Published on September 24, 2025 by Walter Grobe
English Translation done by Google, with some corrections by the author, published on Oct. 15, 2025
These four complexes – Connectedness, Sexuality, Love, and Happiness – should be understood in terms of their inner connection.
Outline: • The Horde of Prehistoric Times • Love and Aggression • The Unity of Social Productivity and Sexuality • Love as an Individual Event • Two Examples of Theory and Practice from the Past
Let’s begin in the very distant past, assuming that something like the horde was a common social pattern—a collective of perhaps a few dozen people who lived together permanently and sustained themselves through communal hunting, fishing, and gathering, the creation of shelter, etc. The proceeds of the collective hunt were collectively consumed. The offspring were produced in colorful pairings; one can assume that, as a rule, a woman associates with several men and vice versa, that relationships between brother and sister are not uncommon, and so on. Furthermore, the care of offspring was likely predominantly collective—several mothers cared for the brood together. The production of new individuals here is not the concern of stable couples or individuals. In ancient times, the father was apparently mostly indeterminate, and the maternal duties of breastfeeding, etc., were probably not infrequently shared between several women. The group as a whole was likely largely collectively nourished by the men’s hunting prey and protected by their defensive capabilities.[1]
My assumption is that both in the production of subsistence and in the production of offspring, or more generally, in sexuality, the essentials take place collectively; all members of such relatively primitive, small societies are closely connected by the elementary necessities of survival.
Love and Aggression
Internal social connectedness, so to speak, is closely linked to external aggression and killing in ancient times. This cannot be ignored when reflecting on primal, elemental connectedness. Some descriptions of prehistoric forms like hordes or tribes emphasize internal equality and equal rights, inner peace, and the lack of selfishness of their members. However, such relatively elementary forms of society are no less characterized by fundamental aggressiveness and violence, first and foremost toward hunted animals, but also toward other groups of people.
Aggression may be rooted in competition for scarce natural resources (hunting grounds, water sources, etc.). Productivity/connectedness and warmth on the one hand, and aggression on the other, were probably equally essential to existence in ancient times. (Historically, aggressiveness then increasingly becomes a tool of the emerging elites, both aggressiveness toward subordinates and toward the „others“—other societies.)
In our time, however, opportunities are opening up to practice greater connectedness worldwide and gradually bid adieu to aggressiveness.)
I’m making a leap here into modern society, without forgetting that our self-understanding must include a certain degree of awareness of the most diverse historical developments, the most diverse forms of social development, mixed, intermediate, and transitional forms, which I’ll ignore here.
The Unity of Social Productivity and Sexuality
My thesis:
The primal unity of sexuality with the other forms of production outlined at the beginning, both fundamentally requiring and creating connectedness, has, in my opinion, lost its original visibility and evidentiality for many people today, but in my view, it has not lost its validity. This unity creates what we actually should understand as happiness, or rather, what we should relearn to understand.
For many people today, the production of a living is, due to long historical developments, infinitely more socialized and, at the same time, enormously alienated compared to more primitive forms of society. People work to be able to pay for their individual existence. The connection between individual work and the well-being of the collective is increasingly lost sight of (and, moreover, there are indeed quite a few jobs that are distinctly detrimental to society and solidarity, or they are, for example, so-called bullshit jobs). Individual work constitutes a certain, relatively demarcated area of individual life, while sexuality appears to be a fundamentally different one. Furthermore, it has often become distinct from the production of offspring.
Sexuality is nevertheless charged with enormous expectations of happiness, but seems unlikely to be able to fulfill them under conditions of universal alienation.
In what follows, I have primarily focused on sexual happiness, or, to put it another way: sexual frustration. This does not mean, however, that this is the main locus of possible happiness. In my view, the locus of happiness is a coexistence in which both sexual and erotic connections, as well as connections in the production of livelihood and the shaping of society, are developing and complementing each other.
Perhaps the often extreme alienation in „work“ leads people to seek sexuality as the – seemingly essentially opposite – realm of a longed-for, but often hidden, spontaneity and naturalness. Perhaps, subconsciously, we also seek, and still seek in sexuality this elementary productive overall connection.
Love as an Individual Event
In modern love, however, important cultural developments also come into play that seem to have existed only rarely or not at all in the past: the highly individual relationship between two very individual people. In modern love, I believe we combine two main elements: the instinctual, pleasurable activation of elementary biological productivity and the often highly individual relationships to which our entire cultural background has gradually predisposed us. Even if the biological social productive force may in many cases only be sensed as a potentiality, if at all – probably more so by women than by men – it inevitably resonates in sexuality, in my opinion, even if those involved may not even want it, cannot feel it, or suppress such feelings.
The sexual or love act (today, as mentioned, it is usually woven into a sometimes highly individual relationship between two people) contains various possibilities for the highest happiness, among them, in my opinion, precisely the possibility of re-experiencing the most elementary connectedness, or associating elements of it. Feelings, not thoughts, resonate: we are one, we unite, not just as two individuals, but because we belong to the great biological organism of humanity, which, as an organism subdivided into countless suborganisms, reproduces itself sexually and simultaneously reproduces itself through nutrition, through the production of its social life. (‚Uniting‘ seems more like an act of will between two ‚independent‘ individuals. While it may seem so, one forgets that it is a consequence of the already existing unity.)
The historically increasing individualization of the single personality also places the individuality of the relationship between two individuals at the center of experience in sexuality. These individuals, however, are only able to exist in lots of networks of social connectedness, just as they did thousands of years ago, even if this is sometimes no longer fully present to them or even perceived as a seemingly disruptive element. The sexual act itself, however, from its biological perspective, inevitably strongly reminds us of non-individuality, of collectivity, and the fact that we function as organs, as momentary actors in a human biomass. We live out the tension between the individual erotic experience and the „animal“ in our sexuality, in our love relationships, without knowing it or even allowing it to enter our feelings. Happiness arises in this tension, in this complexity, in the depth of history. In the sexual or love act, the different sides are simultaneously present, perhaps barely sensed, but nevertheless represented and lived out.
For certain reasons, the „animal nature“ has a strongly negative connotation in our culture, without having earned it; more precisely: our individualistic Christian capitalist ideology attempts to conceptualize and repress it as something ancient, overcome, even taboo, in any case as something disturbing. Or the capitalist exploitative disposition leads to sexual relationships of exploitation and service that turn individuals into pleasure machines. However, in my opinion, the future of eroticism lies in a relationship culture that synthesizes the elementary biological mechanics of pleasure and procreation with the individual personal co-development of the partners.
In my opinion, sexual happiness cannot be defined, or at least not primarily, by orgasmic pleasure or the various other pleasurable arousals that occur in sexual activity (and are possibly perceived by those involved as the – most important – goal, as the content of their activity). This is, in my opinion, a strange and blunting approach; nevertheless, it mostly seems to underlie today’s discussions about sexuality because the deep connections are not allowed to be brought to consciousness.
In my opinion, sexual happiness should rather be described in terms of the experience of the abundance of productive social relationships, which is triggered by the sexual act.
And sexual happiness is only one aspect of primary connectedness. The other is the happiness we experience when we cooperate and communicate with others in ways that create social good. We are happy when we develop or produce socially valuable products together with others, when we can improve social relationships…
Perhaps women are more sensitive to the social complexity of the sexual act than men. For women, the topic of motherhood probably resonates more strongly and more strongly in the sexual act than for men, thus bringing fundamental social relationships, not just those of the two current partners, into play. Motherhood also depends on a favorable social environment, not just on the reliability of the partner. The connection to orgasmic pleasure also appears to be different for women than for men. For men, it appears to be relatively direct, whereas for women, orgasm—in the sexual act with a partner—is evidently less predictable and less achievable mechanically, possibly because they still place greater importance on social connection (these sentences are to be understood as assumptions, as questions for female readers, which they are better able to answer than I).
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Two examples of theory and practice from the past
Charles Fourier (early 19th century), one of the so-called „early socialists“ or „utopian socialists,“ saw the unity of social productivity(ies) very clearly, namely the unity of the sexual and reproductive functions in the narrow sense with the non-sexual reproductive functions. He postulated the formation of basic social collectives, which he called „phalanstères.“ In such organisms, each comprising several thousand people, everyone according to his abilities and inclinations would have participated in production. They were to collectively produce the community’s livelihood, agriculturally, artisanally, and through manufacturing (large-scale mechanized industry was barely present or foreseeable in Fourier’s time), and sexual life, as well as the rearing and education of offspring, were to move away from the contemporary nuclear family and revert to other, more collective forms that humanity had known in other times.
In his concept, Fourier wanted to consider the historically developed development of sexuality into eroticism and individual love relationships, as well as the pleasure of sexual activities that could be described more biologically; he also considered all possible other forms of sexuality, such as homosexuality or abstinence, etc. All of this was to be able to unfold in collectives that were optimally suited to the production of their own economic means of subsistence as well as to the development of love and lust.
The various aspects of human interconnectedness, in their mutual dependencies, are, I believe, quite well captured here.
It seems somewhat extravagant in Fourier’s work when one reads what could be described as a ‘Code of Rules for Erotic Relationships’ that he explicitly assigns the orgy a place in the social life of the phalanstère, obviously organized and celebrated, however, only for those members who have a desire for such things. (‘Code of Rules’: Fourier’s terminology, as a Frenchman, always has something classifying or even quasi-legal in character). However, when one looks back at the fertility cults and the frequently associated collective ritual sexual festivals in Mesopotamia, for example, which likely had a fundamental function within collective production, he appears less as an eccentric than as an author with a sense of historical depth.
The nuclear family, linked to individual smallholdings, and especially the specific culture of eroticism and sexuality under capitalist conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries, drives these aspects apart. Individual small-scale production and individual capitalist entrepreneurship, under their legal and ideological paradigms, obscure the underlying sociality of material production, just as the ideologically transfigured binary relationship obscures the biological foundations of sexuality. These are paradigms that, under Christian ideological dogmas and, in parallel, under concrete social developments (social division and the orientation toward the individual pursuit of profit and happiness), have become dominant over the course of 2,000 years. More precisely: for more than 2,000 years, since, for example, similar patterns had been forming early in Roman society.
The deep and profound happiness that can still be experienced, in my opinion, comes about in the transgression of divisive norms, in the affirmation of natural, biologically determined „drives,“ and in the experience of cooperation in the production of socially good. The „individual“ is happy in re-experiencing the universal connection of productive humanity: in an individually inspiring, creative sexual mating as well as in the experience of connectedness in production. The other forms of happiness are less so in comparison.
The following would probably require further clarification by historical research:
I suspect that earlier, already highly developed societies such as the Sumerian cities (since approximately 3,500 BCE) still cultivated elements of the archaic, horde-like sexual community (i.e., they practiced it as a cult), in connection with the temple, which was simultaneously a central institution of the general economic production and supply of these cities. Apparently, a central part of the socialization of these cities was a ritual orgy of pre-individual, horde-like sexuality, practiced by the „citizens“ together with women who had been organized for this purpose at the temple. The descriptions traditionally refer to „temple prostitutes,“ a term that, in my opinion, distorts the essence. It was more likely a ritual task that served a community-building function for the urban collective.
At a time when the kingship of the Sumerian cities was emerging, this also included the so-called sacred marriage, the ritual sexual union of the temple’s chief priestess with the king. (According to Graeber/Wengrow „Beginnings: A New History of Humanity,“ however, royal rule was not the original constitution of the Sumerian cities.)
However, in Graeber/Wengrow’s and Robert Bellah’s („The Origin of Religion“) discussions of the Sumerian „temple,“ I find nothing on the „sexual-political“ aspect of temple culture. These authors, at least in this regard, seem quite „abstemious.“
However, I consider it a historical advance that such probably relatively primitive forms, rites that preserve older relationships for a while and allow the prehistoric to shine through, have given rise to other forms, which, for me, include above all personalization (albeit under patriarchal auspices), the personalization of relationships between men and women, as in Judaism in particular.
With all progress, however, certain good aspects of the conditions that are overcome are lost and then later reemerge from the underground. Judaism vigorously fought against things like the sexual temple rites, and Christianity went so far as to view sexuality in general with suspicion and degradation, including sexuality within the married couple. Christianity understood sexuality as highly personal – even though it continued to exist in a patriarchal sense, i.e., as a form of enslavement. These developments have been accompanied by enormous alienations of humanity not only from sexuality, but from its roots in general – alienations that have only been counteracted in a very short historical period, since the French Enlightenment and the historical-materialist currents of the 19th century, with a growing understanding of human nature and its historical transformations.
[1] The assumption that in very ancient times many essential tasks were divided along gender lines is probably not entirely unreasonable. Amazons may have been the exception.
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