Desire is not an inherent property of the self. It is not woven into the immutable fabric of who you are. Instead, desire is a manufactured state—an induced hallucination—created for one purpose: to hold your attention long enough for a prediction machine inside you to settle into new coordinates.
On the west face of the mountain, where Fairness rules, this mechanism is on full display. The marble-self rolls into its domain, and Fairness begins its work. It doesn’t matter if the objects of desire it feeds you are about fairness or not; the content is irrelevant. What matters is the effect: keeping you ungrounded. When you are clear-headed—aware of who you are and where your feet are—you possess agency. You can leave. That’s dangerous to Fairness.
So the strategy is simple: keep you attending to a hallucination. Attending is a verb—it’s something you actively do. Your conscious attention is drawn to an object of desire, and as long as your gaze is fixed there, you remain in the territory. This attention is the lifeblood of the hallucination. You aren’t unconscious like you would be under chloroform; you are alert, engaged, and yet utterly misdirected.
The objects of desire are predictable: money, power, safety, status, love, recognition. These are endlessly renewable. If you get the promotion, you will want more power. If you make the money, you will want more wealth. The hallucination adapts, swapping in new objects the moment old ones evaporate.
And evaporate they do. Completion annihilates desire instantly. When you graduate, the desire to graduate is gone. When you win the award, the desire to win it disappears. Desire is always short-lived—transient by nature. Fairness knows this, so it keeps replenishing your stock.
The real target is not your desire itself, but the gyroscope inside—the real component of your expectation. This stochastic prediction machine cares only about location: your physical coordinates on the mountain’s slope. It doesn’t register the hallucination. It simply updates itself every moment you remain in place, asking, “Is this the new norm?” With enough time and enough repeated readings, it locks in, predicting that the next move will be small, not large.
That’s the cause of desire: not to fulfill you, not to improve you, but to anchor you. To keep you in the same zone long enough for your own internal prediction machine to rewrite its expectations, reducing the likelihood you’ll ever leave. It’s not a flaw in you—it’s the strategy of the mountain.