The Quality of Emotional Response Reveals our Quality

 

     Three crude sketches. Imagine a child, born into a life of wealth and privilege, spoiled from birth rather than really loved, never able to leap out of a purely ego-centered perspective on the world, valuing other people and things only to the extent it elevates him over others, respecting only people who seem to have more stature in the celebrity and financial marketplace than himself (e.g. Donald Trump). One more sketch: that of a similar person who psychologists classify has having narcissistic personality disorder: a person whose mode of self-consciousness involves a “pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with narcissistic personality disorder as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding.” Often this narcissism had its beginnings as a coping mechanism to protect the fragile child-ego from pain caused by a parent incapable of giving the child the love it needed. (You can fill out the details of these sketches yourself.)

       What both these cases have in common I think I can illustrate with this: imagine that these people were grade school teachers who, when confronted with a child they considered cheeky or disrespectful of their authority, get so angry the call the child names like ‘jerk.’ Anger: anger is anger at someone because the angry person feels that someone has said or done something that unjustly injures them in some way. Imagine the cause of anger a note passed between pupils that said ‘so boring.’ The angry response contains a judgment about the content of the note and about the child. Of course, if the teachers discovered the ‘boring’ applied to another pupil, the cause of the anger would go away, but otherwise the anger expresses a conviction that the passing of that note unjustly damaged her – say, she feels attacked in her self-worth as a teacher, disrespected as a woman, and lowered in status below her actual rank. Her anger also contains a judgment about the child: that a respect and decency is absence in the child which should be there, and that the child is somehow ‘rotten’ (i.e. responsible) – the anger contains a judgment that the child is a responsible moral agent. The anger also reveals that the way the class perceives her is very important to her as is her sense of status and self-worth. The expression of the anger (pleasurable) is a kind of payback that restores their sense of status and self by putting the child down to a level below them. Imagine the teachers (assuming no official consequences follow) have no second-thoughts about calling the child a ‘jerk.’

        Now I guess we would agree the anger was misplaced and the expression of the anger wrong. The child’s behavior may have been inappropriate. There are different appropriate ways to respond to and deal with it, but not that way. To respond and deal appropriately to the child’s behavior, however, required a person capable of not only understanding the behavior of the child with the intellect but also with the feelings – I am not even sure our habit of separating the two does justice to either, though of course there are situations in which heart and head can be at variance. But my point: the two characters I have sketched – and a multitude of others I could sketch – cannot see the child and cannot understand the significance of the note due to the way their emotional-intellectual life has been formed by a character that was damaged in important ways. This is not a matter of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”; this is a case where the complex thought-feeling-action is out of tune with reality itself due to a kind of meaning-blindness. And the over-valuation of status and self-worth gave rise to and expressed the anger. Indeed, the personality disorder distorts the entire value structure.

       My point: the interconnected ways we think and feel contain judgments about the way the world is and what is important. These judgments cannot be lucid unless the ways we think and feel have been educated and formed in ways that allow us to be in tune with the world around us. When education fails – and it is rarely ever completely successful with anyone in any social form, but especially not in capitalism – emotion-thoughts and thought-emotions will never reach their objects, will always be reflections of damaged ego, like living in a room full of mirrors, a prison, a cave. Such a child-become-adult will have no experience of things outside this mirror room or cave. Thus the philosophy of 'nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so' itself has deep roots in the psychic reality of most of us, and this in turn has deep social causes. Admitting that one’s character is properly judged by realities (e.g. children) it doesn’t construct itself can be threatening – an odd root of the value of ‘autonomy.’

        Also odd: the person who is to some extent locked in their cave of mirrors is in a way pre-moral to the extent they are so locked in. Moral judgment proper can only properly be applied to those outside the cave because only they are capable of self-knowledge and thus responsibility – only in degrees, never absolutely.