Pleasure is the universal vice, and, like a vice, it grips us all. There are other tools that shape who we are, but they all act in the context of pleasure.
Dopamine acting in the brain – that’s what the books, web pages, experts say pleasure is. Worms have it and know that dirt tastes good. How much dopamine would it take for me to eat dirt. Less than I think – I imagine.
My pleasure lives in a different apartment than my cognition. Perhaps the apartment below. So that my cognition can hear pleasure rudely fucking and playing music too loudly.
But if I follow the signs placed to a mine of pleasure, in a place, that my compatriots find desirable, they’ll hand me a pick and shovel, and praise my effort. To a social animal pleasure is currency.
To a solitary creature, dopamine is life’s guide. Only fear and sloth mitigate it’s influence. And what are fear and sloth, but a means to preserve the self long enough to gain more pleasure?
To a social animal, the pleasure of closeness; the fear of aloneness; the need to care for the self balanced against the need to care for the group – which in-round cares for the self; are the drivers of action and choice.
If I find my pleasure in a place that splits me from the agenda of my society, I am shunned. It is for me. It is for them. We humans are pleased when we have consensus in thought and deed – even truer when the shunned find others like themselves.
Pleasure splits and binds in infinite ways – searching for the most successful way to preserve life.
Pleasure lends itself to mixed metaphor. It is everything that has ever felt good.