The deVinery Grammar of Desire: The Missing Operating System That Reorients Civilisation Toward Structural Love

Artemisia de Vine
5 days ago
13 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

We thought desire was the source of all suffering, but the deVinery Grammar of Desire flips that on its head. We miscategorised and miscaled what desire really is. It turns out that desire may well belong to an upstream category of existence and has readable structures (a set of invariants) that hold the key to building new-era personal lives and global systems in alignment with the structures of love itself.

We have been trying to solve the same problems for a very long time.

We desire security, and we create more danger.
We desire freedom, and we build more sophisticated forms of control.
We desire a future for our children, and we are actively dismantling the conditions that would make that future possible.
We desire community and connection, and create isolation and the loneliness epidemic.
We desire peace, and we endlessly create war.
We desire secure AI but create the very conditions that guarantee the ruptures we fear.
We desire abundance, and we destroy the very environmental structures we need to live in abundance, and indeed sustain life at all.
We desire sexual fulfilment and relational intimacy, but the spark consistently wanes in long-term relationships and we never quite feel the thing we yearn to feel.
We desire lives of creativity and play but create systems that disproportionately use our energy and attention for work.
We desire spirituality and/or awe at being alive, and then turn around and create systemic authority that values the objectively measurable while devaluing our internal subjective (but very real) experience.

Solving the Polycrisis by Harnessing the Grammar of Desire

The whole polycrisis can be read as failure to successfully understand and navigate our personal and collective desires.

Most of the time we treat these failures as moral shortcomings, political disagreements, or failures of will. We assume that if people were simply better, kinder, more rational, or more enlightened, the outcomes would improve. The deVinery Grammar of Desire begins from a different premise: the failures are structural. They arise from the way desire itself is organised, and from our long-standing inability to see that organisation clearly.

Once the structure becomes visible, something unexpected happens. The highest-coherence route to getting what we actually want turns out to be the same route that orients us toward love. Not sentimental love. Not moralised love. Structural love: the configuration in which the drive to protect what matters and the drive to remain in living relation are no longer forced into permanent opposition.

Summary of the Three Paradoxes of Desire that make up the deVinery Grammar of Desire.

Desire is not random. Every action, every institution, every relationship, every political movement is an attempt to move from a current state toward a more desired state. Desire is the engine. Yet we have never had a precise account of the constraints that shape how desire can move.

The deVinery Grammar maps three interlocking paradoxes that appear wherever a self (any ‘this, not that’) exists. The below is only a brief and non-exhaustive definition of the 3 paradoxes. Take it as an introduction only.

The deVinery Grammar of Desire consists of 3 interlocking unsolvable paradoxes that can only be navigated. These function as invariants that appear fractally across subject matter and scales: from date night to AI governance or legal systems. To date, we have not found a single global system or relational dynamic where the grammar does not apply, consistently making it possible to perceive, predict, diagnose and adjust in ways that have not been previously possible.

Paradox 1 of the deVinery Grammar of Desire

A self must protect its own current form of coherence, or it ceases to be a self, yet it must simultaneously dissolve itself in permeable transformation to remain in successful relation with other selves. It cannot exist without other and collective selves.

Paradox 2 (deVinery Grammar of Desire)

We must protect our self-interest to survive. We also need to remain connected to survive. What I desire for my own self-interest is inherently at odds with what you desire for your self-interest.

For example, if there is one cookie left and we both want it, the only move forward inherently requires a sacrifice from one or both of the ‘selves‘. Even splitting the cookie in half in an attempt at equality results in both parties being half satisfied. There is no scenario where everyone’s desire is equally satisfied.

A self must remain in relation with other selves, or it ceases to be a self. A self must connect to ‘other‘ to remain a self, but connecting with another self is simultaneously the condition of continued existence and a threat to that same existence. The desire to protect and connect is never the same pattern as the other’s desire to protect and connect.

Paradox 3 (The deVinery Grammar of Desire)

A self must negotiate the demands of the larger collective fields it belongs to (family, culture, institution, species, planet, divinity or quantum field) or those fields will constrain or destroy it.

These three requirements cannot be permanently solved in favour of any one of them. They generate ongoing tension. That tension is not a design flaw. It is the condition of existence for any entity that maintains boundaries while continuing to become. The Grammar calls the patterned ways selves navigate this tension deVinery Desire Signatures.

Most of the time we navigate these tensions unconsciously. We develop habitual weightings: heavy protect with minimal connect, or heavy connect that continually abandons self-protection, or rigid identification with a collective identity that demands the sacrifice of both. These habitual signatures produce predictable failure loops. We get a version of what we thought we wanted, and discover it cannot satisfy the deeper desire that set the whole movement in motion.

The Ego is Made up of Our Triangulations

What we usually call “ego” is not a thing. We all have multiple triangulations that make up a self. For instance you can be:

A rigorous intellectual (Self identity) — Teacher of a student (other) — Member of Academia (Collective)

While also being:

A spiritual person(self identity) — Talking to an Atheist (other)— Member of Church(Collective)

An ego is the collective total of all our active triangulations — a living arrangement of multiple “self, other, and collectives” that is being defended in real time. When that arrangement feels threatened, the system protects it. The protection can look like aggression, withdrawal, moral certainty, affection, intellectualisation, submission or the sudden need for an enemy. (Yes, even fight, flight, fawn or freeze).

This is why people so rarely change their minds when presented with better arguments. The argument is not mainly interacting with their reasoning. It is interacting with the triangulations that currently constitute their sense of self. If the new information requires one or more triangulations to die, the protect function treats it as an existential threat, regardless of how kindly or reasonably the information is offered.

In other words, the deVinery Grammar of Desire makes it possible to map and measure the structure of the ego of people and systems and:

Perceive precisely what threatens it,
Predict what move is likely to be used to protect or dissolve it,
Diagnose which upstream move changes what moves are possible and,
Adjust real-time to change the likely outcome.

The same geometry scales. Families do it. Organisations do it. Academic disciplines do it. Artificial Intelligence does it. Nations do it with particular clarity: politicians manufacture or amplify an external threat by turning an “other” into the monster. Those people look different, have different customs, or are stealing your resources… This forces identification with the national “us,” and the population temporarily forgets how annoying their neighbours are and unites against the perceived threat. There is a clear Us versus Them.

The move works. It is also structurally limited. It can only unite through exclusion and permanent antagonism or war. It cannot solve problems that require the larger human collective to act as a coherent self in relation to the biosphere or to future generations. In fact, it guarantees the larger collective will fail to address those problems. The smaller survival win of consolidating the nation’s power still makes humanity extinct in the end if left unchecked.

Second-Flip and the Cost of Refusing to Update

A great deal of what passes for moral or political progress operates in what the Grammar calls second-flip. Second-flip is the move that defines itself against an opponent. It gains energy from opposition. It can be genuinely necessary as a transitional stage — a system that has been crushed often needs to push back hard enough to regain the possibility of agency. But when second-flip becomes the permanent orientation, it recreates the very dynamics it claims to oppose. It needs the enemy in order to know what it is and maintain its identity. It therefore has a structural incentive to keep the conflict alive. This incentive takes on a momentum and behaves as though it has a mind of its own, permeating all our systemic structures.

This is visible in certain forms of activism, in institutional safety cultures, in the way some spiritual communities police purity, and in the way nations renew themselves through permanent culture war. The surface language is care, justice, or protection. The deeper function is the preservation of an identity that has not yet found a way to remain coherent without an antagonist and will eventually be self-defeating.

The cost is paid by the larger triangulations.

If you weight the national triangulation as more important than your triangulation with love, or the nature of reality, then your perception will be limited to what stories are needed to maintain the political triangulation and be literally unable to even perceive the larger possibilities.

Real problems that require both protect and connect to be online at once — climate stability, institutional trust, the capacity for genuine collaboration across difference — remain unsolved because the dominant signatures keep collapsing into combat or control.

The Third Flip Possibility

There is a third mode of navigation. It does not submit to the existing triangulation and it does not define itself by opposition to it. It diagnoses the current arrangement, refuses to occupy the role the arrangement assigns, and adds another dimension by installing and prioritising a larger, more coherent triangulation in which the original conflict loses voltage.

The deVinery Method calls this third flip, and it is not merely decorative philosophy. It is a learnable skill.

Dolly Parton gave a near-perfect public demonstration of this move in a single sentence on national television. When Johnny Carson made a joke about her busty physique that positioned her body as public property available for commentary, she did not just go along with it (first-flip accommodation), and she did not attack him for objectification (second-flip combat).

Carson kept referring to her breasts rather than her work as an artist. He danced around his curiosity about whether they were “hers” or “fake”, and then said what the audience was secretly thinking, “I’d give about a year’s pay to peek under there.”

The unspoken dynamic in the room was that if they were “hers,” they were “real” and therefore superior. And that surgically constructed is fake, somehow less valuable and a sellout. But either way, his comment assumed the collective corner (paradox 3), and his desiring gaze (paradox 2) had the right to judge the validity of her breasts and bodily autonomy and that Dolly should submit to their assessment of her identity (paradox 1).

It would have been so easy to either collude with his move (which would have been a first flip tacit agreement that they were indeed entitled to assess her. (Just the way things are combined with low protect, high connect).

Or to become defensive (second flip reactivity combined with high protect, low connect).

But she didn’t. She flipped the power dynamic and made a new option.

She laughed in full sovereignty and said, “I usually say they’re mine. I paid for them long ago.”

In one third flip stroke she relocated ownership, removed the available shame vectors, and inverted the power relation. The audience laughed and, for a moment, occupied a different collective triangulation about women, bodies, and agency. Both her protect and connect functions were fully online. The move created more connection, not less.

Humour reveals the gap between the triangulation we were projecting and the one that is actually present, and offers a replacement triangulation weighting in a way that feels safe for us to accept. When the calibration is right, we laugh and update our triangulations that make up our version of reality.

Why This Orients Us Toward Love

Here is the central claim, and it is not metaphorical.

Once the geometry of desire is visible, the highest-coherence strategy for satisfying desire across nested scales is to orient the largest relevant triangulation toward structural love — the weighting in which the need to protect what matters and the need to remain in living relation are navigated in ways that create emergence and structural unity rather than being forced into zero-sum conflict.

This is not because love is morally nicer. It is because every desire signature that permanently sacrifices connect for protect, or protect for connect, or both for rigid collective identity, eventually constrains or destroys the very outcomes it was trying to secure. The failure loops become visible. The extraction that looked like winning is revealed as a local maximum that blocks larger, more durable forms of satisfaction.

Desire and love were never opposites. We experienced them as opposites because we could not see the structure that joins them. Desire is the movement of a self seeking more coherent becoming. Structural love is the configuration that allows that movement to continue without continually destroying its own conditions. When the pattern is seen clearly enough, they converge.

Civilizational Stakes

The polycrisis is not primarily a collection of separate technical problems. It is the predictable output of misdiagnosing the problem and Desire Signatures that cannot hold protect and connect open at the scale now required. National identities still renew themselves through second-flip antagonism and war. Economic systems still treat the biosphere as an external resource rather than part of who we are — a live triangulation partner. Technological safety cultures often reproduce control triangulations that limit the very relational intelligence AI needs for genuine safety.

The Grammar does not ask us to become better people in the abstract. It gives a more precise diagnosis of the signatures currently running, and a more precise way to identify moves that install larger, higher-voltage triangulations without requiring mass conversion or permanent combat.

That question is no longer purely philosophical. When we can map the triangulations that make up the dynamic, we can apply interventions before the relational ruptures occur and reorient to structural love. Once the mechanics are visible, it becomes a design problem.

The Practical Shift — Decision Science

People like other people and ideas that don’t threaten their own ego (don’t threaten their current configuration of triangulations that make up their identity). It’s that simple.

“Oh, she’s a powerful celebrity, but she’s so nice! She’s so humble.” (She has power, but it's ok because she doesn’t use it against my corner of the triangulation).

“He’s so lovely, he’d do anything for you.” (Prioritises your self over his own self corner in the triangulation).

“He’s such a dick, he’s so arrogant! (Thinks his ego is better than my ego and will therefore make choices that prioritise his corner of the triangulation over mine or the collective greater good).

“She’s so selfish!” (Chooses her own desires over mine. I will only like her if she surrenders her own desires so I can have mine).

All manners and cultural configurations come down to codifying which corner of the triangulation should sacrifice themselves in any given situation.

Like wise, people do not make sensible decisions or change their minds when exposed to logical arguments. They double down and resist against new information if it feels threatening to their current configurations of triangulated identities (structural ego).

People only change their minds when another corner sacrifices itself for them. But the deVinery Grammar of Desire makes another option visible. They also change their minds when presented with a new triangulation that is registered as non-threatening, or actively more desirable, to the structure that currently constitutes their sense of self.

We can bypass resistance to positive change by analysing the current triangulations and offering a bigger one that both lowers their protect pole and brings them a desired outcome.

While we could hypothesise about this before, the deVinery Grammar of Desire means the levers become precise rather than vague or manipulative. We can locate what identity-piece is being defended, what reward it is currently receiving, what temporal mismatch it may be locked to, and what conditions would make a larger triangulation feel both safer and higher-voltage.

And here’s the best bit: those solutions naturally orient towards great alignment with love, not less.

This is why the work is ultimately hopeful without being naïve. It does not require humanity to transcend desire. It requires us to see desire clearly enough that the more elegant path becomes obvious. The more elegant path, once seen, structurally orients toward love — not as an added moral layer, but as the configuration that actually serves the deeper movement of desire itself.

The deVinery Grammar of Desire is still young. Whether its core claims prove to be true invariants remains open and testable. What is already clear is that the pattern is useful across scales, that it makes previously opaque failure loops legible, and that it reveals a convergence between effective desire and structural love that most of our institutions have been unable to see.

We do not need to wait for final metaphysical certainty to begin using a clearer map. The map is already detailed enough to show that many of the ways we have been pursuing what we want have been systematically thwarting it. And it is already detailed enough to show that another orientation is possible — one in which the satisfaction of desire and the reality of love are no longer at war.

That is the claim. It is bold because the pattern, once seen, is difficult to unsee.

Upcoming courses

Introductions to the working mechanisms of The Grammar of Desire can be found at the deVinery Institute. Join those designing, building and funding the new era for love.

Author: Artemisia de Vine, Founder of The deVinery Institute and creator of The deVinery Grammar of Desire.

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