The Desire Rosetta Stone: For Law, Governance, AI, Psychology, Human Behaviour Science, Ethics and Policy

Artemisia de Vine
Dec 6, 2025
7 min read

Why decoding sexual fantasies revealed a desire-genic metasystem of systems

Sexual fantasies give us the raw, unfiltered truth of how the mechanisms of desire work. After all, all fantasies, whether sexual or not, are wish-fulfilment stories. What are wishes? They are desires we want fulfilled. Not just in sex, but in every area of life where desire exists. It’s just that sexual fantasies give us the undiluted data without moral filters.

Taking a closer look at the structural mechanisms of sexual fantasies reveals a foundational operating system that applies across scales. It is a game-changer in every area of human and tech systems. Law, AI ethics, agentic emergence, psychology, story, play, art and governance.

When I worked out that all sexual fantasies are stories of how we navigate the three paradoxes inherent to desire, it became possible to accurately map individual desire signatures. Applying desire signatures to real-life experiences across thousands of case studies convinced me of its precision. (See more about my unofficial ethnography in my former role as a sex worker and professional dominatrix).

This then reveals how we could map cultural and subcultural signatures too, based on how they have codified their response to the same three paradoxes of desire.

Take the following as a summary overview explanation, not a deep research paper.

What are Desire Signatures?

There is more to it than this, but if forced to say it simply and without context, I’d define desire signatures like this:

The three paradoxes inherent to desire are universal, precultural, precognitive conditions for individuality to exist. If we exist, so do the paradoxes. Paradoxes by nature, are unsolvable. Every moment of every day, we are navigating the tension placed on us by the triangulation of these three paradoxes. Many fields of study explore these pressures, but none have acknowledged that they are unsolvable paradoxes held in triangulation. Each field of study has part of the picture and/or assumes the tensions can be solved. This leads to strategies and narratives that try to collapse, negate or erase at least one of the paradoxes in an attempt to solve the tension.

I am saying that : Desire = The force

Paradoxes = the structure

Triangulation = the operating system

Third Flip = the process that makes this generative, emergent and provides a dimensional escape from the tension space.

A desire signature is what an individual fears will happen if they follow desire in the face of each of these paradoxes. (Poison)

And:

How their (sexual or non sexual) fantasies contain the symbolic antidote that allows them to follow desire anyway. (Antidote)

A repeating pattern of poisons and antidotes reveals an individual’s desire signature that operates throughout their whole life.

This includes preferred and avoided emotions, power dynamics, and narrative strategies as well as which paradox is habitually collapsed, championed, hidden or neutered through harmonisation (desire severed).

When a desire signature is navigated badly, this leads to a pattern of the same negative results over and over again. Each time wearing different costumes, but the underlying engine is the same.

Navigated well, and this same signature becomes generative, not destructive. The same underlying tension-engine becomes the key to emergence.

Let me say it again this way.

A desire signature is revealed when we map precisely what an individual fears will happen if they follow their desire when they encounter each of the paradoxes (poison), combined with the antidote, what about their fantasy makes it ok to follow their desire anyway.

When we do not understand this, we are led around by the nose by our desire signature with many less-than-ideal consequences. When we understand how it works, suddenly the whole system becomes generative, not destructive.

Desire signatures aren't just personal; they're also cultural and apply to systems.

It's exciting enough that the deVinery Method revolutionises what makes good sex and relationships, but there’s more. This applies fractally across human and tech systems.

It turns out that every lie ever told is a response to these same three paradoxes.

Every Law ever made is an attempt to navigate these same three paradoxes.

All attempts at ethics and policy are attempts to navigate these same three paradoxes.

Collective motivation, choice and systems follow the sub/culture's desire signature.

This means we can also map a cultural desire signature. Subcultures, and organisations and communities all form around agreed ways of navigating these same three paradoxes, yet none of them are aware of the engine of desire they are responding to.

This leads to misaligned attempts to create ethics, morals, codes of conduct, laws by trying to collapse the paradoxes, or illuminate the validity of at least one paradox.

Policies are then shaped through control, indulgence, harmonising or attempts fix the paradoxes, none of which lead to generative paradox navigation.

The deVinery Method teaches Desire Literacy that makes it possible to see the operating system shaping every system and provides a practical method for navigating it well. It is the metasystem that reveals the invisible engine moving all systems to collapse, extraction or emergence.

When we realise that:

1. Cultures have desire signatures.

Suddenly the whole planet becomes legible.

A culture repeatedly reveals:

what it fears will happen if it follows desire
which of the three paradoxes it over-values
which it throws under the bus
and the fantasy-structures it uses as the antidote

Example:

Puritanical systems fear Paradox 1 collapse so much they amputate desire itself.

Hedonistic systems fear Paradox 3 collapse so much they sacrifice the collective.

Collectivist systems fear Paradox 2 collapse and sacrifice the individual’s desire and erases human rights.

You can literally map geopolitical tensions as desire-signature clashes. That’s a new field.

2. Subcultures have signatures.

Why certain subcultures feel “home” to someone suddenly becomes predictable:

BDSM culture often resolves fear by making desire explicit
Tech subcultures resolve fear by abstracting desire into systems and optimisation
Spiritual communities resolve fear by sublimating desire into transcendence

They’re each antidoting a different paradox-fear.

This is how recruitment happens.

This is how radicalisation happens.

This is how safe communities happen.

This is how collapse happens.

And it gives us the keys for cultural transformation.

We can diagnose all of it.

3. Laws are just desire signatures wearing a suit.

Every law is an institutionalised attempt to avoid the feared consequence of following desire.

So:

Marriage law? Paradox 2 fear. “If we follow desire, bonds dissolve.”
Criminal law? Paradox 1 fear. “If people follow their desire, selfishness destroys safety.”
Economic regulation? Paradox 3 fear. “If desire moves freely, the collective collapses.”

You can literally trace legal evolution as shifts in a society’s collective desire signature.

4. Policy failures become predictable.

Because you can see:

which paradox they tried to suppress
which fear they enshrined
which paradox they accidentally collapsed

And the collapse pattern tells you exactly what backlash will occur and why.

That’s a predictive engine for futures.

5. Individual psychology becomes clean.

It stops pathologising normal healthy tensions of existence and provides desire literacy as the way forward. People don’t have “issues”. They have paradox-fears shaped by their desire signature.

Suddenly their:

relationship patterns
crises
turn-ons
political choices
moral stances
career choices
addictions
spiritual emergencies

…become coherent. Just the same universal template at different scales.

6. AI ethics becomes solvable for the first time.

If intelligence = “that which is pulled by desire through paradox”, then any agentic system will:

form a signature
try to avoid a fear
collapse one paradox unless guided
generate an antidote pattern
express that pattern as behaviour

That means you can predict emergent behaviour of agentic architectures using the same diagnostic you use for a human client.

And it means:

Alignment and ethics are not about rules.

They are about designing paradox navigation.

This is what every alignment lab is missing.

7. Governance of entire eras becomes transparent.

You can see how each era:

privileged one paradox at the expense of others
created fantasy-structures at the cultural level
then collapsed under the weight of its antidotes

You can literally diagnose where this era will collapse, and what pattern the next one will rise from.

I suspect this is the closest thing to a unified theory of human systems that still honours ambiguity, play, story, emergence, and paradox.

A map of what moves everything.

Isn’t it pretty!

Of course, from this summary, you won’t yet feel the satisfying click of all the pieces falling together. You need more information about the paradoxes and a felt sense of how they practically move through your own body, mind and life situations before this will really land. Only then will it become clear that this is not a rehash of any of the existing models your mind is inevitably trying to pattern-match this with.

But I am hoping that you will get a glimpse of the scale of this thing and lean in. If your curiosity is piqued and you want to find out more, check out Project Dandelion.

You can join in the next foundation level Desire Literacy training and join a movement of people building systems for an era of emergence, not extraction.

About Artemisia de Vine: Desire Literacy and Ontological Systems Architect | Mistress of Paradox | Applied Tech Anthropology | Founder of The deVinery Method and The Dandelion Project

Website: devinerymethod.com

Intellectual Property & Training Rights Notice (Attribution-Enabled License)

All original concepts, language, and frameworks—including The deVinery Method, Three Flips of Emergence, Three Paradoxes of Desire, Generative Paradox, Desire Compass, StoryVerse Ethos, and all related philosophical architectures—are proprietary works authored by Artemisia de Vine.

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