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I, along with perhaps billions of other people will tell you that they are in love with their wives/husbands and children, and that yes it is subconscious.
Your frustration with this is because you haven’t personally experienced it. You should reevaluate your belief that you are experiencing a wider range, more intense set of emotions than most people, because you apparently have no experience with the emotion that much of the world feels most intensely, and you apparently do not feel at all.
As to your question: the harm that people like Aella have done to society is to convince people of the incorrect, unhealthy, anti social framework of understanding that you are presenting here.
Yes, love is real, yes it is healthy to love your wife and children, and no this is not all transactional. You, nor Aella, nor the red pill people, nor the pickup artist people before them, nor any of the other people of that persuasion have discovered something unique insight into human emotion. Aella et al have figured out an exploit in the human psyche that enriches them, at your expense and the expense of the rest of their customers.
You continue to misinterpret my claims.
Love, if it exists, is a miracle. But did I ever say, at any point in this conversation, that you shouldn't believe in miracles? I've said no such thing.
Regardless of what claims you think I'm making, this would not constitute a legitimate criticism of any of them.
You could almost say that it's the business of philosophical reflection to produce claims (or, plausible sounding arguments for claims, at any rate) that almost everyone rejects. It has variously been claimed by different parties in the history of philosophy that cars and buildings and animals are not real, that conscious experience is not real, that 1+1 does not equal 2, that there exist sentences which can be both true and false at the same time. Almost all humans reject these claims; but this is not taken to be any major impediment. Truth is not subject to democratic rule. The philosopher simply carries on with his business; he is well aware that other people will think he is in the grip of some kind of psychosis. When the propositions of "common sense" are finally subjected to long-overdue critique, the results will unavoidably be counterintuitive.
I mean, you will certainly believe that some people are incorrect and unhealthy and anti-social, but we still all have to try to get along, y'know? Tomorrow it could be you who's getting called incorrect and anti-social.
I don't agree with the TRP/PUA people at all! I've done a terrible job of explaining my positions if that's what you took away from it.
I'm less familiar with Aella, but I'd probably find points of significant disagreement with her as well.
This was your original claim;
Elaborate on this. I have never traded resources or services for sex.
Sex (or, to generalize and be more precise, "access to a woman's body" - this includes sexual contact in general and childbearing in particular) is important to men. To the point that it's a necessary component of romantic relationships. Not the only component, but a necessary one. I know this from my own experience of being a man, from my experience of having male friends, from the fact that dating advice (TRP, PUA, etc) and dating apps are a multi-million dollar industry with a mostly male clientele, and just in general, from everything that's ever happened to me in my life. Sex is what men are seeking.
Female bodies are more valuable than male bodies. Women are acutely aware of how in-demand their bodies are. She knows that merely being granted access to your body is not adequate compensation for her granting you access to her body. So she typically wants something else from you as well. Thus the very generalized heading of "goods and services". (To be clear, relatively abstract things like "personality" and "companionship" could also be considered "goods and services").
This does not cover every possible configuration of human interactions. I was careful to qualify that this is only a typical and average type of exchange.
As I have said, you really need to reevaluate the claim that you are "2 sigma" beyond the depth and breadth of emotions that most people are experiencing.
My wife does not "grant me access to her body", sex is an act of mutual participation, and a physical manifestation of the love that we have for one another.
What you are describing is sex with a prostitute; a simulacra of sex inside of a loving relationship. It is the Polynesian cargo cultists constructing bamboo control towers and runways hoping to summon back the western airplanes, but without an understanding of what they were doing.
In the analogy, Aella and her compatriots have noticed the cargo cultists and started selling them bamboo. They have realized that there are men who recognize the aesthetics of a loving relationship, and that they can simulate this and charge for it.
I'm always open to evaluating new evidence to the contrary. But this claim of mine has been confirmed time and again in my experience. In particular, I'm quite confident that I'm more of a doe-eyed hopeless romantic than you are.
It appears I have been largely unsuccessful in communicating my views on love. I would recommend reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling if you want to understand my views on love better.
The book describes the dialectical stages of the development of Abraham's faith when he is asked by God to sacrifice Isaac. We begin at "mere" faith, a mere unreflective belief -- his mode of relation to his faith is unmediated immediacy, because this faith has not yet been subjected to critical inquiry. We proceed through doubt, despair, and resignation, until finally arriving at a faith that is identical to the faith we started with, and yet somehow not the same at all. He's back exactly where he started, and yet everything is different. His faith is now a mediated immediacy, mediated by the preceding dialectical development; he no longer believes in spite of the absurd, he believes because it is absurd to believe, the absurd is his reason for believing.
In brief: there is no such thing as authentic love until you have realized the impossibility of love.
Love is impossible. But its impossibility is what makes it beautiful. If it weren't impossible, it would have no value.
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