It seems to me like you’re overestimating the value people place on companionate love/the “warm fuzzy” feeling many people get from physical and sometimes emotional closeness to another (which is what I associate with oxytocin). It’s a mild nice feeling, not an “oh my god I must have more of this right now and forever” feeling that would hijack your brain and value system in the way you speculate that trying heroin might.
I can’t comment very well on whether heroin actually would hijack my values if I tried it, although I remember in a drugs and behaviour class I took once there were anecdotes of doctors who were fully functional with easy access to and frequent use of heroin, in the time before it was illegal, and also stories about Rat Park, where the idea was that rats in a deprived environment took water laced with cocaine excessively, but those in an enriched environment were less interested in that. I speculate that many people place a high value on companionate love having been through significant periods of loneliness, rather than because the experience of a hit of oxytocin is much like the stories I’ve heard some people tell about what a hit of heroin is like. Also I note that you sometimes say “love” when you mean companionate love specifically, and many people who say something like “love is very important to me” aren’t being as precise in their language or thought as you tend to be, and conflate companionate love, libido-rooted sexual desire, limerance, and social acceptance into one thing, and say they value that. And there are definitely a lot of people who do some pretty insane-seeming things in pursuit of a combination of sexual attraction, limerance, and a feeling of closeness which is antithetical to loneliness. But just the warm fuzzy feeling? Less so.
I also think the stories of people throwing away large amounts of things you value and putting up with situations which to you would be strongly net-negative “for love”, aside from being about the more imprecise conception of love most people use, are also salient to you because they’re dysfunctional. There are, I expect, many people who have functional oxytocin receptors and just live their lives in perfectly sensible ways that wouldn’t come to your attention as a problem, or even very notable. Companionate love is just one feeling among many. Many/most people start out with little ability to regulate their emotions, as small children, and then grow and mature and by adulthood, throw fewer tantrums and handle their emotions better. And I expect if you gained the ability to feel the emotion(s) corresponding to oxytocin, you would handle them with about the same level of maturity that you manage with the other emotions you have. It is true that some people do stupid things because they don’t know how to integrate their emotions and their thoughts into a sensible response to the world around them, quite a few people seem to struggle with their feelings, but this isn’t just true with respect to companionate love, it’s also true of anger, sadness, shame, limerance… etc. Having experienced both limerance and companionate love, I think if you can handle the former, you can handle the latter—limerance definitely feels stronger and more cognition-distorting in my experience.
With all that said, your post does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t felt a common emotion. If you were, say, someone who had never felt anger, you could likewise look at the world around you and go “wow, people sure are doing some insane things while under the influence of this emotion, I’m glad I don’t have it”. And that would be pretty accurate, and likely true of most emotions.
I say most of this to suggest that if there is, in future, the ability to give yourself functional oxytocin receptors, you probably have less to fear from that than from other mind-altering interventions you might think of. It’s pretty mild, and most people in a good life situation with a decent amount of maturity can handle a warm feeling in their chest without throwing their life away in pursuit of more. Our culture is not good at saying “be reasonable about your pursuit of love”, or even teasing apart different aspects of the culturally-approved thing-you’re-supposed-to-throw-your-life-away-for-like-in-the-movies, which is unhelpful to those trying to navigate new emotions as teenagers, but I bet if you felt a warm fuzzy feeling one day, you’d be just fine.
Another thought I had: Likely if you had grown up with functional oxytocin receptors, your values would be different than how they are now, sure—you’d value a thing you have no reason to value right now, and that likely would have had many effects on the path your life has taken. But that doesn’t imply that if, as an adult, you get functional oxytocin receptors somehow, you will become the person you would have been if you’d grown up with them from birth. Think less vampire-transformation, more “I didn’t realize my nose was plugged, this food actually does taste good now”.
It seems to me like you’re overestimating the value people place on companionate love/the “warm fuzzy” feeling many people get from physical and sometimes emotional closeness to another (which is what I associate with oxytocin). It’s a mild nice feeling, not an “oh my god I must have more of this right now and forever” feeling that would hijack your brain and value system in the way you speculate that trying heroin might.
I can’t comment very well on whether heroin actually would hijack my values if I tried it, although I remember in a drugs and behaviour class I took once there were anecdotes of doctors who were fully functional with easy access to and frequent use of heroin, in the time before it was illegal, and also stories about Rat Park, where the idea was that rats in a deprived environment took water laced with cocaine excessively, but those in an enriched environment were less interested in that. I speculate that many people place a high value on companionate love having been through significant periods of loneliness, rather than because the experience of a hit of oxytocin is much like the stories I’ve heard some people tell about what a hit of heroin is like. Also I note that you sometimes say “love” when you mean companionate love specifically, and many people who say something like “love is very important to me” aren’t being as precise in their language or thought as you tend to be, and conflate companionate love, libido-rooted sexual desire, limerance, and social acceptance into one thing, and say they value that. And there are definitely a lot of people who do some pretty insane-seeming things in pursuit of a combination of sexual attraction, limerance, and a feeling of closeness which is antithetical to loneliness. But just the warm fuzzy feeling? Less so.
I also think the stories of people throwing away large amounts of things you value and putting up with situations which to you would be strongly net-negative “for love”, aside from being about the more imprecise conception of love most people use, are also salient to you because they’re dysfunctional. There are, I expect, many people who have functional oxytocin receptors and just live their lives in perfectly sensible ways that wouldn’t come to your attention as a problem, or even very notable. Companionate love is just one feeling among many. Many/most people start out with little ability to regulate their emotions, as small children, and then grow and mature and by adulthood, throw fewer tantrums and handle their emotions better. And I expect if you gained the ability to feel the emotion(s) corresponding to oxytocin, you would handle them with about the same level of maturity that you manage with the other emotions you have. It is true that some people do stupid things because they don’t know how to integrate their emotions and their thoughts into a sensible response to the world around them, quite a few people seem to struggle with their feelings, but this isn’t just true with respect to companionate love, it’s also true of anger, sadness, shame, limerance… etc. Having experienced both limerance and companionate love, I think if you can handle the former, you can handle the latter—limerance definitely feels stronger and more cognition-distorting in my experience.
With all that said, your post does make sense to me, from the perspective of someone who hasn’t felt a common emotion. If you were, say, someone who had never felt anger, you could likewise look at the world around you and go “wow, people sure are doing some insane things while under the influence of this emotion, I’m glad I don’t have it”. And that would be pretty accurate, and likely true of most emotions.
I say most of this to suggest that if there is, in future, the ability to give yourself functional oxytocin receptors, you probably have less to fear from that than from other mind-altering interventions you might think of. It’s pretty mild, and most people in a good life situation with a decent amount of maturity can handle a warm feeling in their chest without throwing their life away in pursuit of more. Our culture is not good at saying “be reasonable about your pursuit of love”, or even teasing apart different aspects of the culturally-approved thing-you’re-supposed-to-throw-your-life-away-for-like-in-the-movies, which is unhelpful to those trying to navigate new emotions as teenagers, but I bet if you felt a warm fuzzy feeling one day, you’d be just fine.
Another thought I had: Likely if you had grown up with functional oxytocin receptors, your values would be different than how they are now, sure—you’d value a thing you have no reason to value right now, and that likely would have had many effects on the path your life has taken. But that doesn’t imply that if, as an adult, you get functional oxytocin receptors somehow, you will become the person you would have been if you’d grown up with them from birth. Think less vampire-transformation, more “I didn’t realize my nose was plugged, this food actually does taste good now”.