A Human Strategy, Matt Berry aphorism 99
99
The habitual contact with a stimulus (or collective stimuli) plus the subject’s inevitable reaction(s) create what I call a drive. This drive becomes weaker when the stimulus is kept at a distance over time, most effectively when severed from all sensory contact. Each move towards the stimulus increases the force of this river ... and each move away adds another brick to the dam of this now undiverted energy. The drive weakens. Below the dam, the river lowers. However, the spring of energy remains, and having no channel in which to pour, its force accumulates. That is to say, the tendency toward a particular response has decreased in direct proportion to the increase in the potential for a response to any stimulus which might happen to show itself — whether that be the reintroduction of the old stimulus or the introduction of a new one.
On the one hand, the subject now has a deep, empty riverbed into which many other tributaries are still pouring ... while the main body of water, behind the dam, accumulates a tremendous reserve of force ... until the dam finally bursts, the force eroding the original river to greater depths or spilling over the banks and creating a whole new course ... becoming a new river that deserves a new name. That is to say, he drudges up deeper reasons for his previous tendencies or he is compelled to make contact with the most available and gratifying series of stimuli ... smug in the pursuit of a new “line of reasoning.”