Recently the New York Times ran an article about a social artifact that uniquely characterizes our times: the twenty-something polycule. A “polycule,” for the uninitiated, is a brutal portmanteau of “polyamorous” and “molecule,” or, it seems, the unit of an ever-growing erotic mass. It’s like a couple but fractally more grotesque.

What struck me wasn’t the article’s explanation of this peculiar phenomenon, but the mantra that two members of the polycule-in-question use to ensure their personal emotional health when faced with the greater whole: “Feelings aren’t facts.”

This couple-within-the-polycule repeats their creed whenever the specter of jealousy arises amidst their amorous extra-couplings. If (as is often the case), the woman finds herself with more sex partners than the man, and these extra parties are more potent, virile, and pleasure-giving (I suppose “traditional masculinity” has value somewhere), the man would simply repeat “feelings aren’t facts” to reassure himself that even if his beloved was having great sex without him, she’d always at least come home to cuddle, which naturally makes all the difference to the modern man.

Any well-balanced human being can easily pierce the seven-layered pleasure veil of the n-dimensional polycule, so in and of itself, I found the story meaningless. The mantra “feelings aren’t facts” struck me deeper, however, and not just for its oily power to smooth the waters of jealousy.

The saying, more than justifying unstable and socially destructive relationships, also reveals a deeply inhuman and inhumane view of ourselves and our world, a mantra that achieves its goal of palliating polyamorous strife by destroying the very thing that makes a relationship worth anything in the first place: the person.

The fact that feelings and personhood go together should be obvious. Feelings are one of the ways we know that we are a person rather than a mere collection of muscle, bone, and nerves (viz. a biological automaton).

I know who I am in part because I feel certain ways about certain things and people. Those passions are what animate my spirit, cause me to choose the things I wish to do, help me form and reinforce my beliefs about the world, and guide me towards friends and away from foes. Feelings, in other words, help make me who I am. Hardly a thing to dismiss.

Still, while feelings may not be facts in some people’s minds, they are things we make and live with (in that sense they are literally facta, or something made). The crude distinction between a “fact” (something real—something that matters) and a “feeling” (something “we just make up”—something that doesn’t matter), is highly destructive of the very self and of the “facts” that one pretends to privilege by asserting it.

If we turn to the relationship polycule example above, we can fully dispel this illusory distinction. We begin by asking: what is a relationship?

At its simplest, we might say it’s a social tie between two individuals, but this reduction can’t be enough because there are many social ties between individuals. I buy groceries from the same store and see the same cashiers often enough that we recognize each other, but we wouldn’t say that I have a relationship with these grocers, though we do have a “social tie” (i.e. as a customer/seller). One might even have co-workers that one sees regularly but not often, with whom one has ties but not a “relationship.”

What makes a relationship different than these other interactions is precisely the feelings we have about them. These feelings may be affection and love, as with friends and lovers, or they may be hatred and enmity, as with rivals and enemies. Nevertheless, what makes these particular people part of our lives beyond the routine is precisely that we have “feelings” about them.

Feelings, therefore, are facts: they form the facta of our relationships. Further, it’s precisely the nature of my feelings that determines the nature of my relationships, i.e. whether this particular person is a friend or enemy to me. I also know that their relationship to me is based on their feelings about me and mine about them (and woe betide one of us should we make a mistake or be tricked about our mutual feelings).

The attempt to deny feelings as facts, even to destroy one’s feelings at least insofar as they relate to one’s social life (which is the practical effect of the maxim), is an effort to destroy the self. The members of the polycule probably don’t realize that. In fact, they’d likely vehemently deny it, but it obtains nonetheless.

On the surface, their denials seem effective. What, after all, could more heighten one’s self than the satisfaction of one’s desires, especially that most powerful impetus of all, the erotic? Isn’t this true maximalization of the self?

Ostensibly, both critics and supporters would agree. The critic may decry the practice, but they both would claim that the polycule, and its rigorous disciplining of feelings, is an attempt to maximize “autonomy” and thereby promote an ultimate, individual self-hood.

In order to understand why the above argument is wrong, that the polycule actually destroys the self rather than building it, we need first to examine the more obvious but mistaken assumption (the one implicitly shared by the members of the polycule even if some of them would deny it) that other people inherently constrain one’s autonomy.

Members of the polycule face a central tension in their lives: they want the pleasure that comes from other people, but only if it fits exactly with their own unconstrained desires. These two goals are in tension because, while other people can be a source of legitimate pleasure, other people also have their own goals and desires that may not align with those of the people who interact with them.

These desires especially constrain those people who are in relationships with each other since they interact and depend upon one another so much. Because of this conflict, any relationship must involve a set of compromises that circumscribe one’s actions and set them against the desires (or really druthers) of the companions to the relationship, causing one person to sacrifice personal pleasure for the relationship’s overall stability. These compromises mean that sometimes any given person in that relationship will be unhappy at the other’s expense. This unhappiness is a problem for the pleasure-maximizer.

The self-actualized, autonomous polyculites believe they have a solution to this problem. These polyamorous elementary particles operate under the dubious theory that if they can scientifically arrange each person’s particular pleasures into a crystalline form, they can manage all of their pleasures and realize them without anyone suffering painful constraints from conflicts. The perfect planned utopia.

Feelings hinder the process of reification because feelings demand we recognize the humanity and integrity of our fellows, and consider that our actions may hurt them.

One of the key ways they manage this tension is by diving deeper into the paradox (and this deep-dive presents the strangest irony of polyamory): by expanding the number of “partners” an individual has, one reduces the reliance and imposition of any one partner on any other, thereby decreasing the intensity of any given relationship (and the claims any party to that relationship can make on any other). This allows individuals to be more selfish while simultaneously appearing more altruistic. (Because of the obvious wickedness inherent in this last principle I doubt any polyamorite would recognize this principle explicitly).

They do this because, theoretically, expanding the number of “partners” one has increases the likelihood that someone will want what the self wants at any given time. Any person who feels deprived of one’s own company can likely find another partner to provide their missing desires.

The problem arises when we realize that people aren’t in fact interchangeable and that often, what one wants isn’t merely generic intimacy, but the intimacy of a particular person. That kind of intimacy isn’t fungible, but is actually central to the “feelings” of any given relationship. People assert that “feelings aren’t facts” when they feel a need to make feelings infinitely deniable and illegitimate.

The denial of feelings as facts is essential to the polycule relationship because denying feelings denies the essential core of any of the individual relationships, hollowing out the social tie. It turns from mutual dependence, reliance, and satisfaction, into a series of one-shot, temporary arrangements based on the hedonistic satisfaction of the self and no more, a transformation that strives to make these relationships fungible.

In other words, as much as these people hate the “consumerization” of social relations (what more sophisticated Marxists call “reification”), they act as party-devotees to the concept by trading the recognition of their companions’ humanity (or their unique individuality) for their own pleasure.

Feelings hinder the process of reification because feelings demand we recognize the humanity and integrity of our fellows, and consider that our actions may hurt them. Even if we feel a disproportionate amount of pleasure to their pain, their pain is reason enough to abstain from satisfaction. Feelings, in other words, eliminate certain pleasures and “impair” our autonomy.

Ultimately, if one wishes to continue in the polycule, one can only resolve this paradox by destroying both the self and its relationships in an attempt to realize the true fungibility of inter-polycule experiences (I won’t call them “relations”). This destruction is what it means to say that “feelings aren’t facts.”

More particularly, the denial of feelings can’t be a one-party plan. In order for it to work, everyone must deny their feelings—the one having the great sex and the one being denied it—for the one with the great sex might nevertheless begin to long for their unique companion in an “unhealthy” monogamous way. Moreover, ordering the other to deny feelings that one has would no doubt be “unfair.” Thus, the abnegation of the other becomes the abnegation of the self. This path is really the only “kind” way (and leads to a form of psychological euthanasia in the pursuit of ultimate pleasure).

The practical end result is anti-human nihilism asserting that no one (self or other) is truly human, and that all anyone can be is a collection of pleasures (at best) or pains (at worst). The key to this catatheosis (the opposite of apotheosis) is to deny that feelings have any relevance or factual connection to any relationship in the world, which, since we have observed that feelings are central to relationships, means that one must deny the very existence of relationships themselves. This denial leaves the polyculite as someone with no feelings and no relations, or no one. It also means that what we might otherwise call “feelings” like pleasure aren’t really feelings, just stimuli and impulses in an indifferent world.

This raises a bizarre question: what are these people if not human beings with feelings? Do they realize they are so de-personed?

The answer is no because of a key delusion: they believe that instead of human beings existing as ends in and of themselves with basic dignity (how Christian, or even just Kantian!), we are mere entities caught in a succeeding web of arrangements and events without any real selfhood or power to change anything about ourselves or our environment. They believe this state of annihilation to be a kind of pseudo-nirvana, a true reality where there is potential pleasure and pain, but nothing else.

De-humanizing the person and locating them not as a person but as an intersection of phenomena is precisely the purpose and meaning of “intersectionality” and “identity,” a perspective that characterizes the worldview of the polyculites and their fellow travelers.

Intersectionality and identity go together because they are mutually constituting of each other and mutually destructive of self and personhood. If one is merely an intersection of particular identities, then one cannot be unique or deep as an individual. Instead, a person is like a kaleidoscopic mirage of phenomena or an exercise in combinatorial experiences.

In this world, one’s drives, passions, thoughts, or “feelings” do not matter because they merely reflect the casual intersection of things outside the person, an intersection that differs from others only insofar as one set of numbers differs from another, through a superficial combination of similar, sometimes coincidental, sometimes differential, elements that is only superficially deep.

In this world, there are no feelings peculiar to anyone properly said. There are impulses, responses to stimuli, and so forth, but feelings that move beyond an identity, the intersection of those identities, or a basic biological need, fall away and disappear as an illegitimate imposition upon at least the self and maybe the other.

The goal of this philosophy turns into the perfect fulfillment of a self that does not exist except through the realization of those most common denominators either to biological life or the identity of the social group to which one belongs. This abolition of man forces its adherents into the depths of solipsistic nihilism through a denial of that most important aspect of themselves, their personhood. This is a descent into an abyss from which nothing, not society or even true personal happiness, can emerge. They are trapped by their pseudo-truth: that feelings aren’t facts.