Secular Mysteries: rage

I'm been thinking about the kind of topics a spiritual atheist would find enlightening. Time and time again my thoughts come back to the study of the arts and emotion. Truly can there be a better topic for an enlightened creature than to understand his or her self? Let us start with emotion.

Consider the eight primary emotions already considered on this blog: rage, vigilance, ecstacy, admiration, terror, amazement, grief and loathing. These are the most intense manifestations of these emotions, not the typical every day manifestations.

Just on that point, the fact that we consider it unusual to experience these 8 emotions on a daily basis is indeed interesting as it implies that frequently expressing intense emotions is somehow pathological. Actually it is... but not necessarily for the person expressing them but for the ones who have to endure such projections of emotions from these people which is very tiring.

I digress into topics I've already covered!

Anyway, consider the emotion of rage (anger, and coincidentally shares 4 of the same letters as 'rage'). Many people are immediately put off by an angry person. And anger person is percieved to be dangerous or unstable. While I don't doubt that there is some wisdom in such a conclusion it nonetheless runs the risk of missing the wonderfully positive effects of rage.

I was speaking to a man at the Parliament of the World's Religions who was bullied and abused as a child by teachers. He said he felt intensely angry as a child and this had prevented his spiritual growth and he felt guilty for harbouring such feelings of rage. Just as a suggestion I pointed out to him that maybe his rage had acted as a protective mechanism saving him from worse psychological damage as a child and how allowed him to be sufficiently intact to make a success of his career later in life. At this suggestion the man had an epifany and appeared to feel as though he could release much guilt he had been unnecessarily holding onto. I was quite chuffed with being an atheist and giving someone else a spiritual insight... :)

But apart from that it is hard to imagine Martin Luther King being such a great orator and inspiration if her were not full of rage. Admittedly, King had mastered his rage and turned it into a tremendous power for good. But that's the whole point. Anger is a powerful emotion, it is the emotion of power but it is morality neutral by itself. Anger is not the problem, the problem is the master whom anger serves.

If you meet an angry man in a bar perhaps it is worth considering whether he is angry at other people because he feels victimised and wants to take from others what he feels entitled to... or is his rage directed towards real injustices in the world and desire to use it to end the suffering of other people and not just his own?

For this reason I feel that everyone should take each emotion, for this example I have used rage, and really sit down and consider what makes them anger and why. Is it fair to be angry for such reasons? Are there more important things to be angry about? How much anger is too much? What limits should I put on the expression of my anger or what creative and good ways can I direct my anger towards? How can I use my anger to make me an inspiring and exciting presence in the world. One that doesn't do harm or upset other people?

Remember sometimes there are good circumstances to be angry: when someone steals something from you, when someone mistreats, when someone in anyway violates you. But as well as these good circumstances there are also good and poor ways to express ones anger that need to be moulded to suit the context.

Also, something more of personal issue... I often feel ashamed for being angry, I feel like I have to be perfect all of the time and so when I inevitably fail to live by these high expectations I turn my anger against myself. This self loathing is the equivalent of turning two powerful magnets of opposite polarity against each other. The effect is a powerful vice that can exert no force for useful work. Anger is spiritual power, it is the ability to reshape the world inside and outside of you... but it should never be used like a broadsword like this. It should best be directed at specific problems: like my self-loathing instead of myself! A focussed rage is a wise rage that can end slavery, liberate women and push personal development... and the better we can discern the best targets for our rage the better we can use it to make the world a better place.

Evilution

One of the most common misunderstandings of the theory of evolution is that all adaptations are somehow beneficial. I hear people say that those animals or that technology is more or less evolved. However, evolution doesn't work like that and machines don't strictly speaking 'evolve' at all. Evolution is a blind process that produces more problems than solutions. Think of all of the genetic diseases in the world, this is not good evidence of increasingly highly evolved people.

However, there is adaptation and some species can be more or less adapted to a specific environment but being very well adapted to ocean life is a huge set back if you live on land most of the time. But even with adaptation there can be some surprising complexities in its interaction.

I bring this topic up because people often assume that just because we have religion it must serve some purpose. This line of thinking goes along the lines of "we have eyes to see, nose to smell and hands to manipulate objects: everything we've inherited seems to have some useful function,"

While yes, everything we've evolved does serve a useful purpose but only for passing on our genes, not for making our lives better. Religion is like this. It has evolved along side us although it doesn't serve any useful purpose other than to reproduce itself. Please keep in mind that I distinguish between religion and spirituality so when I'm talking religion I'm talking dogma, irrational social-rules and harmful moral prejudices, and not creativity, altruism, self-knowledge etc...

But if religion is harmful why does it exist? Surely harmful things are selected out by nature. Actually, both yes and no.

Consider jealousy and greed (bullying). These are socially harmful emotions that no species wants to have but on an individual level though they are helpful for individual reproduction.

Consider two primitive men go out hunting: one man is fast, agile, strong and clever while the other is slow, clumsy, sickly and dim. He brings back food for the tribe but the weaker hunter can't catch anything. The strong hunter gets lots of attention from the women who want his genetics for their offspring. However, this attention makes the weaker hunter jealous... the weaker hunter then decides to kill the stronger hunter by striking the unsuspecting hunter when his back is turned. Now the women have no choice but to pass on the weaker hunter's genetics because jealousy increased his fertility.

Greed is common in most species, generally it manifests when a sibling will beat up and steal attention and food from another sibling. This bullying greatly increases the strength and size of these individuals, increasing their chances of reproducing.

But there's a problem here... if the weaker members of a species all wipe out the stronger members then that species is in serious trouble because soon the whole species will no longer be sufficiently adapted to survive at all! Also, a society full of bullies will fall apart as bullying is about breaking the rules and society can't function without at least partial observance of the rules essential for maintaining group cohesion and solidarity.

With these qualities of jealousy and greed which help individuals increase their fertility but overall harm their entire species there exists a balance. If too many individuals in a species are overcome with jealousy and greed then the species will either select against these qualities or go extinct.

Thus religion is like this. It is greedy, it wants the power, resources and attention of the people it infects and is jealous of other religions which could be better than it. But can't get too powerful otherwise it will wipe itself out. Consider what would happen if the Catholic Church was successful at removing every man with high intelligence from the gene pool by putting them into the priesthood during the middle ages? Or if muslims strictly only married within their families? Or if no Christians used condoms in spite of an HIV epidemic? Or if scientific progress had been successfully suppressed instead of just slowed down?

Consider the Zorastrians, they won't take converts and can't marry outside their group... the one time super religion has wiped itself out.

Religions are their own worst enemies, killing the very societies that keep them alive. But fortunately a society that resists complete domination by a religion is still able to grow and indeed when the Church went too far the people fought back and pushed through religious reforms to make their religion more tolerable and less harmful. Until we get a point today when the Catholic Church is no longer able to declare wars, conduct genocides, witchhunts and brainwash children en masse... at least not in the west.

Despite how harmful religions are to society as a whole they are very good at motivating people to protect and nurture them. This is the most curious thing. There is something very noble in human nature, humans appear to be most courageous, most motivated and passionate when fighting for something greater then themselves: a love, an identity, a principle or a dogma. Religion exploits this human nobility and perverts it.

I believe the purpose of spiritual thinking is to replace religion and revitalise our ideas of things greater than us by pushing individuals to create their own inspirations and to continuously refine and develop the principles that they would get up and fight for. Because if it isn't a conscious choice to decide what you believe is worth dying for then you're simply living as a slave to somebody else's prejudices.

Own your prejudices and make the future the way you believe it ought to be. If you speak up, you will never be alone.

Love and Submission

Over the last few weeks I've had no shortage of topics I want to write about. I've written several drafts of entries I have wanted to explore and not published them because while I'm full of ideas I'm not particularly emotionally stable these days. I find that when I try to write while not under the influence of emotion it is painful to write and disjointed in structure. When I'm writing under the influence of intense emotions it is altogether impossible for me not to sound manic.

While I hardly expect that I'm going to find inner balance and peace anytime soon considering the vast number of traumatic and high impact events in my life recently. Nonetheless, it is painful to be multi-tasking so many intense emotions for prolonged periods and very difficult for me to work efficiently. So, I'm trying to bring acceptance and peace to the turmoil within me. In the process I'm also appreciating that all my previous models of emotionality are far too simplistic to adequately describe the conflicts and changes going on inside of me. Models based on 2 or 3 primary emotions are really just preposterous to me now. I actually think only a thinking-type person with very little self-knowledge could put forward such a ridiculous idea.

In my quest to expand my model of emotionality I've found the following:



Wow.

The eight colours each represent a primary emotion. The intensity of which increases the darker it gets. The emotions written in between represent complex emotions made by combining the elements of the two neighbours. For more about the person who invented this wheel of emotion click here.

Intuitively I know there is something wrong with this model immediately: If we have 8 primary emotions then we shouldn't be limited to 8 composite emotions. While I accept that opposite emotions can't be combined easily there is no logical reason why composites can't be made across 90 and 135 degree arcs. Reducing it to 4 primary emotional bi-poles would eliminate such issues... but for all I know such complex combinations are allowed in the 8 primary system. But for now let's move aside from the flaws in this system.

What strikes me is the location of love on this wheel: between joy and trust. I've found myself many many times in trusting and accepting relationships that I just wouldn't call love. I trust them with my physical and material safety and they felt the same with me. But I never trusted them with my emotional safety and I have friends who would be far more intimate with me if they could bring themselves to trust me with their emotional safety.

My problem with my previous relationship was mostly because while I was seeking to encourage serenity within the other person, the other person was seeking to encourage fear in me. Which apparently would lead to my submission to them if successful. Certainly, I felt that their intention was to make me submit to them and their wishes and my problem was always being able to feel sufficiently good about myself to break free of them... otherwise I really did feel like I should submit to them. The thing is I haven't just experienced this dynamic, I've watched it in other people's relationships. One or either of the people in the relationship try to make the other person feel insecure about the other person's care and affection for them. Certainly, it feels more comfortable to feel above someone than below them.

It is probably much easier to get someone to submit than to combine ones psychological assets to work towards creating harmonary and peace with each other. It does require taking off ones psychological armour to another person and trust that they won't hurt you. In my mind the idea of getting someone to submit in a relationship sounds a lot like, "find their biggest fear, fluster them with it and fuck them," because it is easier to induce fear in a person than serenity and really, fear can be as reliable as serenity when it comes to tying a person to you. Also, I don't think this happens only in romantic relationships. I've been reading up on a few tyrants recently, they honestly see themselves as loving people and the people below them genuinely feel unworthy of their tyrant's love. Yet the flow of kindness and compassion in their relationship is assymetrical.

Of course, I for one belive that we should be brave in our search for love. We should bolster up the confidence and happiness of those we love even though we're giving them strength they could use to leave us with. I know abandonement hurts, but if you lift up a person and they desert you for it then it is a good thing that they have left your life because they don't deserve to have someone as wonderful as yourself. Of course you can get angry with them, hate them even for abandoning you, but I have to wonder, if we just accept that sometimes people will desert us for our effort just as department stores accept that a certain proportion of their stock will get stolen, then can we not avoid a corrosive recourse into bitterness? I hope you'll get me when I say what I am proposing is simultaneously optimistic and cynical. Optimistic in the endeavour to find true love but cynical in the acceptance that some people just don't want to love us back.

What impresses me about this model is that the creator, Robert Plutchik, wanted to prove that there was a survival advantage in having emotions and that all animals use emotions as part of their basic information processing schema. I wonder if he knew that we're now trying to give computers emotions because it is considered by some to be the missing ingredient in artificial intelligence?

What concerns me, as I've probably said it a million times, is the number of people in positions of authority in the world who don't appreciate the role and importance of emotions. They push them aside and dismiss them as though they are some form of weakness. A person without emotions is simply not alive and as autonomous as a robot. While conversely they would point out that people who are over emotional are inefficient and irrational. However, the fact that they've said 'over' instead of emotional gives away that they recognise the importance of emotions on some level and referring to people who struggle to balance and harmonise their emotions isn't fair considering the millions of people who successfully balance and harmonise their emotions every day.

What we need is to learn to be literate in an emotional and relationship-wise sense and appreciate the value of empathy. One can always reach a win-win solution with a person who has adequate empathy but you will never reach a win-win solution with someone who cares more for themselves than others. Conversely, a person who cares more for others than themselves will always be getting the rough end of the deal.