A lie I've often tried to believe is that people are governed by facts, logic, and reason. I suspect that lie once offered me a sense of security, something objective to depend on. I grew up with scary, unpredictable people, often ruled by emotions and passions, a state of affairs that continues today somewhat, at least in terms of being surrounded by so much addiction, insanity, and societal chaos.
I did just endure the naked men on bikes, a Seattle tradition, as well as the violent aggressive men who want to be women shoving people around and screaming about their rights. Kind of amusing, but how come no one ever screams at them about staying home and making sandwiches? Fine, if you really want to be female, the first thing you will need to do is adopt a cloak of invisibility. No one will ever see you, no one will ever listen to you, no one will ever pay you, and your job is now to just make sandwiches and listen to how women are ruining the world. Poof, look at that, you've now achieved female identity. Fortunately I am on the far edges of this rubbish, somewhat unable to conjure up enough energy to even bother to fight for the alleged identity of "womanhood." I just mention these events because this lie that, "men are more rational and less emotional" probably also needs to swirl the drain and be flushed away.
Which brings me to the next lie, "if you just dismiss, demean, or disregard emotions you will get to live in a more logical, reason based world." I've never really subscribed to that falsehood, but it is a prevailing thought among many. It is a complete lie. The somewhat weird little paradox is that if you genuinely embrace, welcome, and process the world of emotion you will eventually wind up living in a more logical, reason based world. When we repress or suppress emotions they often grow bigger and exert a more powerful influence over us. When we sit with them for a bit, they tend to teach us what we need to know, go away, and leave us in peace.
I've watched a lot of people have tantrums, smashing up furniture and punching holes in the walls, all while priding themselves on their "reason based ways" and their ability to allegedly suppress all their emotions. Generally people do this after a long stretch of informing everyone around about how rational and therefore morally superior they are.
In the Western world we seem to have this dreadful and unhealthy relationship with our emotions. We try to numb them and snuff them out. I suppose that is true all over the world, but in the US especially we have just normalized taking a lot of pills, drinking large amounts of crappy beer, binge eating junk, all as a way of avoiding ever having to have a close encounter with ourselves and our emotions.
You certainly don't have to be as touchy feely as I am or as compelled to navigate the emotional undercurrents in any given situation. That just brings about a whole other set of issues. We all have different personalities, strengths and weaknesses, I'm just saying that declaring oneself to be a member of the "reality based community" is a huge fib, a gigantic fabrication, a lie. We are all human beings. That means we are emotional creatures. I just groaned when a lot of conservatives on the internet a while back decided to mock and ridicule people about the importance of, "facts not feelings." Why did I groan? Because this is the fastest way to create a world where facts and truth no longer carry any weight.
And here we are now, we have arrived right there, exactly as I feared......
All in good humor here, but when we disrespect one another and demand facts as if we were the personal arbitrator of all things objective and reality based, people tend to just toss out the validity of using "facts" themselves. Hence we now have people unwilling to even define what a "woman" is.
I've dealt with a lot of authoritarian bovine poo from both the left and the right, from both Christians and outright atheists. Of course everybody usually denies it.....while they are shrieking rather hysterically at you about their vastly superior grasp of reality and how you're either going to hell.... or going to global warming hell. Either way, human behavior seems to take the same form and it just screams, I have unhealed, emotional wounds and a complete lack of self control. Sometimes when people are truly desperate, they just attempt to shut down any and all conversation and subject you to censorship so they can just proclaim, everyone agrees with us and there is no opposition.
So avoidance, bullying, and relationship dysfunction, comes in all flavors, all political stripes, and tragically is found in both the Christian religious and the atheist religious. Another way of saying that is, people are often emotionally stunted, relationally dysfunctional lunkheads, with egos five stories higher then their IQ's.
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If this post annoys anyone, you can blame Jordan Peterson. I mostly enjoy him, but lately he seems to be suffering from the same affliction, this unwillingness to address the root cause of our various insanities. He likes to try to wrap everything in intellectualism, mockery, and appeals to reason. I'm rather annoyed with his behavior on account of the fact that he actually went to school to deal with people's psychology, so he should know better. Conversely however, he also nearly died from medicating his own self so as to make his own emotions and feelings go away, so I don't know what I expect.
"Better" that's what I expect. I shall now just gesture vaguely and say, "do better. "Heart matters, matter. Pretending we are creatures ruled by reason is like trying to build a civilization in quicksand. It's a false premise and it doesn't work.
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