Emotionalism is Ruining Civilization

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The most amusing part of that article are the rationalizations of those who say that the fact that we allow morons to make our political decisions isn't a problem. Rather affirms the opening comments about avoiding truth through selective understanding and interpretation of the facts (which I also am currently engaging in).

Well, all choices reveal intent.


What should we call advancement? Why? Is advancement good? If it is then prove it so. If advancement cannot be proven absolutely good then why should we have to care about it.


Why are false beliefs a cause of unhappiness? What then causes happiness? Couldn't unhappiness have biochemical causes as opposed to purely phenomenal causes.


What does it mean to establish morality? What about individualist anarchists in the tradition of Max Stirner, who has explicitly rejected morality as shown in a previous quote? How is morality actually related to reason if morality ultimately refers to facts it does not have due to Hume's Is-Ought problem.


You do realize that you are arbitrarily dismissing good psychological research, and even doing this while ignoring the rationale for why emotions are necessary, thus denying reason to support reason.


No, man began to use reason to seek the desires his emotional urges came up with. Desiring sex, companionship, and social success did not arise ex nihilo, but rather came from somewhere. The issue is not homilies but rather debating points.

Well, I suppose you'd have to say so. Civilization is usually defined as requiring reason based structures, so the statement is basically tautological.

By that reasoning, you shouldn't care about anything, as "good" is a subjective term and you can't prove anything to be absolutely good. I can hold something like "less people dying or suffering" as tautologically good, but there is no real means of expressing my sense of good or bad to anyone else. Which is why we should at least go the universally accepted notions of good, adn advancement would generally be considered to fall under that.

Why should I care? This is a FREE ENTERPRISE system, you communist hippie! I have the RIGHT to make money from destroying the world! So keep your godless-commie-pinko hands outta my business, or I'll come for you with my assault rifle!

I STRONLY disagree with the assertion that emotions are always irrational and that they are totally uncesessary
There are times when a persons emotional reactions are Very Rational. For example, when people are mean to you and treat you unfairly based on something that you have no control over, and/or when somebody takes advantage of you it is TOTALLY RATIONAL to feel angry! Considering how completely helpless and defenseless human babies are if women(including their mothers)didnt love them and feel protective towards them they surely wouldnt survive.

No, you've got it all wrong,
EMOS are ruining civilization.

I totally agree with the OP. IMO a large part of the blame for our society's rampant emotionalism is the Baby Boom Generation. The left-wing Boomers embraced New Age BS and attacked Reason and Science as "fascistic oppression and tool of Capitalist domination" while right-wing Boomers embraced Fundamentalist Christianity and attacked Reason and Science as "Godless Atheism." The Boomers embraced a destructive "Moral Outrage" form of politics. Instead of reasoned debate and compromise we have angry rants by Culture War ideologues damning each other to Hell with self-righteous fury, political theatrics, and Congressional gridlock.

If only we could make use of love for rational reasons...

I always said that if I cannot make use of a relationship for anything other than emotional reasons, I'm better off terminating it.

Fundamentalist christianity isnt a new thing. 200 years ago you may as well forget about mentioning a lack of belief in god in public. Culturally athieism is relatively a new phenomenon that you can thank the OTHER half of the baby boom generation for putting forth. I dont necessarily think society is degressing into an emotional civilization; as far as I've read about, it's been that way more often than not.

Emotion is not the problem in so much as letting your emotions influence your decision is. If you are concerned about outcomes, then logic and rationality should always win vs. emotion (whatever course of action has the highest chance of success given probabilities is considered to be the logical one). Emotion can be factored into logic so to speak (i.e. pursing "love" will make me X times happier at Y cost). Also, sometimes the logical choice is to be emotional (such as in fights, sometimes releasing the "primal rage" works rather effectively). These days those who favor logic are often compared to straw Vulcans unfortunately.

civilization is the rational organization of individual irrational people

logic just makes you feel better about a decision, because you feel its logical, you feel you should do it

to the OP watch a different news show, they all do that emotional crap to make the story more dramatic but some are better than others

It never hurts to experiement to see what ACTUALLY WORKS in society.
That's among the top points of science.
And is going to happen one way or another.