Men desire power

I have been spending time thinking of a certain topic (which I may post about in the future), and I concluded that it is a necessity for my argument to start from the axiom that men desire power.
The pervasiveness of the value of power in most cultures at any given time in human history would seem to support that affirmation. However, not being very much of that inclination, myself, it is difficult for me to accept this axiom, and thus I would like to discuss it.

I would benefit from talking to very ambitious people. Though I think that is probably not the case of any of the readers of this forum, I don't think your input would be entirely useless.

On to the subject:

A brief search for the definition of the word power returns:

Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment.

Do you agree with this definition?
Is power always about control?
Why do men desire power?

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I would benefit from talking to very ambitious people. Though I think that is probably not the case of any of the readers of this forum, I don't think your input would be entirely useless.

Bah. I'll answer regardless of the insult, just like you knew I would.

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Do you agree with this definition?

No, not unless you define both 'control' and 'environment' in radically unintuitive ways.

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Is power always about control?

No, I think it's more about over-coming, an 'entity's' (taken to mean essentially anything) ability as well as its state of over-coming, of dominance/domination.

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Why do men desire power?

Do you mean 'men' as in 'man', in the universal sense? If not, this question is almost offensively sophomoric.

without-music wrote:

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I would benefit from talking to very ambitious people. Though I think that is probably not the case of any of the readers of this forum, I don't think your input would be entirely useless.

Bah. I'll answer regardless of the insult, just like you knew I would.

You will see that it is a compliment.

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Do you agree with this definition?

No, not unless you define both 'control' and 'environment' in radically unintuitive ways.

I think that this definition considers control and environment in a very general way. It could be taken to mean a lot of things.
What unintuitive meanings to control and environment would you have to apply to make that definition of power true?
Else how do you define it?

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Is power always about control?

No, I think it's more about over-coming, an 'entity's' (taken to mean essentially anything) ability as well as its state of over-coming, of dominance/domination.

By this you mean that power is always power over something.
The ability to manipulate something/someone to a desired objective is also power, but it implies a more passive role than you suggest.

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Why do men desire power?

Do you mean 'men' as in 'man', in the universal sense? If not, this question is almost offensively sophomoric.

I mean men as in mankind. Would you care to attempt an answer?

A man's power & dominance shows his sexual fitness etc...

It's really simple and comes down to reproduction :p

No woman wants a wimp that can't defend her, so yeah...

And men are always working on the great divide between what makes them men and the others .....the women

They need that separation, and identity; to show that they are capable, movers...

without-music wrote:

Do you mean 'men' as in 'man', in the universal sense? If not, this question is almost offensively sophomoric.

Depends on the kind of power...

Generally speaking, men rule :]

Does it all come down to fucking?

No, it all comes down to dying.
Fucking is an evolutionary response to it.

Are you working on your succinctness, or just trying to please me?

I adapt to my dialectic partner.

Freud didn't delve deep enough.
He saw sex everywhere.

Satyr wrote:

He saw sex everywhere.

And sex is not everywhere...

Of course? ;]

The very act of sex itself is the cornerstone of life. More than just sex, it shares and embodies the form of any life bearing process, and so does not end at the act itself; it instead continues through every facet of life and can be observed in the strangest of places.

For those who fully understand this, 'sex' is working very well to their advantage, in more ways than one.

phoneutria wrote:

Does it all come down to fucking?

For the simple, yes...I suppose....it could....

And only the simplest of minds would interpret my last post to mean something like that :pp

Satyr wrote:

I adapt to my dialectic partner.

Freud didn't delve deep enough.
He saw sex everywhere.

Did he commit the offense of thinking of men as animals?
I hear you can get banned from philosophy forums for that :O

Poison IV wrote:

Satyr wrote:

He saw sex everywhere.

And sex is not everywhere...

Of course? ;]

Sex is everywhere concerning humanity.
Outside the contexts of human biology, social systems, politics, human thinking, it is not everywhere.
When man observes the world from outside the prism of sexual gratification then he's made a step forward.

Poison IV wrote:

The very act of sex itself is the cornerstone of life. More than just sex, it shares and embodies the form of any life bearing process, and so does not end at the act itself; it instead continues through every facet of life and can be observed in the strangest of places.

For those who fully understand this, 'sex' is working very well to their advantage, in more ways than one.

Absolutely...within human systems and interests.

Underlying it all is mortality, directly linked to entropy:decay, time, striving, need etc.

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phoneutria wrote:

Did he commit the offense of thinking of men as animals?
I hear you can get banned from philosophy forums for that :O

Is it me or are you being overly defensive?

Men are animals...we are here to define what this means, or in what way man differs from other animals.

On a side note,
The latin word for success, succedere, means to go under. Cedere means to go, to give away.
The word implies that someone gives up their place in order for someone else to step up. By suceeding, you suceed.

There is fuzzy evidence that people who are not considered, or don't consider themselves powerful, exibit more empathic personality traits than powerful ones.
Power has selfish denotation.

On another note:
This present society is completely obsessed with success. You can tell by the amount of noise. It was difficult to find any useful information under the piles of self-help garbage.

Success?
This can either be a socially, memetically, defined construct or it can be a genetically defined one or it can be a personal one.

The generosity of power is evidence of its overabundance in relation to the one it offers its excesses with such freedom.
You are nice to a dog because it needs you more than you need it...and because it posits no threat, whatsoever, to your basic interests.

Giving is also a sign of dominance...one makes the other resent that help he needs, as this receiving is an admission of inferiority.

You have q Princess Diana becoming some icon of compassion and generosity by giving to people of what she never earned herself and she had plenty of.
She was wonderful and admirable only because she could have ignored the rabble.
Yet she did not...and this is because she, and the royalty she represented, gained something from her activities.

So yes, to succeed in any way is to become relatively indifferent to what you succeed within.
Then you have the choice.

No time anymore for this. But anyway: consider this, Satyr. During sex, have you ever stopped and thought for a second (being the Apollonian you are): "This is ridiculous, what am I doing? These strange repetitions...this is nonsensical" and so on, and so on. This thought threatens to undermine the sexual act completely. In a way, sex depends on the maintenance of an illusion, the refusal to think this thought -- the same applies to masturbation. And it is this concept that pervades everything. Freud didn't go far enough; he identified one more layer, but failed to see beneath it.

without-music wrote:

No time anymore for this. But anyway: consider this, Satyr. During sex, have you ever stopped and thought for a second (being the Apollonian you are): "This is ridiculous, what am I doing? These strange repetitions...this is nonsensical" and so on, and so on. This thought threatens to undermine the sexual act completely. In a way, sex depends on the maintenance of an illusion, the refusal to think this thought -- the same applies to masturbation. And it is this concept that pervades everything. Freud didn't go far enough; he identified one more layer, but failed to see beneath it.

I can't see how not thinking a thought - certainly that one - is an illusion. I suppose if one is actively refusing to think this thought - and only manage not to via suppression/repression - but this seems simply assumed to be the case: that unless one is not actively refusing to think this thought it would occur during (all) sex. That thought, especially its implicit assumptions, seems much more the illusion, because it is generalized. I have had such thoughts and yes they could undermine things, but much illusory generalization can undermine sex. I mean look at some religious thoughts on sex for some people.

Unless you made a poor choice of partner or you really were not in the mood or some other way refused to notice how you felt about the sex, that thought is off. But note: those specifics are much more important than the intellectualized generalization of sex as repetitive, etc. I think it's likely that general thought is masking the specific ones, the ones connected to the person, context, mood of the moment.

Often it is easier, especially for intellectuals, to generalize mentally, rather than feel specifically. It's not her or me or today, it is sex in general. I don't need to hone or notice my desires and learn how to navigate sex and lovers, I can stay above it all on this mental level and dismiss the whole thing.

There are many thoughts that can undermine us, if they are nurtured and worshipped, but this has little to do with their truth value.

without-music wrote:

During sex, have you ever stopped and thought for a second (being the Apollonian you are): "This is ridiculous, what am I doing? These strange repetitions...this is nonsensical" and so on, and so on. This thought threatens to undermine the sexual act completely. In a way, sex depends on the maintenance of an illusion, the refusal to think this thought -- the same applies to masturbation. And it is this concept that pervades everything. Freud didn't go far enough; he identified one more layer, but failed to see beneath it.

Is that rather like having the sudden feeling during sex that you are being watched, then realizing that the third eye is actually your own, observing from some distant, unobtrusive location, as an anthropologist might observe monkeys fucking in the jungle?

Lilith wrote:

Is that rather like having the sudden feeling during sex that you are being watched, then realizing that the third eye is actually your own, observing from some distant, unobtrusive location, as an anthropologist might observe monkeys fucking in the jungle?

I believe so. For sex to "work," that thought must remain emphatically unthought. But the impulse underlying that thought is more fundamental than the sexual impulse; and so in this way, the sexual impulse predicates itself on an illusion.

For me, it's more of an embarrassment to be overly self-conscious of my sexuality than to be completely aware and critical to the point of disgust... :/

Thinking of oneself on an animalistic level while committing a sexual act is probably a sure sign of disconnect from what it means to be alive & participating in this yucky, despicable place in the flesh, of weakness & shame.

Bodily fluids are a set-off to our gross detector, and this is a natural response of protection against sickness I believe.

Sexual parts are also ....bizarre looking, and not very pleasing to look at (for me at least) & this could be because they're always hidden & when revealed almost pose as alien attachments.

It's not supposed to be refined by any measure, which is why it has an awful reputation of being dirty :]]

Take it or leave, your mom & dad had to get it on to have you ;]

I don't think things get more grody than that... :/

phoneutria wrote:

I have been spending time thinking of a certain topic (which I may post about in the future), and I concluded that it is a necessity for my argument to start from the axiom that men desire power.
The pervasiveness of the value of power in most cultures at any given time in human history would seem to support that affirmation. However, not being very much of that inclination, myself, it is difficult for me to accept this axiom, and thus I would like to discuss it.

I would benefit from talking to very ambitious people. Though I think that is probably not the case of any of the readers of this forum, I don't think your input would be entirely useless.

On to the subject:

A brief search for the definition of the word power returns:

Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment.

Do you agree with this definition?
Is power always about control?
Why do men desire power?

I would say power is not all about control because some times power comes in being able to evolve to your habitat and thus survive in it... thus in otherwords the power to submit.

The idea that men desire power seems to imply that women do not... I would disagree with that... I would even go so far as to disagree with any assertion that on average men or more desiring of power then women... even if women do not seek political power which many have in the past done by means of manipulation of the man, many women regardless in fact most seek control of other women by means of popularity and such...

Men do desire more power, ultimately...

There is no contest to that.

To say this is not the case is to ignore reality altogether, which speaks for itself...

without-music wrote:

No time anymore for this. But anyway: consider this, Satyr. During sex, have you ever stopped and thought for a second (being the Apollonian you are): "This is ridiculous, what am I doing? These strange repetitions...this is nonsensical" and so on, and so on.

Definitely.
I once thought, as I was pumping away: "This is simply funny." I actually giggled a bit.
In fact there is no moment where I am not acting and observing myself acting at the same time.

For me only alcohol can somewhat quiet my mind down to the point where I can let go.

without-music wrote:

This thought threatens to undermine the sexual act completely. In a way, sex depends on the maintenance of an illusion, the refusal to think this thought -- the same applies to masturbation. And it is this concept that pervades everything. Freud didn't go far enough; he identified one more layer, but failed to see beneath it.

Yes.

For example, the connection of sex with food has not been thoroughly explored.
Sex is a secondary need, in that one can survive without it, because it evolved later on in our biological history.
I think it evolved out of the need for food.

The connection of obesity with sexual frustration or the obvious connection of kissing with feeding and of the bites and the act itself of consuming, are all related.

The act itself is a dominating one....one stabs the other, the other submits, surrenders...is consumed by the act.

The belief that you can apropriate a person's essense or atributes by eating parts of his body is presenty in several isolated cultures.

The act of chewing is also a repetitive, mechanic activity.


I don't have a point with this post.

phoneutria wrote:

The belief that you can apropriate a person's essense or atributes by eating parts of his body is presenty in several isolated cultures.

The act of chewing is also a repetitive, mechanic activity.


I don't have a point with this post.

If I thought about your post while I was having sex it would undermine the sex act, at least as long as I was thinking this thought.

My heartbeat is a repetitive activity.

My post seems to have no point, but it is actually so deep I am only channeling it.

Culture is a natural construct.
The gene transformed into a meme.

It's principles are natural principles, sometimes twisted, repressed sublimated, and sometimes enhanced, promoted allowed to reign free.


Activity is existence.

phoneutria wrote:

Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment.

HOw about the negative: Power is a measurement of an entity's freedom from control by its environment.

without-music wrote:

I believe so. For sex to "work," that thought must remain emphatically unthought. But the impulse underlying that thought is more fundamental than the sexual impulse; and so in this way, the sexual impulse predicates itself on an illusion.

The impulse underlying that though is spontaneous rationalization. Rationalization, as far as we know is a phenomena of highly developed brains.
I don't see how that can be more fundamental than the irrational act.

When it comes to the present discussion, I'd think that the power related implications in sex are also irrational.
(Unless the parts involved are role playing, obviously).

Kovacs wrote:

phoneutria wrote:

Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment.

HOw about the negative: Power is a measurement of an entity's freedom from control by its environment.

Interesting. I will think about it.

Another marginal note:

I can't speak for every woman, but personaly, I often take pleasure in being overpowered.
Not just about sex. The deliberate act of giving up against my own will is delightful.

Abstract wrote:

I would say power is not all about control because some times power comes in being able to evolve to your habitat and thus survive in it... thus in otherwords the power to submit.

But isn't in the case that because you need to change to suit the environment, the environment has power over you?
Isn't submittal a yeld of power?

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The idea that men desire power seems to imply that women do not... I would disagree with that... I would even go so far as to disagree with any assertion that on average men or more desiring of power then women... even if women do not seek political power which many have in the past done by means of manipulation of the man, many women regardless in fact most seek control of other women by means of popularity and such...

See my previous post.