Summary: "Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too." Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety." To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe." This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years. Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe. Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence. The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug
