Nilsi

I want to see Jordan Peterson vs. 20 Muslims.

How did you know?

I also think the whole Wolf of Wall Street archetype of the salesman is a complete cultural delusion. A real sales professional isn’t some chest-thumping frat boy in a suit yelling “sell me this pen.” He’s much closer to a psychoanalyst - quietly decoding repression, resistance, and obscure purchasing anxiety. Though to be fair, the shared cocaine habit does provide a certain continuity between the two.

Incidentally, that’s why sales - despite being the obvious cliché answer - is actually one of the worst possible jobs for a narcissist. It requires the complete annihilation of one’s own ego, so you can obsess over the others desire and every neurotic, logistical, and financial obstacle standing in its way. A narcissist in sales is like a vampire in a mirror: fundamentally incompatible with the task at hand.

“Creative Director” is, functionally, a polite euphemism for terminal narcissist with a Pinterest addiction. Unfortunately, I’m professionally obligated to interact with a depressingly high number of these “visionaries.” Each encounter being a test of my gag reflex and moral restraint. CEOs and MDs, by contrast, wield exponentially more power and money, yet manage to behave like actual adults. It’s almost as if the less you care about your „aura,“ the more tolerable you become.

My epistemology is that some broke-ass programmer, oozing resentment toward any resemblance of success and actively accelerating his own inevitable replacement by AI - by turning even his private life into AI-powered cheerleading for his narcissistic cult leader - is definitely not a credible source on anything, let alone the „most capable sleep specialist on planet earth“.

The only one putting themselves on a pedestal here is you. Really copying Leo all the way, huh?

This has to be a parody, right?

The moderator Integral’s intelligence is child’s play, a monkey could mimic whatever his cult leader tells him without questioning anything. The mark of stupidity is that he thinks blind following is originality, and that because the echo chamber that is this forum has validated him as being at the pinnacle of something very important, he must be intelligent. Yet Integral has never questioned what originality or individuality is, revealing the lack of both - coming, predictably, from someone who can’t even write his own posts and has to rely on AI to do it for him.

Do people actually try things before they talk? I’ve been training like this for years and consistently putting on muscle. So what are we even talking about?

I much prefer Nietzsche and Camus - and also post-structuralists like Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. Their thought really frees life from the burden of self-realization. It honors life in all its beauty and miracle - not as a problem to be solved, but as a possibility.

That’s also, by the way, why I don’t care for Sartre. He basically takes Heidegger and then circles back to Hegel. So nothing’s really gained. You’re still stuck - not as spirit realizing itself, but as a human incapable of realizing itself yet still trying. Like... why?

I appreciate him in the same way I appreciate Heidegger - he’s offering the preconditions for escaping the nightmare of dialectics. And yes, at the core, I’m trying to move beyond dialectical thinking. And I claim existentialist thought at its best - and particularly Deleuze, with his insistence on thinking as productive and creative - is such an authentic post-phenomenological and even post-Enlightenment stance. That’s what I’m most interested in.

That’s the entire point I’m trying to make - and it’s super important and fundamental. So how is that nitpicking?

There are plenty of female psychoanalysts who’ve developed these ideas independently of Lacan. Jessica Benjamin argued that mutual recognition is always unstable - there’s always a gap or asymmetry in desire and relationality. Luce Irigaray critiqued phallocentrism and argued that women’s desire is multiple, non-unitary, and resists being fully captured by male-centric psychoanalytic structures. Julia Kristeva, though focusing more on the semiotic and abjection, also emphasized the irreducibility of desire and the impossibility of full relational closure. So what now? Are they just not "real women," or have they been coerced by the patriarchy too? And honestly, I even get that psychoanalysis itself is often framed as a patriarchal discourse - which is why I aligned myself with Deleuze and queer theory from the start. I already anticipated this might come up.

Good song - I love Björk, I’ll give you that. But what do you expect me to say to this? I’m not going to argue against your experience. Maybe we’re just using words differently. Anyway, my experience is completely different. I’ve never observed the kind of difference you’re describing. I’ve been with women who actually shared your views to some extent, but nothing I saw in them made me believe anything like what you’re describing was really at play. Take that Björk song. What makes it so good? Can you put your finger on it? People have been writing about her for decades and could keep doing so for millennia - and still, that je-ne-sais-quoi would remain. It’s the same with desire. A woman might love her man. She might even grasp him in his entirety. But his being changes. It’s fluid, not fixed. And so is desire. What you desire is just a temporary assemblage. There’s no stable correlation between signifier and signified as you’re making it out to be. Desire can proliferate in all sorts of directions. Even now, you probably desire something particular to this moment that keeps your experience moving forward. And it’s the same when you’re with your man. He’s not the embodiment of desire itself. Some of that desire gets projected onto him - when you’re thinking about him, spending time together, passionately making love, or whatever. Yet there’s always an element of the yet-to-come in desire. That’s why it’s impossible to fully desire the concrete, the already, the embodied.

Maybe we’re just having a language problem here. I’m not talking about sexual desire per se. Desire - even the sexual kind - isn’t really about the person, their body, or any specific quality. It’s always about some possibility, something that’s not even fully there. There’s that famous Lacan line: “There is no sexual relationship.” It points precisely to the elusiveness of desire - that there’s always an other present in the sexual act. It’s not just deep intimacy between two people and that’s it. There’s always a gap. And that gap is exactly where desire resides. And again - please don’t take this the wrong way. That doesn’t mean there aren’t profound, intimate experiences. I’m all for developing those kinds of relationships. But it is what it is. There’s no getting around this rupture in reality. You’re never truly present with someone. It’s literally impossible. So how can you fully desire them?

Again, I do understand - I just disagree. Honestly, I’m not sure where you’re getting this from. I mean, I kind of get it, because you’re not the first woman I’ve heard frame it this way. But to me, that’s bullshit - with all due respect.

Ok, I see. Still, I don’t buy that. I’ve met and been with a woman or two in my life, and yeah - they desire the same way men do. Again, I don’t buy into this whole binary, or the sacred archetype stuff, or left-brain/right-brain theories, or whatever. Desire is universal. Everybody desires. And desire is always deferred. It’s always some elusive quality that’s immaterial - it doesn’t reside in a single person, object, or trait. By definition, it’s impossible to desire wholeness. I’m sure that experience of wholeness can be blissful, and I’m sure there’s a lot of love in it. But that’s not desire. Desire is the irrational pursuit of the impossible. Wholeness is actually the concession of the pursuit itself. And also - why would that be something only women are capable of? That’s some pretty wonky stuff.

By the way, I’m totally fine with this being a normative framework. But I’m fundamentally an immoralist, and - again - I’m talking about desire here. If you’re willing to turn down the desire knob for the sake of a long-term relationship where, granted, there can be a lot of love - that’s fine. It’s just not what I’m talking about.

Ok, at this point I feel like I’m just being projected onto. For the record, my experiences with women have been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve been in intimate, loving relationships, and I’d even describe myself as both a feminist and a queer ally. If anything, what I’m sensing from you now is a degree of contempt. I’ve never said anything degrading about women - yet it seems like you’re reducing my perspective to something shallow, when in fact I was trying to discuss desire from a systemic point of view. And frankly, I’m not sure who you’re trying to convince with this holism rhetoric. Desire is always particular. You never desire "the whole" person - you desire an elusive, shifting quality that’s hard to pin down. And riding that current within a monogamous relationship is incredibly difficult unless both people are truly exceptional and committed to personal growth and keeping the connection alive. Let’s be honest: most people kid themselves about these things and end up repressing unconscious desires. So I’m not especially impressed by this kind of moral posturing, unfortunately.

Jealous!

I have a feeling you’re just reading the outrageous bits and ignoring all the context this is situated in. And I stand by these claims, by the way. Yes, women generally play the role of selectors, not men - that’s where the asymmetry comes from. But all of this only makes sense when you look at it from a macro, systemic perspective. These are emergent, statistical patterns - not necessarily what you’d notice just by observing individual people.

Dude, I’m just drawing a loose conceptual connection. I’m not saying you’re literally Peter Thiel. I’m just pointing out that, in this or that way, what you’re saying is similar to something over there - so that, if you’re interested, you can check it out and maybe learn something about yourself.