Thanks for pointing to this post. Makes me think that the conflict might not even be about victory of one identity or the other, but rather to merge or not to merge…

The second was this new issue about context and automaticity – that your automatic first order desires are weaker when outside of a familiar context, and this gives you scope to ‘control’ them, or to impose your first order desires instead.

So far I’ve been speaking about travel. But context switching can be more extreme than this. Travel is a temporary measure and not symmetrical with the daily dealings of life that we are use to – you don’t need to think about jobs, or housing, or cleaning, or eating in any long-term sense – everything is immediate. So although travel gives a taster of being out of context, it doesn’t replace a context of some type with a different context of the same type (life A for life B), it swaps one context type for a different context of a
different type (life A for fun-time B). And so the kind of ways in which you change in context B are not always transferable to context A. Make sense, or just nonsense?

So I’m sure you see what I am getting at. (I’m writing this in the middle of a library in a primary school, overhearing the teacher from the class next door, and I want to strangle the woman. Throttle. Dead. Just thought you should know.)

So what I’m getting at. Yes – this is all might be nonsense, but it sounds like sense to me. Thus a motivation for a longer trip where self-fending is necessary sounds to me like a good way to test this idea, because that really would be (even if for only 6 months) a life
A/life B swap. I’m guessing that if you had to ask John he might say whether this makes any sense at all (I’m not sure what there is to be said about returning to context A, and whether context B has changed any of those automatic first order desires).

I’m still trying to figure out how works out for me – since obviously it looks like I’ve done the life A for life B swap – but it doesn’t feel very exciting. Perhaps this is because I was not in the right frame of mind when I arrived. My other explanation is that the context switch actually wasn’t that dramatic. In certain ways I suppose it is, but culturally and socially, its not particularly inspired, in many ways more repressed than Johannesburg, I think. Strangely, I find people here have a narrower concept of life than people from South Africa (on average) – so instead of learning you find yourself constantly trying to explain. This is a generalisation though, its not quite as bad as all that, but I’m just trying to explain my experience such that it fits my theory (very unscientific!)

Alright. I’m off to put on my gloves, find a rope or a wire or something, maybe a sock to stop the screaming. I think the children will grow up better people for it. I’ll try to blog from prison (I wonder if there are any prison blogs….)

Now this idea is just part one. You see, I like this idea of desires, and orders of desires. A first order desire is something immediate to me. I want to eat the chocolate. A second order desire has to do with what we desire our first order desires. I want to be a person who wants to eat chocolate. Or I want to be a person who is not tempted by chocolate. Whatever. One is to do with how we interact with the world, the other to do with how we want to interact with the world. But a little more abstractly, the first is basically who we are and what defines our behaviour, the second is our own ideal of who we want to be. A person in harmony *is* the person they want to be, their first order desires are the same as their second order desires. They are not character-hypocrits (as we all are).

Now part three, put these concepts together. In general, in the day-to-day routine of life, we have a set of predefined first order desires. These arise automatically out of context. You finish work, you are hungry, you are too lazy to cook, and macdonalds pops into your mind. Though your second order desire is to eat healthier and learn to cook, the first order automised response is too big. So you fail.
But see what happens when out of context. You no longer have those strong first order desires which arise in a familiar context – just because your neurons are firing differently. What does this mean? It means that you somehow have the ability to allow your second order desires to dictate your first order desires – i.e. to become the person you want to be.

So in your post, you talk about reconciling the two persons. I think this is a mistake. You want to kill the first person, and replace it with a second. Travel, then, in this sense, is a sort of therapy. A tool for becoming the person you want to be. Of course it also helps you to realise your second order desires, but thats a different story altogether.

I think this is actually a crucial reason why this has become so important. Its a means to a betterness. Of course, *travel* is not strictly necessary – any proper attempt at switching your head context out of automatic mode will help in everyday life, but travel is just an easy way of doing this.

I like this as a base. No idea if any scientific theory backs it up, though