Love. Hate. Happiness. Fear. Anger.
These words represent powerful emotions that move us to action. They’re deep in human nature, and are constantly at work in one form or another.
Unfortunately, many have a mistaken idea about emotion that misleads us into error, regret and pain. Here are some phrases that reveal the mistake:
- Love is love. There’s no wrong or bad expression of love. All love is good.
- Hate is hate. There’s no right expression of hate. All hate is bad.
- The purpose of life is to be happy. All happiness is good.
- Fear is always bad, never good.
- Same with anger. Anger is always bad, never good.
The mistake is to believe our emotions reveal what is truly good and bad, instead of simply what we perceive to be good and bad. We confuse emotion with truth. We believe authentic emotion is sacred and shouldn’t be questioned.
Imagine someone saying, “It’s not right to feel the way you feel about this.” How would people react? That’s heartless and disrespectful. Don’t invalidate the way I feel. My emotions are my truth, the essence of my humanity.
Don’t get me wrong here. Empathy is a vital part of human life. Emotional Intelligence is critical to success and to getting along with people. I’m not against emotions.
I’m against the idolizing of emotions, this idea that if emotions are authentic, they’re valid and true.
Emotions aren’t the deepest part of us, and they often don’t represent the truth. Emotions come from the way we “appraise” reality, memory, and imagination. We look out at the world, or we remember an event, or we imagine something.
- In that moment we tell ourselves a story about what happened. We characterize reality.
- Then we decide if this story is good or bad, and how good or bad. We evaluate our characterization.
Then, and only then, do we feel emotions. Our fear, anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, and so on, all spring from these super-quick and intuitive appraisals.
If the appraisal is right, the emotion is right.
But if the appraisal is wrong, the emotion is too.
That means we can have completely inappropriate and invalid emotions.
The cure for emotional deception is to separate out every aspect our emotional lives into categories of valid and invalid, true and false, constructive and destructive:
- There’s a right love and a wrong love. Hitler loved the idea of a pure Aryan race that would cure the world of all its social problems, and believed that love required killing Jews and minority groups. His was a wrong love.
- There’s a right hate and a wrong hate. Martin Luther King Jr. hated prejudice and injustice. His was a right hate.
- There’s useful fear and useless fear. Most of the bad things we see on the news create useless fear, because they’re extremely rare and will never happen to us. On the other hand, it’s useful to fear running out of money and use that motivation to save for a rainy day.
- There’s righteous anger and unrighteous anger. It right to be angry about things that are truly harmful. It’s wrong to be angry about things that only seem to be harmful.
- There’s an appropriate and inappropriate disgust. It’s right to be disgusted with things that truly harm our moral and physical well-being. It’s wrong to be disgusted with things that look harmful but actually help our moral and physical well-being.
- There’s a good happiness and a bad happiness. We can be happy for the wrong reasons, like when vandals are happy to smash up a house, or when husbands are unfaithful because a different woman would make them happier.
- There’s an appropriate sadness and and inappropriate sadness. It’s wrong to be sad about the imaginary death of a child, or an obsessive focus on a bad event.
We can’t validate every emotion, because some emotions are built on lies. They come from inaccurate appraisals, distortions of reality, and destructive value systems.
That means emotions aren’t sacred. Some of them are profane. Emotions aren’t the essence of self. They can be the destruction of self. Emotions aren’t the deepest expression of self. They’re the result of something deeper, an appraisal of a perception that can be right or wrong.
It’s time to take down the idols of emotion. We need to question our emotions, along with the appraisals that drive them.
- Are we happy for the right reasons or the wrong reasons? Happiness must be based on true goodness, not just any old idea of goodness.
- Is our love based on true goodness or a false goodness? Love isn’t good when we love the wrong things and if the things we love will eventually lead to ruin and misery.
- Is our fear based on a true sense of harm or a false sense of harm? Our fear could be good or bad, useful or useless, based on how true our appraisal is.
- Are we angry about the right things, meaning, are we angry about things that truly threaten the good? Or are we angry about the wrong things, calling things bad that are actually good?