Society, unlike the fabled gods, however, wishes each of these to devote full time to making, manufacturing, buying, selling, even fighting, which always makes more work, but never to loving, which it considers a mere waste of time. Children it wants, but they can be begotten without love; and the less love the greater numbers.
Society therefore completely ignores the individual. It tells him to make chairs and tables but never to make love.
§ 131
One has to reflect thus, so as to disentangle the motives that rule one’s actions. The most individual and intimately personal motive is love. One’s strongest individuality, if one can discount society and be oneself, is seen in the ability to make love.
What a man most controls is most himself. Those actions that are most controlled by forces outside of himself are least his own. In his thinking he has to learn inseparably to link individuality and self-control.
He has been taught from infancy to give up doing what he wanted to do himself and do what other people want. All other people want him to do almost the opposite of what he wants to do himself until, with punishments, retaliations, and all sorts of rebuffs, their wants have snowed under his instinctive desires with such an avalanche of prohibitions that his actions are about ninety-nine per cent controlled by the kind of selfishness that consists of selfishly trying to please other people for a release from this snow pressure, which release is called approbation or praise.
The impulses which come from the avalanche are the egoistic-social motives, social because they come down upon him from everyone with whom he comes in contact, egoistic because he is really protecting and pleasing himself by following these motives.
But one can see for himself how much of the control of his ordinary every-day actions is his, how much is the control of the avalanche.
Really then the only thing left to the individual is his love impulse. Society is not interested in it, or does not see that it is. Society would be a very different thing if it had eyes. It might have some sympathy. The individual’s love impulse is the one bit of leaven in the human mass today. It is the one thing he can call his own, the one thing whose expression he can control. But society has taught by implication that that is the one thing he cannot control except by annihilation.
So it appears society has shown quite Machiavellian abilities in checkmating the erotic impulse which is the individual impulse par excellence. Society is confronted with an apparently antisocial influence and reacts to it on the low intellectual plane of trying to destroy it.