Living in a Fisherian Runaway Nightmare
Being a peacock ain’t easy.
It all started ages ago, when one of the guys discovered that peahens really like it if you grow yourself a small wheel.
Something about it made them just crazy.
It was a nice little exploit.
Grow a wheel, get da chicks. Easy peasy.
But then all the guys started to notice and started growing a nice wheel.
So a regular wheel did not make you special anymore.
What did we do? We tried to grow the biggest wheel.
That will get us the most chicks.
But everybody did it.
Some guys’ wheels got so big, they straight up died.
The guys who survived are crippled by their wheels.
Can’t fly or even walk properly.
But them wheels, they make da chicks so crazy.
Can’t get them chicks with no wheel.
Why don’t they wake up and see it’s bullshit?
Damn chicks.
This is a trap. The peacock fetishizes the peahens. It does not care about any of the peahens’ attributes; being a peahen just suffices. The peahen is super attracted to wheels. A major weakness. The peacock finds it, exploits it scrupulously to obtain his fetish object. In the process, the peacock reduces itself to a wheel carrier. Still, it never manages to become the perfect fetish object — a peacock wheel. The peacock and the peahen don’t care about each other per se. Maybe the peahens once cared, but were so stunned by the super stimulus of a peacock wheel that they forgot. And end up going home in shame, rethinking their life choices. But for the peacock it does not matter. It does not see the peahen at home. And if the wheel does the trick and only the wheel, what is it going to do?
The peacock’s goal is one-dimensional, and it ends up making the peacock one-dimensional. It also makes the peahen one-dimensional. Without this stupid wheel exploit, it could care for other things. But now it only sees wheels. They just shut out all other aspects of reality.
The peacock thinks that the peahens are pretty stupid, falling for this thousand-year-old trick. There is no respect toward the peahen, but still there is the need to obtain the peahen. The way of getting what he wants further degrades what he wants. The peacock who respects the peahen and does not exploit her weakness will not get her, since another one will. So in the end, nobody in the whole situation gets anything he regards as truly good.
The only thing obtainable is the fetish object — some weird abstraction of reality.
The only valuable things are peahens and wheels. This may seem harsh, since peahens are not really things, but they are only valuable as soulless fetish objects.
If I were a peahen, I would not really like anybody using a peacock wheel on me. It seems violent.
If I were a peacock, I would really hate that everybody only cared about my wheel.
If I were a peahen, I would want not to care so much about wheels that I reduce myself to a mindless zombie.
If I were a peacock, I would want not to care so much about peahens that I reduce myself to a fetish object.
The peacocks and peahens need each other. But they don’t see each other.
And they won’t.