Pursuing praxis

You’ve met them. I sure have. The people that make you want to drop everything, forget everything, the split-second they flit across your mind or chance upon your life. It’s rather disconcerting, for an island like me. I’ve been wondering about this property of magnetism, and the myriad related tangents: does The Magnet know he’s magnetic? Is it recipient-specific, or do most people who know The Magnet agree that he is magnetic? What is the basis of the magnetism? Does it "run in families" (a phrase I dislike, but it carries some clunky semiotic value)? Are certain personality traits correlated with magnetism? Of course, what I’d love to know is: what causes magnetism?

Well, let’s start as Aristotle did, with observation and description. Let’s know the beast.

Perhaps the most unusual thing I’ve noticed about people with magnetic personalities (and yes, my personal experience is almost exclusively populated by men), is a certain irrationality, a contradiction: the utter joy of their presence, coupled with one or more huge obstacles for smooth-sailing. Some examples (drawn from others’ experiences as well): falling head over heels for a married man when "I’m totally against that sort of thing!"; seeming to touch souls with someone whose personal ideology hacks at the roots of your own existence; spend hours tallking, utterly content, when you meant to "tell them off" and be gone forever in five minutes; coming back for more and more when their behavior points to "all things bad".

What gives? Especially when we know better? Is it simply a matter of forgetting oneself? Of lacking dicipline? If so, why these cases and not the remaining 95% you handle with ease? Is there some key point that’s being missed, forgotten, weakened, that is the soft spot in the levee? What is it? Why does the mind surge ahead so readily with these people, especially when lives, circumstances, backgrounds, and worldviews are often so different? Is it a dallying in the exotic? A romanticizing of otherness? A discovered chasm in the edifice of self-esteem filled by the charisma of another?

I posit that power plays a role in here, somewhere, to some degree. I don’t mean literal electricity, or the exploitative kind of power, but some delicious gap between you and the other that makes you want to turn over yourself to this person with more. It can be more experience, worldliness, brains, money, adventurousness, extroversion. They are also, almost inevitably, the sort of people that make you feel like you’re the center of their world when they’re with you. They are "extremely present," focused on you and your time together, and time just seems to stop, although appointments and obligations may go sailing by. As to the power, they give the impression that with their presence you  will effortlessly glide through the maze of questions and details and trials and errors, in a distilled teacher-student fashion, the only requirement of you being a token dance that shows off your best qualities (which strangely never diversify, multiply, or deepen; it’s always the same old line-up).

In a broadly metaphorical way, it’s like the morphine addict with an IV of morphine-on-demand. The morphine is the giver, the thumb does its dance on the way to the button, but it’s the experience OF morphine that creates the addiction: the combination of one’s psychological state, and its "fit" with the stimulus, that creates an output, a feeling, that is damn near undeniable and irresistable.

Aha. There it is. Is The Magnet just the vehicle for a feeling we crave? And do we - likely - mistake a magnet for its effects, and chase after the magnet without inquiring whether we have any of our own? Or inquire about how magnets work, so we can harness their powers at home, and without the side-effects of tolerated irrationalities?

As much as I dislike to admit it, for I’ve fallen and fallen hard, I think Magnetic People are those who fit our unaddressed needs like a puzzle piece, and create a connection so the juice flows freely and we feel amazingly alive. But the truth, I think, is that they are not an indispensible connection, that this aliveness is possible to us from ourselves. And our wiser selves know it’s silly, stupid, or dangerous to go chasing after someone to make us whole, especially when the logistics are so often very, very poor.

As is my typical strategy, I want to turn such experiences from sob stories or pangful reminisces, into mirrors for reflecting myself back to me, and then into information and data, and then into tests, and finally into bricks that will help me make myself into what I aim to be: a fully rational, integrated (ah
I love those two words together) human me.  

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Addendum: I’d like to take a small, qualified step backward. I remembered the power of what Rand called sanctioning, and the fact that it can only come from another person, and it does make you feel fantastic, and it can make the world just dazzlingly bright.

However, I think it differs significantly from magnetism (or being magnetized by someone, if you will). Experientially, you don’t feel a compulsion to be with the person sanctioning you, you don’t require their presence or continued attention to sustain the awesome feeling. In fact, once can sometimes be enough, whereas if you were magnetized it would be tantalizing, frustrating, or darn near intolerable to be just magnetized once. Also, for the most part, sanctioning is on more equal terms, it’s a two-way street of recognition, even if the two people differ in absolute level of achievement. On the other hand, a person gets drawn in by The Magnet and seemingly benefits tremendously - but what of The Magnet himself? No idea. By the paucity of hearsay, stereotype, and personal experience, I’m inclined to think that most Magnets don’t realize they are Magnets. But every sanctioner knows he is one inasmuch as he is aware of his actions and his relations with others.

So, I think being sanctioned and being magnetized can seem quite similar, in that they make you feel fantastic and the experience is dependent on another person, but the nature and fallout of the experiences are different. Sanctioning is independent , chosen, and rational (given that humans are social animals by decent and by choice). Magnetizing is dependent, unchosen and the associated evidence points to it being irrational. It’s irrational in that it plays upon unnoticed gaps in one’s psychology, and by strength of feeling compels us to ignore very real difficulties in relating with the person.

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Addendum No. 2: I’ve since been told that all of the above is just an intellectualized explanation of why women are attracted to jerks. I disagree. None of the magnetic people I’ve known (or been told about) were jerks, at least not in the stereotypical sense. If they were, they were the sort that didn’t know it and/or tried hard not to be. (Perhaps that’s the worst kind.) But I picture jerks as inherently valueless an inimical to my associating with them. This contradicts my general impression of Magnetic People (or should I just call them Magnetic Men: MM’s? hahaha), who are generally quite compelling in many (though not all) aspects of their character and achievements. Is the "though not all" the sticking point? The point where someone transitions from quirky-normal to asshole?

Maybe I haven’t thought sufficiently about what constitutes a jerk. I’m not convinced this would be good use of my time.