The Entitlement Of Pleasure

If it feels good, do it.  Remember that little proverb?  The Sixties were pretty good to you, eh?  The Seventies, too.  It was a kneejerk reaction against any constraint of repression, prudishness or inhibition.  It suggested a joyous abandonment of all responsibility, of releasing and channeling our inner two year old.  It was the clarion call of the sexual revolution, and of all things sex drugs and rock and roll.  The hedonists' war cry.  The triumph of the reptilian brain.

Of course the reptilian brain, also known as the amygdala, has another side too.  I believe it is called fear.  Fight or flight, as they say.  All I have to say is "Donald Trump."  See?  It works. 

I mentioned yesterday a certain unfortunate douchebag (and I use that term very loosely) living in the building next door and his preference for playing his bass-thudding music on the loud side.  Not a nice person and it has taken two visits from police in as many days to persuade him to not play his stereo at an unreasonable volume.  He appeared to be playing brinkmanship, so determined was he to keep cranking it up no matter how it affected those around us.  This is what I call the entitlement of pleasure.  No matter how it impacts those around us, or the environment, we are going to keep doing this because it is pleasurable to us; and it is not only pleasurable but it helps us forget our misery and emptiness, it staunches our pain, the pain of our vacuous, soulless existence.  It helps us forget all the pain and misery that life has visited upon us.

This war of hedonist entitlement is waged on all sides for all kinds of reasons and by all kinds of parties: the French insist on their right to foie gras,  It is a very cruel way to raise and feed ducks but the descendants of Napoleon must have their pleasure and pleasure as an entitlement is deeply embedded in the French collective unconscious.  A sidewalk smoker, because of his addiction and also because of the existential salve he experiences from lighting up and inhaling, is going to forget entirely not only the wrath he is visiting upon his health and lifespan but on everyone around him in breathing range.  And there are also the sex offenders.  Not just those pathetic men who wait in the bushes to expose themselves to unsuspecting young women, but men in general, or those still so brainwashed by the myth of patriarchy that their piggish behaviour is construed as their natural right as men to their sexual pleasure.

Even though we often and too easily behave like selfish hedonists I don't believe that that is all we are.  We are more than our amygdala.  I could write of any number of heroic acts that give the lie to this nonsense that we are basically vile, selfish and evil and nothing else.  But here I will mention but one little example of the triumph of altruism: today in the paper I read about a number of American Muslims donating blood to the surviving victims of the Orlando massacre.  None of these Muslims, unlike the shooting survivors, are gay, since in the US gay men are not allowed to donate blood.

Go figure.