know that desire is a bad thing and as a result try to fulfill them to end them. Unfortunately for us as soon as we fulfill them then another pile of desire awaits us. It’s is not usual to see someone desire something and not want it. If you desired to spend a day at the beach and NOTHING prevented you from doing it and I mean nothing as in no problem with transportation, fear of ocean, being seen in a bathing suit, not having enough time, etc…then you would most certainly go. The only reasons people don’t fulfill their desires is because things block their way, not because they choose to. Someone who is devoutly religious and says that money is of no importance to them might seem to someone that they desire money but do not give in to it. In fact, they say that a lot, “they do not give in to worldly desires” and so forth. But that’s not true, they simply don’t desire it. Desire is all or nothing. I may even flip the tables and say that they desire to not have money and worldly desires. Regardless, they are giving in to their desires of not wanting something, which technically is the exact same thing as desires of want for something. If we desire something we want it, there is no way around it.
My conclusion here is that if we remove desire, then all that is left is happiness, which most anybody could agree with. We want to achieve our natural state of happiness and the only way to do that is to rid ourselves of desire. And as of now the only way to rid ourselves of desire is to fulfill them, but at the same that fulfillment of those desires simply leads to new ones, and so the infinite loop continues on. From a religious point of view, maybe Heaven is a world of no desires and Hell is a world of nothing but desire. In that sense we’re all already in Hell or at least pretty close. Yes desire can be for good such as in love-happiness, but it’s like putting perfume on the pig; yeah, it’ll smell nice but it’s still filthy. Going back with what I was saying in the beginning with our true selves and being drunk on desire, maybe we will only know our true selves when desire is gone. Since all that is left is happiness, then its probably safe to assume that we could only be better people. When you think about it, any crime is based on desire: theft is desire for money, murder is desire to end someones life, assault is desire to hurt someone, the list goes on. If we remove and cleanse ourselves of this filth of a feeling called desire then we can only better ourselves. Sober up from drinking too much desire. I can create two statements using this concept (yes, technically I could combine them and it would be just as effective but I wanted to use the bullet dots):
