THE LIBIDO AS LIABILITY

The following is a passage from Andy Nowicki's A Final Solution to the Incel Problem, now available in paperback and on Kindle.

The Master said:

Do you not know, distracted adept, that your libido is your worst liability?

It works forever against your interests, to the detriment of your well-being. Why, then, do you insist on viewing it as some kind of ally? By what lapsed logic do you reach such a conclusion?

Your libido actively commits treason against you. In a sense, it is cunning in this regard. It makes every effort to bring you low, to cause you pain, humiliation, and embarrassment. If it were a sentient being, its soul would be malicious to its very core.

Yet beneath this base cunning in fact dwells a mere beast, albeit a spiteful one. It is a beast which wishes to be fed, which thrives on satiation, and is forever addicted to validation.

The validation it seeks is of the crudest sort, although it gets transmogrified by your psyche into something of a more complex nature. It simply wants what it wants, then takes pride in getting what it wants, as if satiation conferred worthiness. Despite its beastly crudity, this beast nevertheless has the power to hold your psyche hostage, if you allow it to do so.

You must tame this beast, shame this beast, crush this beast.

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Yet despite yourself, O distracted adept, you view your libido, this beast, as an ally, because you associate it with pleasure, fulfillment… and validation.

Since you associate your libido with the notion of your libido’s satiation, you therefore regard it as an ally, rather than a liability. But think about this proclivity of yours… Does this proclivity extend to other primal drives or desires? Do you associate hunger with the sensation of being nourished with food? Do you draw a parallel between thirst and being refreshed by drink?

In fact, you do neither, because you know that hunger and thirst are great and grave liabilities, particularly during a time of famine or drought. But eating and drinking, as well as breathing, are bodily needs, drives which one must satisfy in order to ensure one’s survival.

Your libido, however, is not needed to ensure your survival. It is, nevertheless, still a need of sorts, being the biological imperative towards procreation. As a need, therefore, it must be dealt with like other needs. Yet being a need, it may also be a symptom of a liability, since as a need its needfulness is in fact an equivocal matter. The satisfaction of one’s libido is, again, not a requirement for survival. 

In fact, the satisfaction of this need-- which is to say, the feeding of this beast—is ultimately an egoic, rather than an animalistic, endeavor. The ego, thus, being an outgrowth of the beastly drive for satiation and validation, seeks fulfillment by setting forth to indulge its lusts.

Unlike in the animal kingdom, where sex is an automatic process, causing the animal to behave in a manner over which it has no real control, among men sexual engagement is a voluntary act, which obtains egoic significance: it becomes a means by which one feels pride in oneself, and engages in ego--burnishment.

As an egoic pursuit, rather than a mere effort for physical (and thus animalistic) self-gratification, the libido becomes especially nettlesome, not only because the drive to feed one’s ego is inherently degrading and debased, but also in the more practical respect that the ego, unlike the body, can never truly reach any lasting sense of satisfaction.

That is, if a man achieves what he construes as sexual success, this “goes to his head,” filling him with a notion of having been validated as a man, since he has managed to get a woman-- or perhaps many women-- to sleep with him. But the ego always wants more: more validation, more vindication, more affirmation. In this sense, the libido—and the ego, which invariably accompanies this manifestation of perceived affirmation upon the acquisition of a “conquest”—is little better than an addiction, or at the very least, a compulsion, to be perpetually fed.

Again, it isn’t merely a question of obtaining pleasure in sensual indulgence; it is also, and much more significantly, the ego’s eager hunger for ever-elusive satiation, which propels it along in its continually-escalating addiction, creating in turn the degrading torment of egoistic desperation. That is to say, the more you feed this beast, the hungrier it becomes.