Mıke Gοgulskı on: challenging monogamy.

I always welcome input from other people on this blog. After my entry on A society based on love, a few people said they would like to hear more about my opposition to “romantic love.” I plan on doing so eventually, but Mike Gogulski (a frequent commenter on this blog) sent me his own views on the topic, so I thought you would appreciate them (I got his permission, of course).

Dear Francois,

Like I said, I think your post gets very close to something essential.

You don’t say enough, however, to know where it leads you. Let’s see if we’re talking about the same things.

[T]he three enemies of the people are monotheism, monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that you’re getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind. And the Gaian mind is what we’re calling the psychedelic experience. It’s an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet, and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience, the compass of the self can be set. And that’s the idea: that we’re figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, intelligence, intelligence. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

The words of Terrence McKenna, on the album “Spacetime Continuum with Terence McKenna – Alien Dreamtime”, to which I have not listened to in long years, even after his death a while back. But since I read your post, this filthy trinity that he mentions, monotheism, monogamy, and monotony, have echoed around my thoughts.

I used to take a lot of drugs back then. Even then, McKenna’s bullshit about the “gaian mind”, planetary consciousness, his primitivism and his millennialism were nonsense to me. Still, I saw a man from whom things could be learned.

I’ve been living polyamorously and honestly about it for nearly 10 years. Since adopting it, I have converted a handful of people, most of them women I loved or still love, to the idea that the definition of romantic love as we have been exposed to from our culture is in fact abominable. That we are expected to deny ourselves the most basic, the most intimate, the closest possible and most important aspects of ourselves when we make this diabolical “bargain” to be in love with someone.

I have seen the power of challenging this idea, again and again and again. Monogamy is not human nature. It is especially not a part of male human nature. There are powerful socio-physical-genetic motivations toward monogamy for the female, but even there the fact exists that the “rightness” of monogamy is nothing more than a social construct, founded, as most of them are, on lies.

I could go on. I suspect that having written this, though, that you will join in my heresy. If not, so be it, but enough’s been said to know. If you agree with me, though, about this, I would like to find how we might sing in concert to contribute to the destruction of an institution even more hideous than the state. If this isn’t your song as well, so be it. But you gave a hint…

Best,
Mike

Yes, I agree with you about monogamy. I have always thought that monogamy, as an enforced institution, was a way to keep people isolated and running an efficiently indoctrinating family unit. I support the emotional revolution, polyamory, anti-breeding, and any other attempts at destroying the statist model. If there’s anything I can do to help, then I’ll definitely do it.