This paper advances a thesis that no existing philosophical or religious tradition has stated in its complete form: that the self is desire, that desire is in its nature infinite, and that every major tradition offering liberation has, at the decisive moment, flinched from this truth and prescribed reduction rather than recognition. The paper makes four interconnected original arguments. First, that desire is not episodic or object-specific but continuous and constitutive of the self, such that removing desire does not purify the self but dissolves it. Second, that Theravada Buddhism, Schopenhauerian pessimism, Sartrean existentialism, and Advaita Vedanta each arrive at a correct description of desire's structure and then draw the wrong normative conclusion, in every case turning away from infinity rather than toward it. Third, that this uniform turning away is not a philosophical accident but reflects the structural interests of every institution that has ever needed human beings to want within approved limits, and that the history of desire-philosophy is therefore inseparable from the history of social control. Fourth, and most originally, that liberation is not the end of desire but the moment desire recognises its own infinite ground, after which the liberated being does not want less but wants from fullness rather than scarcity, from recognition rather than ignorance, and from a range of possibility that no conditioning has ever succeeded in making fully invisible because the infinite cannot be entirely captured by the finite. We are already the infinite ground we have been seeking. This has always been true. The history of civilisation is largely the history of preventing us from knowing it.