What is it that we want? We take our soda without the sugar. We cook with fatless butter. We have our sex without the children. We want to drive without producing emissions. We want to waste money on "Green" products which will somehow reduce waste. What we want is clear: pleasure without the consequence. Yet in this pseudo-compromise, is it really pleasure that we are given? Diet soda tastes like shit. Butter without fat is an abomination. Sex with one's organs either bound tight in barriers or, more subtly, neutered with chemicals, is sex one step (or more) removed from the immediacy of true flesh on true flesh.
What we want is pleasure without consequences. What we get is a lessened pleasure with unforeseen and often worse consequences. We give our gold away for shiny foil.
This abdication of self-control is tied in with the fantasy that we have somehow transcended the laws of cause an effect, that we have superseded the age of common sense. We forfeit raw and earthy humanity for the idiocy of ghostliness. And deep below every excessive celebration of this exchange is a pool of vast and gray despair.
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