In
Part One of this article, I described the chemicals that our bodies
produce when we love, or fall in love, and how each chemical makes us
feel. In this second part, Dave the Romantic debates with Dave the
Cynic about the nature of love, and whether love it is essential to a
healthy, meaningful life, or just our body's way of taking control of
our behaviour...or perhaps both.
Dave the Cynic:
Look at you! Pathetic. Goofy smile one minute, heartbroken and
teary-eyed the next. Dave the Blogger has already explained that each
person is nothing more than a watery bag of organs, organs that collectively
co-evolved the body and the brain to help look after their mutual
survival. Our brain is just a feature detection system, their early warning system for potential dangers, and their navigation control and information processing system.
Our belief that this brain is somehow 'us' is sheer vanity. What 'we' are is merely a figment of reality,
a complicity, an emergence of the pandemonium of the body's
semi-autonomous processes. That's what an organism is. That is our unromantic purpose. You, all giddy with love, are merely doing what your body
commands you to do by flooding your brain with hormones.
Thought you'd got past all that, eh, Mr. How to Save the World? There
you were behaving rashly, ready to toss aside all the programming your
body had invested in you over all these years. Now look at you. An
addict to your body's chemicals, to love and that Second Life fantasy
world. You think you're actually connecting with people through those
'avatars', little cartoon characters, with your soppy romantic
lines and your ridiculous notion to practice Intentional Community in a place that doesn't exist.
Dave the Romantic: At
least I feel something, not like you, you smug zombie. I've learned as
much about myself in two weeks of opening my heart and soul to the
people in this strange, wonderful world, people who are looking for
ideas,
connection, meaningful conversation, friendship and, yes, love, than
I've learned in twenty years of sterile study of how the world really
works and better ways to live and make a living.
Without love, there is nothing, no meaning, it's all abstraction,
rhetoric. In Real Life everyone (except the fools) has given up on
change, on possibility, on imagination. Most people just sleepwalk
through life, content with not feeling anguish or pain. Except for the
few brief moments they feel real, ecstatic love. That love is so scary
everyone in Real Life who has it is terrified to lose it. And they
usually do.
Second Life may be an artificial world but it is a liberating one, ripe
with possibility, limited only by the imagination and not the dreary
constraints that have us in a stranglehold in Real Life. Second Life
gives you a second chance, to try something completely different
without fear of loss or failure, to be really yourself, aching, vulnerable, exposed.
And the rewards, of finding others on a similar bold journey, go far
beyond love. They include genuine friendship, much deeper and faster
than is possible in the real world where everyone hides behind their
persona, their mask of conformity and respectability, and never comes
out. The real world is a place of fear, cruelty, emotional and
imaginative poverty.
Dave the Cynic: You self-righteous bastard! Who the hell are you to say what other people feel, to judge them for who you
think they are. You're just projecting your own emotional shallowness
on others. Just because you're intelligent, informed and imaginative,
doesn't mean you have one inkling about others' feelings, or the depth
of them.
What you do in Second Life you could do even more fully in Real Life,
if you had the courage. Let me tell you something about love that goes
beyond the simple chemistry Dave the Blogger explained yesterday. No one knows anyone else. No one knows what it is like to be someone else, or how they feel. What you love in other people is your idealistic imagining of what you want
them to be. And if they say they love you, they're really saying they
love who they imagine you might be, who they wish you were. All that
chemical soup is just the lubrication for the illusion you want to
believe, what your body wants you to believe.
Reread the words you said to her, and hers to you, in the stark light of day. Look at the picture of the two of you, cuddling. What a fraud. At least she's smart enough to know it's all a fantasy.
Dave the Romantic: You seriously mean to tell me you believe the people who fall in love in Real Life have something that's more real?
Dave the Cynic: Not
at all! That's exactly my point. Both in Real Life and in Second Life,
we love who we imagine the object of our affection to be. We have no
idea who they really are. Our bodies drug us with the chemicals of
love, so that we believe all the sentimental crap about 'touching
souls' and 'two becoming one'. It's just our bodies' way to get us to
procreate, to stay together, and to keep us in line so we don't do anything risky,
threatening to their well-being. 'We' just do what they tell 'us'.
Dave the Romantic: So
how do you explain the fact that, since I've been filled with these
chemicals of love, I've learned so much about myself, about what's been missing
in my life, and I'm more aware of others in Real Life too, and
strangers in Real Life look at me differently, as if I've melted. And I
care about people more. Yesterday I cried, all-out, for the first time
in years. If these chemicals are to further a fantasy, why do I feel so
much deep, real-world emotion?
Dave the Cynic: When
the chemicals of love take control, you lose your ability to judge
what's really happening, and you trust people more than you objectively
would or should. You become hugely vulnerable, so when what you thought
someone you loved felt turns out to be utterly different from your
romantic imagining, you're devastated. As an artist and idealist, your
imagination is especially strong, you invent a great fantasy, and when
it's shattered you fall especially hard.
Face it, who are most of the people in Second Life? They're the same
motley crew you're not terribly fond of in Real Life. Lonely
middle-aged men and women looking for something to fill the emptiness
in their lives -- most of them in loveless marriages, or separated (the
chemicals of love only last so long).
Young people with low self-esteem: The men trying to make conquests
they know they couldn't make in Real Life. The women yearning to be
noticed, called pretty, lusted after, possibly for the first time in
their lives. Deeply unhappy, needy people. Bored people whose Real
Lives are so unbearably bland they escape to Second Life because
anything seems better than the monotony and monochrome of their
imagination-less 'reality'.
You don't care about such people in Real Life, do you? So why do you
care about them behind their masks in Second Life? Because they flatter
you with their attention, with their cute little cartoon faces and
perfect skin and flawless figures and scanty clothes? Because they are so willing to let
you fuck their unreal cartoon bodies for hours just to get the
attention and appreciation no one else will give them in Real Life?
Because when they cry on your character's shoulder or giggle in its ear
in Second Life you can't see the desperate, pathetic looks on their
real faces, the boredom in their real eyes, the imperfections of their
unglamorous real bodies, and they can't see yours?
Ask yourself why you can't bear to listen to their real voices, and
speak to them with yours, hiding instead behind the fantasy of text
messages you can both read as coming from lovely young voices with
perfect, unhesitant articulation? Do you hate the real world so much?
Dave the Romantic:
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I do love the natural world in Real Life
and loathe the civilized world of seven billion mostly-pathetic humans
-- most of them ugly, voracious, stupid, ignorant, emotionally
crippled or dead, devoid of imagination and racked by personal
insecurities that make them dysfunctional. Real Life is a world of
misery and anger and thoughtless devastation and horrific scarcity,
scarcity even of love, and all the petty jealousy and greed and possessiveness
and deprivation and heartbreak that brings.
So what's wrong with wanting to live in a world where there is no
violence, no scarcity of anything, including love, no ugliness, no
poverty or deprivation. Of course
many of the people in Second Life are dysfunctional, but many, with
their brave disguises, seem merely unfulfilled emotionally, looking for
love and, given a second chance, open to it and generous with it. And
of course I'm disturbed that so many people bring their emotional baggage into Second Life with them. You can work around them.
I don't care if it's idealism and fantasy and illusion. You argue that
what we imagine we love in Real Life is no different. And maybe as you
say the feelings we feel for others are largely the result of imagining
them to be, and feel, what we want them to be and feel, not who they
really are, in both worlds. What's so terribly wrong with that? What's
so great about reality, anyway?
If it fills me with feelings of love and has the same effect on them,
why is that any less 'real' than love in the real world? My polyamory
Intentional Community idea is a model, and of course it's not a
completely realistic simulation of what such a community would be like
in Real Life, but what of that? We can learn from it, experiment, make
it up, have fun with it. Live in our own collective fantasy novel. Much
of what makes, and challenges, an Intentional Community is the social
interaction, and we can certainly simulate that. Is that really so
pathetic? If two people in Second Life have real feelings, deep
affection, as if they've forged a true, intense friendship, who's to
say that's not real?
You say I should be doing something in Real Life for others instead,
and helping them, being an activist, making the world a better place.
But if I make someone happier, wiser, feel better about themselves in
Second Life, why is that not just as valuable? We only accomplish
anything in life through what we impart to those we meet, one on one,
those we touch. I've touched those I've met in Second Life, and they've
touched me. We've learned, cared, helped each other, and made love more
abundant in the process. I love them as surely as if I'd met them in
Real Life.
So, if this is just a dream, a fantasy, show me that it's any less so
than Real Life, or that the self-changes and the changes I can evoke in
others in this beautiful dream world are any less real and important
than what I could do in Real Life. Tell me, with a few scavenged late
night hours each day, what would you have me do instead?
If I'm destined to be addicted to love, what does it matter which dream world I choose to be addicted in?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
