Love

There's a strange convergence between Charlie Munger's clinical description of "Liking/Loving Tendency" — where admiration and love enter a feedback loop that can drive "deliberate self-destruction to help what is loved" — and the novelist's version of the same mechanism. In Banks's *Use of Weapons*, a soldier feels his mind slowly polarizing to match the woman who is healing him, "the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented." He doesn't choose this. It happens to him the way a gosling imprints on its mother. What's unsettling is that both Munger and Banks treat this as simultaneously the best thing that can happen to a person and the most structurally dangerous — Munger notes it causes you to "distort other facts to facilitate love," while Banks's poet insists "you could not love what you fully understood." The implication is identical: love works *because* it degrades your capacity for accurate perception. Tiptree's Daniel, drifting through a galactic nucleus, arrives at the same place from the opposite direction — stripped of every intellectual pretension, he finds the one thing he can carry into eternity is love, precisely because it requires no understanding at all.