Haha yes and what I will name the “Actualist Tobacco Effect” must not be understated – as the number of actualists in a group increases the likelihood they will start smoking grows parabolically 
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Indeed I find this too!
It is a bit strange at times. I find that I’m unable to tell myself off anymore or beat myself up for “desiring something I shouldn’t” or doing something that isn’t sensible. It just doesn’t make any more sense to do it. So there is therefore no ‘moral punishment’ for doing something ‘wrong’…
The traditional advice is that this would lead to licentiousness, that you need that moral shame or guilt to prevent yourself from doing bad things. But pure intent, sincerity and sensibility have become active enough where instead what happens is I’m just left appraising what I just did. I can see I didn’t feel good while doing it… and then I’m just left wondering why I would do that in the first place! And eventually the answer is that it just doesn’t make sense to keep doing it, so I just stop doing it… and that’s it! No fireworks or drama. It is odd but I’m becoming more used to it!
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Perhaps worth mentioning that things like money, career success, exist so often as desires that those of us wishing to ‘do better’ may think that part of doing better means doing away with those, whether as desires but also as simple preferences.
As @Kub933 mentions above, this can result in an increasing strait-jacket as we add rules to our lives in an ill-fated attempt at increasing freedom.
There is nothing ultimately wrong with making lots of money, or making whatever sensibly might improve one’s career position. As with all things, whether it’s sensible or not for you at any particular moment is completely dependent on conditions - trying to pin down a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ rule is looking for a ‘way out’ of being here, alive, right now, and being in the position to live this moment.
edit:
I’m glad this post came up today, because thinking on this subject I can see several areas of my life I have been doing this. Money & career ideas have definitely been one of them
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Reflecting more on this & really the height of foolishness here is not wanting this or that thing, it’s thinking that worrying about it or desiring it will help us to get them. It won’t, it’s really debilitating
So a lot of what happens here is we desire/want something → our psyches betray us via handicapping intelligence → we give up on the wanting (while subtly still wanting)
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What you mention @henryyyyyyyyyy makes me think of feelings being a gross distortion of the actual. As in desire is there in an attempt to do what intelligence can now do much better.
So it’s not that wanting this or that is evil in itself, it is just that the tool of desire which nature implanted is the blind and dirty way of getting there, it has that intrinsic handicap within itself. It’s what drove organisms to act before intelligence developed.
Now there is a way to move towards that which is wanted without being blindly driven.
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There are some interesting models of desire that go beyond the usual common-sensical ones. I used to find these useful and fun to contemplate and still find them compelling.
Rene Girard’s Mimetic Desire: What is Mimetic Desire?
Jacque Lacan’s theory of desire is harder to explain and more convoluted. But he too sees desire as a mimetic social product than something biological. Unlike animals the human being is a unique product of language intersecting with the body. Because language can only go so far in its production of human subjects, it creates a lack - a yawning hole that can never be closed. It stays there like an existential void at the heart of human subjectivity. It’s sort of like a half rendered video game where the scenery turns to black pixels and wire mesh. From this lack desire springs - a fantasy that wholeness and closure are possible if only we get the longed for X, Y or Z which we fantasise the Other has. The Other is a hallucinated socially produced figure that we imagine to be un-lacking and complete e.g. Elon Musk, Dua Lipa or maybe just a moderately socially/sexually successful friend. Furthermore as infants our needs as babies are interpreted by powerful caregivers e.g. ‘johnny is hungry’, ‘johnny’s nappy is wet’. But our caregivers dispense not only bottles and clean nappies but also love and recognition. Over time biological needs get complicated and saturated by psychological demands for love/recognition and caregivers are internalised in the babies minds as powerful Others. But even the best caregivers, being only human are always getting it wrong and falling short. The demand for love is frustrated and what remains is desire - a sort of never-ending preoccupation with the Other and the fantasising of what the Other wants, has or doesn’t have. By this point the Other has been so thoroughly internalised that we don’t even realise we are doing it and simply experience it as desire. We are constitutionally desiring beings that desire as Others. Lacan would probably say that the goal would be to move away from demand - something that is rigid and concretely mimetic and into desire - one that is looser, socialised and tragi-comically aware of the ultimate futility of desire, yet realising there is no escaping it. Actual freedom would agree with Lacan and Girard insofar that desire is constitutional of ‘me’, but of course there it is possibly to bring desire to an end by ending ‘me’.
Hope that wasn’t too much of a head fuck 
Happy New Year everyone!!!
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Very nice indeed.
It lines up with many insights into the way I have seen this over the years.
Nature repurposes what I call “primal distress” into what becomes what psychology calls “libido”.
It’s the same thing. What can’t be satisfied, an ultimate comfort/survival becomes, a longing for the Other.
Julian Jayne’s book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” makes a similar point about the hallucination of the Other. The analog ‘I’ is a product of the social imagination of the complete “leader”.
These ideas are far out @Srinath. Still, I think I’m partial to my arguably more conventional actualism bottle 
(or model) to explain the origins of compulsion and desire. To each their own of course.
Was I was too quick to dismiss Lancan? I note the sequence or gradation that takes place: need → demand → desire. Or perhaps it is not so sequential given that need, being bodily, is purported to operate on a different pathway than demand and desire (desire, in this model, being a direct outgrowth of a psychological demand) but instead gets inevitably crossed or intertwined with those psychological pathways?
I recall a documentary I watched years ago about an orphanage in, I think, Romania. It was a bare bones, run-down establishment managed by nuns. There, the orphans were provided the basic needs of sustenance and shelter. But nothing else! No affection, no attention or engagement, no stimulation was provided to the infants and toddlers (much less “love or recognition”). The older children who had been subjected over the years to that bare-bones treatment developed severe developmental disorders and behaviors. Sure, they were alive. Their so-called basic needs were being consistently met. But they were horribly, mentally damaged. Many were reduced to a constant rocking back and forth, and making grunting or squeeling noises rather than speaking coherently.
Cases like that present a blurry line between bodily “need” and psychological “demand,” especially as it concerns human infants/ toddlers.
This is interesting, my first reaction was - why is Srinath going off the actualist paradigm 
But I read the linked article and your post a couple of times and it brought up some interesting ideas.
The other thing is this post seems very pertinent to what @henryyyyyyyyyy has been writing in his journal recently - desiring others through the belief that they possess a way towards the completeness which I am lacking. In fact I initially thought you must have accidentally posted this in the wrong thread and the reply was actually to Henry!
It is an interestingly blurry line of early development morphing into the psychological/psychic self, I always observed that people’s identities seem to be this uneasy conglomeration of the various reactionary responses to the traumas of life. It does kinda go in line with Richards observation that a mature adult is actually a lost, lonely, scared and very cunning entity.
It makes sense why the identity is so very deeply entrenched, because its development coincides with the maturation of this body from a baby into a fully grown adult. It’s like by the time one is an adult, the tentacles which are ‘me’ reach every nook and cranny of the mind. They were weaving and morphing along with the cognitive abilities of this brain developing.
I was thinking about this a while ago, how the conditioning begins whilst the brain is still developing! My 5 year old brother who can barely understand the world yet is already being taught about the existence of various truths and morals, of gods and fantasies. Those will be weaved so deeply and fundamentally that he will never think that they could be nothing but beliefs.
@rick Yeah, exactly. Infants need more than merely having their biological needs satisfied. They have to be wrapped in a kind of psychological and caring envelope for several years given how helpless and.vulnerable we are in childhood and how much there is to learn about human relating and culture.
Something like that - according to Lacan anyway
@Kub933 I don’t claim that these ideas are ‘right’. Just that I find them compelling. At best I think they are very partial truths. Maybe they can shed light on certain aspects of human experience, that actualism cannot.
As for escaping rather than understanding Desire and the human condition, I don’t think there’s anything that comes anywhere close to actualism freedom. But I guess models like these can potentially help one understand and be kind to oneself in the meantime. For some anyway. For others they could just sound like gobbledegook and be completely useless.
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I will admit to having skimmed the article… and not fully appreciating Lacan’s position.
But it seems obvious to me that the fact of the matter is that that which ‘makes up’ desire is an instinctual passion that we humans (being animals) share with other animals… and the rest is all essentially how that desire is acculturated. I don’t think these models conflict with actualism per se, rather it is that they re-define the word ‘desire’ to mean something else and then talk about that. From the Girard article:
So they simply define ‘desire’ to mean something other than this instinctual desire, which is how the word is used in the context of actualism.
To use actualism terminology, they’re both talking about the social identity and how that shapes the raw instinctual passion of desire (which they call ‘need’) in different ways. With that in mind it’s obvious desire has social elements… and of course it can rapidly become clear that desire has more to do with ‘my’ identity rather than the objects of ‘my’ desire per se…
I’m always a little surprised when I see comments like this. Is there an ‘actualist paradigm’? There is certainly actualist terminology… but it’s not that there are some things that are “true within actualism” but not true otherwise. Something is either a fact or it isn’t… is a feeling-being factually built up of instinctual passions plus social identity acculturation, a feeling ‘soul’ at core with a thinking ‘ego’ on top? I don’t think it’s a ‘model’. I think it’s describing the way it is. It’s like a description of a forest, it’s either accurate or not, but it’s not a paradigm or a model.
Someone can describe the same forest differently of course… no harm in that! For what it’s worth I always have and continue to find the actualist description to be the simplest and most comprehensive, most far-reaching, most accurate and most simple. It doesn’t invalidate other descriptions… but if both descriptions are valid there must be some way to reconcile them. If they can’t be reconciled then one, the other, or both must be wrong.
Not sure if I am going in circles or making a caricature of myself lol. Anyone else see what I’m sayin’ or am I just replacing ‘paradigm’ with ‘description’ and that’s what you meant @Kub933 ? Lol .
Claudiu, I have a different take. I think that all accounts of reality, including the actualist take on human subjectivity and structure are necessarily partial accounts. They cannot be exhaustive or comprehensive. In that sense they are models and paradigms. I think that actualism can definitely be reconciled with the above 2 models.
Ultimately it’s less important for me that a model be an absolutely 100% true rendering of reality than its utility or what it can achieve. If my point is to drive from my home to the city, then I’m less interested in the exact chemical composition of my windshield, than knowledge of how to drive a car safely and perhaps a very crude understanding of how a car mechanically functions. If I want to unknot a tangled knot, I’m less interested in knot topology than a simple technique to unravel it. This is where the strength of actualism lies. It’s a rough and ready account of how the human psyche works which serves the purpose of ending it. As the Cheshire cat said to Alice, it all depends on where you want to go.
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Yeah what I mean by paradigm is a particular angle of addressing and explaining a topic, like you say we might both be describing what a forest is and yet if we both wrote a short piece describing a rain forest they might end up being 2 completely different pieces of writing. Yet still both be describing the various facts of what a rain forest actually is.
It seems that the more complex the topic the more angles it could be chipped away at, but the goal remains to arrive at facticity.
I might describe a table by referring to the fact of it having 4 legs and a flat top, or I might also describe a table by referring to the qualities of the material it is made from etc.
I mean even if we look at the writings of all the actually free people we have there is some sense of a different angle being taken, eg if I read Richards journal, Srinath’s simple actualism page and Peters Actualist guide they are talking about the same method but there are differences for sure.
So I notice in myself this desire to have these unbreakable actualism tenets and then Srinath comes along not playing along to my rules, and I notice some slight conflict within myself which is interesting in itself to look at as it is showing some kind of belief in play.
What I noticed in other areas of my life is that the more genuine understanding of a topic I have the less dogmatic I become in discussing it - precisely because I understand the core facts which we are trying to chip away at from different angles.
I suspect your main issue @claudiu is that by proposing different paradigms we are kind of proposing that we are discussing different beliefs as opposed to talking about facts.
Maybe there is a third alternative here 
that a fact can be approached from different angles, depending on what it is that I am trying to do (as with the table example).
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It’s interesting that the article is quick to dissect the socially instilled objects of desires, but assumes that there is a level of desire which can safely be called “need”. The biggest red flag is they put sex in the “need” category, and then go on to discuss essentially “keeping up with the Joneses” objects of desire.
Pretty normal ‘normal’ thinking. Putting the cart before the horse. It’s like discussing the colour of a gun in a debate on reducing gun violence. As if passing a law that all guns should be pink and have flowers painted on them. Objects of desire are mostly irrelevant, as the article itself goes on to say that “desire is never satisfied” (or words to that effect). It’s the desire itself, the very thing being manipulated which is the primary driver.
As Richard (and many other critical thinkers too) points out; if one of your basic axioms is wrong, everything after that point is also wrong.
Freud’s “everything is sex” stands in stark contrast to the writer’s stance that sex is a need.
Indeed, closer examination of the “models” proposed in the article would uncover the weakness of “sex as a need” axiom pretty quickly. Just about everything that could be called a “model” in this article has some element of sexual status. So if sex is a need, then everything becomes necessary to fullfill that need.
New clothes to fit in? Need.
Fashionable car? Need.
Wealth and a big house? Need.
Plastic surgery? Need.
I saw a video the other day which made a fantastic point about cowardice in relationships.
People will say “my needs aren’t being fullfilled”.
When the fact is, it’s my wants not being fulfilled.
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I was hoping to find elucidation from Rene Girard himself on this distinction between need and desire. I began wondering whether he himself saw a distinction, rather than such distinction being an interpretative overlay from those who’ve read him.
For the last few months I had been meaning to get around to reading Girard and his mimetic theory as it came strongly recommended by someone whose opinion I respected. Now that Girard has made his way onto this actualism forum, I figured I go ahead and see what he was on about.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find his original works online. It took me a while to find something that he actually authored. Finally, I located a pdf of his seminal book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. It was buried deep under books and articles written by others interpreting his works.
There, he presents and elaborates on his mimetic theory of desire through the analysis of fictional literary characters. One can download it at this dodgy looking website if interested. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure 9780801818301 - EBIN.PUB
I’ll just say that I personally cannot relate much at all to his view of the world. Nor does his understanding of the human experience resonate. His large following suggests it resonates with many others, so there’s that.
You can also try borrowing a copy at archive.org, though it’s checked out at the moment.
Deceit, desire, and the novel; self and other in literary structure : Girard, René, 1923- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Maybe they see it this way: I want plastic surgery. I need plastic surgery to satisfy my want. Ergo, I need plastic surgery.
I want to breathe. I need to breathe to satisfy my want. Ergo, I need to breathe.
What one wants determines what one needs. If there is no desire for food, there’s no need for food. If there’s no desire for life, there’s no need for life.
At any given time, I may want candy, water, internet, shelter, solitude, oxygen. What is “needed” translates to that which is wanted most intensely. When the body is dying from thirst then fluid is desired more than anything. When thirst is quenched then other wants materialize.
Point is: the subjective experience of want vs. need is hard to distinguish. Subjectively, there’s just degrees of want. Those prioritized wants we call needs. And those priorities are fluid and contextual.
I want to write this. I need to write this to satisfy that want. I may start having a heart attack as I write this. My want to write this disappears, and now I want medical assistance more than I want to write this. I would then need medical assistance to satisfy that want.
There’s a very, very basic aversion/attraction operation occurring continuously, directing conscious wants (or needs).
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Hmm so I think it’s possible we are all saying the same thing, and just hovering around the wording for it.
The analogies with a description of a forest, or how to drive home from the city, or how to untangle a knot, all seem on point. It’s true that no description can be completely exhaustive — ultimately the only 100% true to the accuracy representation would be the object itself. So a description must necessarily lose some detail, and of course the choice of what to leave in and what to omit affects the final product … …
But I think the better word for what we’re talking about in the case of these analogies is a map! A map is something that faithfully (if it’s good) represents that which it is intended to represent. A satellite map summarizes the visual imagery, a road map summarizes the roads and leaves out unimportant details like exactly what trees are where, a subway map might not even have the routes be a 1:1 where they are in the world but they represent the connections between stations and the progressions…
There might be a paradigm for how the map is built (e.g. picking simple and complementary colors to make it easier to read), but the map itself isn’t a paradigm per se, or a model in the sense of a scientific model (e.g. like a model for how the sun works). It is of course a model in the sense of ‘a scale representation’ (e.g. like a model of the solar system).
With that in mind, an “actualist map of the psyche” could be said to be one that is conducive to actualism — where ‘actualism’ means basically the actualism method, the experiential enjoying and appreciating of this moment of being alive.
But there is nothing dogmatic here, it isn’t that it is a model that is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ — it’s a map that highlights certain useful things and doesn’t go into detail of other things.
And of course nothing precludes one from using multiple maps if they are helpful.
Right so I think this comes from misinterpreting the actualist writings as being tenets or a model or a theory or a worldview etc., as opposed to them being a map (descriptions of what is the case). Not to say I haven’t done it myself of course… it’s as you say here:
Exactly this basically. I find that for me too, when I have no or little experience then I tend to want to latch onto beliefs of what is the case, of what is right or wrong. While when I have a lot of experience, I simply know what is the case or not, I know if someone is mistaken (which is different from them being ‘wrong’), and I also know when I’m not sure, instead of believing I know when I don’t. Obviously there are egoism tendencies at play even when I have experience, to want to be right and such, but experience does a wonderful job of dislodging them — for me anyway.
I’m satisfied with this understanding, what you guys think?