The Nature of Desire

About this episode:What if every right you possess—from free speech to privacy—is actually based on a form of desire? And what if our new socio-technological conditions necessitate the protection of new rights, such as the “right to attention?”In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the fundamental nature of desire, unveiling it not as something merely psychological, but as an ontological principle that underpins rights, needs and values.They establish a central thesis of CosmoErotic Humanism: that clarified desire equals value, and that a clarified first principle or value is a right.The conversation highlights the inseparable link between rights and responsibilities, bringing profound implications for creating a society that honors human dignity rather than one that manufactures and exploits desire.Note on Source Material and Citation:The material covered in this podcast is drawn from two forthcoming volumes published by the World Philosophy and Religion Press:* Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze, Vol. 1* Attention: First Principle, First Value, and Human RightIf you deploy any material from this episode, please cite directly using the following reference:Temple, David J., Conversations with David J. Temple, World Philosophy and Religion Press, November 2025, Episode: “The Nature of Desire.”About the Authorial Voice of David J. Temple:David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship between Dr. Marc Gafni, Dr. Zak Stein and Ken Wilber at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence.The Center for World Philosophy and Religion is a community-driven publication. You can subscribe for free to receive updates. To support our work, consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $9/month.Chapters:0:00 — Introduction0:59 — Context Setting1:45 — The Right to Sex Is Absurd, But the Right to Desire Isn’t4:35 — Rights Emerge From First Principles and First Values5:40 — Desire Is a Fundamental Structure of Reality7:37 — Reality Desires Value, Desire For Value Is A Need, and The Desire and Need For Value Are Rights10:01 — The Right to Have Rights and The List of Rights Must Expand12:33 — Unique Self Symphony as a System of Rights: My Right Can’t Stop You From Pursuing Your Right16:45 — Anthro-Ontology Provides the Basis for Clarifying and Establishing Rights and Responsibilities23:15 — About First Principles and First Values24:11 — The Basis for Protecting Attention in the Technological Age Is Clarified Value and Human Dignity28:20 — The Right to Desire and The Right to Be Desired Confront Propaganda and Should Transform How Our Society Shapes Desire32:30 — Advertising Is Fundamentally Disrupting Your Ability to Clarify Your Desire34:48 — Desire and Need Generate Rights and Responsibilities Through Power and Powerlessness38:34 — Biological Needs Are Different and Complementary to The Needs of GodEpisode Transcript:Zak: All right. Well, we’re here again on David’s request, but, of course, David has not shown up. But I know he gave you a note earlier about what we were going to speak about.Marc: He did. He’s very interested, and I’ve been getting a whole bunch of texts from him. He’s also on Signal now. I think he’s got like a new app or something. I know he’s been texting you at the same time.Maybe Zak, if this works, brother, I’ll take a bunch of minutes to spaciously lay it out, then I’ll pass it to you and you’ll spaciously lay it out your way and then we’ll kind of meet in the middle. I think it’ll take a little time for both of us to lay it out. I’ll go in that way. Okay?Zak: Sounds good.The Right to Sex Is Absurd, But the Right to Desire Isn’tMarc: I just happen to have this book here, truly by coincidence, Amia Srinivasan, writes this book, The Right to Sex. She’s a professor at Oxford and part of the classical gender conversation.The classical gender conversation which has gotten really greatly embarrassed by Judith Butler in the past several weeks [editor’s note: he’s referring to February and March 2024], in the way she’s taken positions and kind of refused to recognize Hamas as anything other than armed resistance. She’s just been at the extreme left and a fundamental denial of the atrocities there. Judith Butler’s just been really tragic in the last few weeks.But Amia Srinivasan comes out of a somewhat similar feminist perspective, but not a Laura Kipnis or bell hooks kind of power feminist perspective, but more of a classical somewhat male demonizing perspective.Her book, The Right to Sex, is a good summation of certain perspectives in second wave feminism, the ones that actually led to the formation of women’s studies departments, which kind of problematized masculinity per se.But for our purposes, what’s important is she is mocking the notion of an idea of “a right to sex.” And what she mocks is actually correct.In other words, she attributes that idea to a particular incel manifesto of a mass murderer and who’s kind of claiming “I’ve got this right to sex.” “Here are these women, I have this right to sex,” which is obviously a gross violation of how we understand humanity.And she’s, of course, correct in that, but the notion that there’s—and let me change the words slightly—a right to desire is actually not an absurd notion.We actually need to clarify desire.There’s a right not to any desire. There’s a right to clarified desire.There’s a primary human imperative to clarified desire, but I also have a right.I have a right to both desire and to be desired. Just like I have a right to be intimate and to provide intimacy.There’s both a right and a responsibility. Desire implies in it both a right and a responsibility.There’s actually a series of what David has called, what we’ve called together, Zak, with our dear friend Ken, First Principles and First Values.Rights Emerge From First Principles and First ValuesAnd here’s the equation: A First Principle and First Value, when it is clarified, when it’s a clarified value is a right.And so let me go step two:It’s not that the right to sex is an absurd idea, there’s actually a right to sex and there is a responsibility in sexing. There’s a right to desire and a responsibility.* There’s a right to be desired, to desire, and to respond to desire.* There’s a right to intimacy.* There’s a right to attention.All of these: attention, intimacy, and desire are actually First Principles and First Values of Reality, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.When they’re clarified, they become—or they’re disclosed as—pristine values of Reality, and those values of Reality emerge from—or they’re disclosed by—our core needs and our core desires.So, let me just go a couple more steps.Desire Is a Fundamental Structure of RealityMarc: Reality desires.At the kind of subatomic level, protons and neutrons desire each other. They’re allured. It’s 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and they come together and they create a new immersion called an atom.So, at that level there’s a desire and there’s a need. There’s no split between desire and need. They’re the same. Desire and need are the same.But the desire and need is for a value, and what’s the value?The value is this deeper contact in this greater wholeness which are the basic structures of the Eros equation.In the interior science Eros equation of CosmoErotic Humanism, Eros is radical aliveness desiring ever deeper contact and ever greater wholeness.So, that desire lives in the structure of Reality. It lives all the way down the evolutionary chain.* It lives in the world of life. All through the levels of life.* It lives in the world of the depth of the self-reflective human mind. All through the levels of the self-reflective human mind.And there’s a very clear both desire and need that are congruent with each other.At some place in the human world desire and need seem to split. We have the sense “I need this but I desire that.” That’s in a classical life of the egoic human, the separate self human. That’s a given that there’s this split.But then at the higher levels of consciousness desire and need come back together. You actually realize: my clarified desire is my clarified need.I have surface desire, but I can clarify my desire and know that my desire is not to be an incel, for example, or to commit mass murder, or to be madly rude to my partner that I just had an argument with.My desire is to create wholeness, my desire is for deeper contact, my desire is for more goodness, more truth, more beauty, more love.That’s a clarified desire.Reality Desires Value, Desire For Value Is A Need, and The Desire and Need For Value Are RightsMarc: So, let’s see if we can put it together and turn it to you:Reality has value. We desire value.In CosmoErotic Humanism, based on the panoply of sources that informed us and realizations that informed us, we talk about Reality desires and Reality desires what? Value.Paradoxically Whitehead, reading a different set of sources, and I guess having his own experiences, came to a similar conclusion. That Reality’s appetite is for value.So, there’s a desire for value. That desire is a need at the most fundamental levels. And that desire and need is a right.In other words, I have a right to, just like I have a right to breathe, right? It’s an absolute desire and need: I have to breathe. I can’t live without breathing.And I actually can’t live without intimacy. I can’t live without the placing of attention and having attention placed on me.What we’re formulating here is that we can’t just think in terms of value.We have to think: clarified desire equals clarified need, which generates, which points us towards the fulfillment or the realization of clarified value, which itself is both a right and a responsibility.So, I have a right to be desired and to desire.I have a right to intimacy, which might express itself also in privacy. And I also have a responsibility in my desire, responsibility in my intimacy.A responsibility in my placing of attention, responsibility not to hijack attention, etc.You and I, Zak, we’ve been thinking about this on and off for a couple of years. I think we’ve come to the place where both in the work on CosmoErotic Humanism, in the work on TechnoFeudalism and in the work on attention, we want to clarify and formulate—I think David really wants us to write it up—this relationship between these five dimensions: desire, need, value, right, responsibility. Because that maybe sets the table here for the conversation.The Right to Have Rights and The List of Rights Must ExpandZak: Yeah. It’s very interesting. Traditionally, the discussion about rights has always been connected to a discussion about human nature.The discussion about rights has always been about what are the fundamental, inarguable, unreplaceable aspects of human nature that to not give people political assurances about access to these things would be to dehumanize them.And so, Martha Nussbaum’s work here is probably foundational with her work on the capabilities approach with Amartya Sen.It’s just: look at what is the nature of the human capability set that’s requisite to dignity, and then how do we assure that people have political assurances for these capabilities that are requisite to dignity—which is to say: it’s not just that we promise you which is the assurance, but the political assurance is that there are mechanisms and legal structures in place that make it so you can do this.Not just saying it, but actually we give you the day off so you can vote, or we make the schools available so that you can read, so that you can exercise your capacities to grow your identity.And so, you’re, I see, clarifying a couple of things here that are left unclarified in that discourse which have to do with several things.One is: value evolves.Which means that there’s not going to be some universal set of rights that doesn’t change and one of the things that’s been discussed throughout modernity and the problematization of the rights discourse would be: how do we expand the rights?Like: how do we expand the rights that are on the list of rights both to people who are secure rights, which means to women, people of color and all of that stuff—the expanding of the sense that the citizen is all humans, not just a small number of landowning males or something, who have the right to have rights.So, the right to have rights expands.And then just the number of rights, which is to say the enumerated list of things that you actually have a right to.And so, the evolution of that—how would you even think about evolving that list of rights?You’d have to find a way to clarify the actual nature of what humans need, the actual nature of the human need. So, that’s, I think, essential.And that type of anthro-ontological clarification of human need in the interest of political change, in the interest of changing the shape of the political assurances that are given, nothing could be more important at this time when humanity itself is on the line.Unique Self Symphony as a System of Rights: My Right Can’t Stop You From Pursuing Your RightZak: So, a couple glosses here that I would throw back to you to just kind of help clarify the position.* The right to sex is complicated because it involves somebody else. The right to desire is kind of easy. Of course you can desire whatever you want.But the right to consummate your desire, which is to say, the right to sex is different from the right to the desire to have sex.So, there’s something very complex. And this is the case with almost all rights, which is that it requires a community that holds rights and responsibilities in reciprocal relationship.To not have the language of rights create a kind of distortion in the culture.Marc: Or my rights intrinsically violate your rights.Zak: Or just that we become selfishly all pursuing our own rights without stopping to reflect on what the responsibility would be.So, like the idea that I have a right to sex irrespective of how I act towards people or how I manage my own life, or my hygiene, and all of that stuff is insane.It would be like saying: I have a right to vote even if I have done nothing to prepare myself to be a politically reflective citizen at all.This is an issue in the rights discourse, which is why some people have abandoned the language about rights. Because it can become absent of the correlative necessary language of responsibility. The language of rights becomes too focused on just whatever the hell you want.So, that would be one thing to think about.* You’ve mentioned this, but in the context of attention in particular, which is moving into this conversation by expanding the notion of rights through the clarification of desire. Via Anthro-Ontology.That moves us into this sense of like, “okay, of all the places we would need to secure rights, right now, in this moment of time, with this current political technological setup, where do we need to secure rights?”And I would say, attention is one of the main ones. The right to discretion over your own attention is root to exercising any of your other rights.So yeah, if we could focus on the right to attention and thinking specifically, okay, if we have a right to attention, which is to say: the discretionary use of my attention, what’s the correlate responsibility?Marc: Right.Zak: It would be: you actually must shepherd or steward your attention in ways that are appropriate and especially in ways that allow other people to use the discretionary use of their own attention.So, that notion of the responsibility-rights relationship.Marc: Yeah.Zak: And then to take it one step deeper, and this touches on the notion of what we would call a Unique Self Symphony, but what Rawls and Habermas called a system of rights, which is to say, if you think of each right in a system of interrelated rights, they all need to make sense together. Which is like: my right to something can’t stop you from pursuing your right to something.Kant called this the Kingdom of Ends, where all of the things that are trying to reach actualization are kind of brought together into a weave where you have maximal possible freedom for all members. It doesn’t mean everyone has total freedom. That’s different. Or it doesn’t make some people have total freedom, some people have no freedom.The system of rights is one in which you have maximal total freedom for all members, which means a little bit less freedom than you might otherwise have if you were allowed to do whatever the hell you wanted, but way more freedom for everybody due to the balancing of the rights and responsibilities, and the ways that the rights are named and seem to relate.So, I kind of throw that out.Marc: Yeah. No, that’s great. So, let’s just reflect together. Let’s talk about two different things that you were working in.Anthro-Ontology Provides the Basis for Clarifying and Establishing Rights and ResponsibilitiesMarc: One is the relationship between human nature and rights.Right is reflective of my nature, and the deist language of “it’s self-evident” is, of course, a way of both avoiding and rooting the right in a Field of Value, and yet pointing to something which seems to be intrinsic in nature.So, this is very, very helpful because as you pointed towards, there’s this anthro-ontological clarification. Anthro, my personhood; ontological, what’s real. So, I clarify through my own experience what is absolutely real and what is, not just a real desire, but my deepest heart’s desire, my clarified desire, and my clarified need.For example, if I actually begin to realize I have a need for relationship, I cannot be alone. I am Tom Hanks and I’m in the movie Cast Away, and I’m on an island and I’ve got all my near Darwinian issues handled, and I can survive forever.And yet, I find my Wilson basketball, which somehow made it onto the island with me without being a spoiler of that old plot, and I take my blood and paint a face on the Wilson basketball because a face is interiority and I need relationship, I need intimacy, I need Eros, the desire for deeper contact even if it’s only in the realm of the imagination with a basketball.And when the Wilson basketball doesn’t quite do it, I throw myself into the Pacific with 2% chance of living because my intrinsic anthro-ontological nature is that near Darwinian survival is insufficient, and if my interior can’t meet the interior of another human being, f**k. I’m going to kill myself, and I actually am willing to risk probably killing myself for the very vague possibility that I might get there.So that’s a very big deal. That’s a very big deal.I realize, “oh, my nature is that I am both a being of irreducibly unique autonomy and yet, I am already in relationship to you.”Just like in Buddhism, we talk about there’s an ever-always already present awareness, there’s an ever-always present relationship.Reality is relationship, this communion. Therefore I have both a right and a responsibility towards that communion, and it’s very beautiful.Meaning, very often Zak, when I say very often, I mean once every three months, I’ll have this kind of deep conversation with someone who’s particularly bright, who’s not fully engaged in the world, and they say: “listen, it’s my life. I have right to do what I want.”And the answer is: well, no, not exactly. That’s not exactly right. You don’t have a right to do what you want. That’s only an expression of one dimension of yourself. But another dimension of yourself is communion and you have a particular responsibility for communion.You have a unique responsibility and capacity for communion that no one else that ever was, is, or will be has other than you. And you have the capacity to ameliorate unlove or loneliness, someplace in the world that no one else can do. So, you have a right and a responsibility for intimacy.And it’s very beautiful, right? And that includes an entire set of actions and boundaries where actions can’t be taken.The same thing is true about desire. I have a right and a responsibility of desire, and I also have a right and responsibility towards sex, but not with any particular person. In other words, the incel tragedy is to say because there’s a right to sex I can therefore claim that right from a particular person. That’s absurd.The same way I can’t claim the right to intimacy from any particular person, or I can’t say “I have a right to attention—I’m going to place my attention on you.” No, that’s actually a violation of privacy, right? So, intimacy also demands a sense of privacy.So, I think:1) The human being participates in the Field of Value, and therefore we can clarify rights by clarifying our own interiors.2) Rights like values evolve, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not real. The fact that we think: “oh, right evolves, it’s not real.” No, no, a right is real just like a value is real. And rights and values are both in some sense eternal and evolving.3) And lastly, and then, I’ll turn it back to you, just to say something about desire and need.One of the formulations, I remember, David scribbled on a piece of paper and I remember seeing it, and he formulated it in three ways, which I thought was good. And they’re all really saying the same thing.* Evolution is love in action in response to need.* Evolution is love in action in response to desire.* Evolution is love in action in response to value.And just question where you start, what discloses what, but when you actually realize, that—I mean it’s very beautiful and I think it’s really a big part of CosmoErotic Humanism’s definition of value: value is clarified desire.Clarified desire equals value. That’s a stunningly important sentence, and I remember for years people—and we’ve been talking about First Principles and First Values—and people would raise their hand and say, so what do you mean by value?And gradually this clarified to David. Clarified desire equals value.That’s like once you get that—I remember when we first talked about this sentence—It’s very ennobling, affirming of human dignity in a fundamental way, back to Nussbaum and dignity.I haven’t read Nussbaum in this regard. I actually was not aware of her work. So, thank you.But in terms of dignity, desire implies dignity, and actually the humiliation of our desires, the humiliation of our basic needs is the violation of dignity.So, beautiful. Back to you.Get the book:In 2024 David J. Temple published a book called: “First Principles and First Values: 42 propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis and the World to Come”. It’s the go-to place to dive deep into many of the themes being explored in this podcast.In forty-two propositions, David takes on the challenge of articulating a new grammar of value—a core set of frameworks that provide a new source code for the future of planetary culture. Rooted in eternal, yet evolving First Principles and First Values, this grammar is broad enough to provide a context for our diversity and deep enough to address our most pressing existential risks.Join us in articulating a new, shared vision that can act as a bridge to enable global coherence and coordination.The Basis for Protecting Attention in the Technological Age Is Clarified Value and Human DignityZak: And some of the things we’re saying here is that the evolution of socio-political organizations has to do with this process here.Like the idea that we even need to think about attention as something to be protected by legal frameworks as if it was a right.There was no need to do that when the most stickiest thing was like a novel, or like the newspaper or something, but changing technoscientific conditions force us into a position to start to feel creepy, undignified.You start to feel like you’re missing something and this forces the clarification of desire and then you realize, “oh my gosh, attention has to be protected like almost as much as our right to free movement and our right to speech, our right to breath, access to water, political voice, and those things.” Attention.Marc: Yeah.Zak: But we never had to have a rights framework around attention, because we never had technologies or life worlds that were threatened to this extent.So, that’s essential for us to understand as there’s no slowing down technological development. And there’s no slowing down its intention or inevitability of creeping in and kind of colonizing the life world as it said.So, in that process the work of the anthro-ontologist, the work of CosmoErotic Humanism to protect the human is in fact to clarify the rights that we didn’t even know we need to name.We didn’t even know we had to claim a right to intimacy because never before has intimacy been so endangered by the absence of, let’s say, for example, privacy. Or the absence of meaningful language, or stories that are organically emergent rather than manufactured for you.So, there’s a whole bunch of ways that our work in TechnoFeudalism, specifically the work that we’ve been doing there is clarifying for us the need to name new rights in order for that to be protected from the encroachment of the technological system.And that’s quite powerful.Now, if you are in a framework, a la Harari or others who espouse a kind of value relativism or a value skepticism, then you can’t answer the question of how you would do what we’re trying to do here.We’re saying in another way what we’ve said before about the inability of the critiques of the techplex. The Zuboffs and the Hararis who want to say, “shut it down, stop it.”Marc: The whole gang.Zak: The whole gang, that in fact, they’re trying to say, “we have a right to be protected from your technologies.”But if you’re skeptical as to the existence of the possibility of truly clarified value, which means that one value is just as good as any other value, there’s not really truly clarified value. Then where are you going to stand to try to construct a framework to protect a new class of rights?Marc: That’s right.Zak: You’ll have nowhere to stand. And so it couldn’t be more essential.But to rewind to where I started, it begins with the intuition of being able to feel the sense of losing dignity, you’re able to feel the sense of being exploited, of being somehow kept from the thing that you feel like you have a right to.Marc: Which is your humanness.Zak: Your humanness, precisely.And that’s why the intuition that, “oh, I have a right to be loved and I kind of have a right to sex,” it’s so sad that we’re in a position where a young man would have to feel that type of barrier to access to something so fundamental to the human, which would be close physical contact with another human that loves you and that desires you, and that you love and desire.And so, the idea that we’re in a culture of society so radically alienated, that in fact people are trying to start to say, “wait, I have a right to have a woman.” Like that’s how bad—Marc: —or to have a man.Zak: Or have a man, precisely. And that’s the irony. I’m not going to go into the dynamics of that, but yeah.Marc: Totally. That’s beautiful, Z. Let me pick up on that last point.The Right to Desire and to Be Desired Confronts Propaganda and Should Transform How Society Shapes DesireMarc: So, let’s say we’re talking about the right to desire and the right to be desired.So, if I understand that desire’s an intrinsic property of Cosmos, Reality has appetite and that’s an appetite for value. It’s what we’ve called ErosValue, an appetite for autonomy merging with communion.And one of the things we’ve said in CosmoErotic Humanism is that in the depths of intimacy, in the depths of ecstasy, the old split between autonomy and communion disappear. In other words, you’re both most free and most in communion.That’s true in beautiful sexuality, but it’s also true in a rave. You go to a rave, you’re fully part of the field of communion and yet, you’re most free, you’re most individuated.So, let’s go back to that notion, this realization that the structure of Reality is desire.And by the way, one of the ways we’ve expressed this and in other works of CosmoErotic Humanism, and I’m sure it’ll come back up in the new stuff we’re writing with David now, is that the name of God is desire.The Yod, the four-letter name of God that so shaped the Renaissance, is the Yod enters the Hei. Yah, as in hallelujah, as in Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. And then the Vav enters the Hei. And these are erotic unions which are at the core of Cosmos.So let’s operate in that, whether it’s from a Whiteheadian perspective or from a CosmoErotic Humanism perspective.Now, what does that mean in terms of how you educate? What does that mean in terms of how you create society?If that’s true, then that means—and this is so f*****g obvious that it’s embarrassing to say it out loud, but—that obviously desire should not be structured through the visual propaganda of society to generate desire only for people that look a particular way. Right?If your body type is this, then you arouse desire, but if your body type is that, then you don’t arouse desire. That’s completely fucked up, because actually, we need to create a field in which we honor, all expressions of body which all deserve to desire and be desired.And so, one of the things that just made me so exceedingly happy, looking in at classical systems, whether they were Amish systems or, at their best, Jewish Orthodox systems, both of which have great shadows, but I’m saying at their best is that everybody gets together with everyone. Everyone’s supposed to have a great match.We basically have this predatory system where the most “beautiful” in a particular embodied way get to fulfill their right to be desired, and most of the rest of society doesn’t. And the amount of times, I’ve talked to people in deep Holy of Holies conversation, in the inner sanctum, a woman or a man would say to me, like “if only I could actually be desired.”And they had this innate fundamental, heartbreaking craving, not because they’re pathological, but because I have a right to be desired.And therefore, we, all of us, as educators, as constructors of society need to construct a system of value which generates desire through its visual structures.That has enormous implications. If there’s a right, we have a right, we also have a responsibility to generate a field in which all can be desired in the field by someone.Zak: Yeah, totally. The right to desire and the right to attention are so linked.Marc: Totally. Desire is the placing of attention.Advertising Is Fundamentally Disrupting Your Ability to Clarify Your DesireZak: Exactly. So, if it is the case that you have a right to your clarified desire and a right to clarify your desire, then that means that we would outlaw advertising.Because like, what is advertising doing?Advertising is fundamentally disrupting your ability to clarify your own desire.Now, in a truly well-functioning market society, you wouldn’t have advertising, you’d have consumer information, which is completely different.Consumer information allows you to make a decision that clarifies your desire, because it tells you what the f**k’s actually going on with the commodity.Marc: Right.Zak: In an economy like ours, which, sorry guys, is not actually a free market economy, it is an economy that manufactures demand.An economy that manufactures demand really well is an economy that fundamentally distorts your ability to clarify your desire.Marc: Exactly!Zak: Right.So, if you have a right to desire and to clarify it, it would mean that we would move a lot of things off of our table and all of that would be advertising.We would put back in our table actual information about the world, and then we can actually have a market that would function, for example.So, for all the people who are pro-capitalist and pro-free market, you should be pretty opposed to the current setup right now, because the social media systems, one of the things it does, if what we’re saying is true and it is, is that they manufacture demand better than any prior possible system could manufacture demand, which means you just broke the market—and the market’s predicated upon that the consumer somehow clarifies their desire.There’s a signal in the market, right? There’s a feedback in the market to reality. You can break the feedback of the market’s reality by distorting desire.Marc: Right, yeah.Zak: So, it’s just worth noting, the visual, the auditory, all of these things that warp our sense of what’s actually valuable, what we actually want. That’s a science that’s put in front of us every day to try to make us confused about what we actually want.Marc: Yeah, this is unimaginably important. Unimaginably.Desire and Need Generate Rights and Responsibilities Through Power and PowerlessnessMarc: A couple of things. Let’s just talk about desire and need for a second.We said earlier that at the lowest, lowest or the foundational, better word, structures of Reality, need and desire the same, protons and neutrons, need and desire, no distinction.We essentially got to go pretty high in the evolutionary chain into the world of self-reflective human life, perhaps high mammalian, but into self-reflective human life and a sense of even separate self to make this split between need and desire where, “oh, I need food. I desire a car which is shiny red.” which is that split.We completely split them, which is part of our demonization of desire. In other words, we actually lost contact with this notion of what the lineage of Solomon calls tshuka, the radical intrinsic desire, which is the actual fabric and structure of Reality.And then at the higher levels of consciousness, we said in the beginning of our conversation, need and desire come back together.So, I actually can clarify my deepest need and clarify my deepest heart’s desire and they turn out to be the same.But now having said that—here it just gets really interesting: need.When we recognize a need, then we understand that we need to generate or articulate a right that can meet that need, that can allow us to meet that need.When we talk not in terms of need, but in terms of desire, which is the actual force of the evolutionary impulse, which is filled with power, there we recognize the need to generate a responsibility, right?In other words, a need generates a right, and a desire generates a responsibility. At least at first, that’s our first take on it. And that’s true. That’s a true split.When we go deeper into it, you’ve got needs that generate rights and you have desire that generates responsibility. I have desire, and that generates responsibility in multiple levels. But actually, when you go deeper into desire, desire is actually power, it’s the power of the evolutionary impulse, and a need has a sense of, “I’m powerless. I need you to fulfill the need.”So, the need, powerless, needs to generate a protective right. The desire, powerful, needs to generate a kind of protective responsibility.But when you go deeper into desire, last step just to lay this out, actually desire itself is far more dialectical, far more vulnerable.Desire itself both has power and powerlessness in it. I’m on the one hand, I feel the power of my desire. On the other hand, I feel the powerlessness of my desire, this daemon that’s acting in me or this devil that’s acting in me or what is this thing in me that I can’t.There’s far more pathos, far more poignancy in desire than mere power. Desire’s not just potency and power, it’s also poignant pathos, which points towards not just power, but actually a powerlessness.And in some sense, whenever we have powerlessness, we need to generate a right to protect it. And whenever we have power, we need to generate an obligation to responsibility.That helps us frame the whole thing in terms of its fundamental, CosmoErotic Humanism frame in terms of how it all works.I just wanted to land that. David’s been thinking about that. And he’s been texting about that this week a lot.Biological Needs Are Different and Complementary to The Needs of GodZak: It’s very important. I’ll say one thing and then we’ll wrap. The conversation is never over, of course, but the needs language is complicated. That’s why I kind of like the desire and the clarification of desire more than I like need.And here’s where it gets interesting.Need implies something like biological maintenance, like, the baseline definition of need is something like “the things that keep your body alive.” So, you could argue that animals have needs and desires, but we share with animals certain needs. Like for food and other things. But rarely is it the case that the animal desires something that will have them override their basic need for survival. Humans do that.This is what’s like a hunger strike. A politically motivated hunger strike is an example where you need food, but you want this political system to change a lot more than you need food, kind of.So, this is an interesting thing where there’s a something that occurs with human desire and the clarification of human desire that actually retroactively supervenes across the biological.And this is where the kind of redemption of ancestry and biology and all of this stuff becomes possible through the clarification of desire.Marc: So, first thing on the table we can get to next time, is one of the things we talked about, like, I don’t know, it must have been a decade ago. It was the needs of God.Zak: Right.Marc: Right? In other words, when I go deeply into it, I realized that the need for freedom is actually as visceral a need as—Wallace is tragically being ripped apart, the great Scottish hero, he screams “freedom!”And so the evolution of need, until we actually become identified with what the lineage masters of the wisdom of Solomon called Divine Pathos, which is Divine Need.This sentence, maybe we’ll end here. We can talk, maybe spend a whole conversation:Avodah tzorech gevohah—Divinity needs your service.So, that takes need to the next level and begins a whole next conversation.Zak: Totally.Marc: Crazy delight. Yay.Mentioned Sources:* Srinivasan, A. (2021). The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Mentioned People:* Judith Butler (1956-)* Laura Kipnis (1956-)* bell hooks (1952-2021)* Ken Wilber (1949-)* Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)* Martha Nussbaum (1947-)* Amartya Sen (1933-)* John Rawls (1921-2002)* Jürgen Habermas (1929-)* Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)* Yuval Noah Harari (1976-)* Shoshana Zuboff (1951-)* Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)Go Deeper:If you’re enjoying these deep dive conversations with Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein, then we have an epic opportunity for you to deepen your learning process and bring these teachings into your daily life!In the World Philosophy and Religion Academy, we’re building an evolutionary community in response to the great calling of this moment of meta-crisis. We bring together daily practice, weekly study sessions with Dr. Marc Gafni, exclusive courses and more.Join us in this movement and transformation into being and becoming Homo Amor. 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