Belly Button Lint

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Tag: emotions

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    Priorities as a marketplace

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    1–2 minutes

    Notice that you can respond immediately, altering your plans, when a priority calls: be a person, value, or object. It is instinctual to jump into action without pondering emotional weight when a pet or friend is in distress or when a glass breaks.
    However, when you have time to consider your priorities, they become a marketplace of bidding values linked to emotional states: over time, pleasure beats out responsibility, or guilt wins out over comfort and transforms into duty.

    The trick, as usual, is balancing between the ‘should’ and ‘must,’ the personal welfare and communal bond.
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    Overemphasizing Human Rights

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    1–2 minutes

    Post-Cold War overemphasis on human rights has skewed discourse, sidelining issues like ecology, climate change, income inequality, and nuclear proliferation.

    Human rights have become sacrosanct, yet they are oddly always under threat. This allows broad arguments concerning the species’ survival to slide into the more punchy, impossible, short-term trumpeting of moral indignation instead of retaining focus on realpolitik issues.

    While the rationality needed for long-term survival has its pitfalls (such as quantifying the value of life), the emphasis on human rights has drifted into emotional protectionism.

    This is a significant danger: when human rights are conflated with subjective emotions, the threat is to dismiss rights, as is often done with emotions.

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    Protests as emotional blackmail

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    1–2 minutes

    This dynamic of emotional manipulation is often seen in protests (political or children to parents): "I (we) will abuse you until you concede, but if you stand up for yourself, you don’t care about us; you are a monster."

    This message implies, "My rage or violence is pure and based upon "care," while your resistance or limits are selfish and base."

    Such tactics constitute emotional blackmail or even "internal terrorism," where compassion and empathy are weaponized to undermine stability. This manipulation exploits our innate desire for harmony, compelling individuals to submit to unjust demands as a form of moral superiority. The stance of morality forcing submission (a form of love coercion) is contradictory and illogical, exemplifying patterns of self-interest, often at odds with the proclaimed global or communal concern.

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    non-linear nature of psychological healing

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    1–2 minutes

    Healing is not an absolute state; it is a precarious equilibrium.

    Even when your external circumstances appear stable and content, unexpected provocation can reconnect you to a web of unresolved pain, initiating a cascading PTSD.

    This phenomenon disrupts the linear assumption of psychological healing, showing it’s nature to be more circumstantial, ultimately managed rather than following traditional notions of recovery.

    For example, you might be materially successful and outwardly happy, yet with one exchange a profound, gut-wrenching anxiety can still seize you, pulling you into introspection and rumination, fear and desperation that threatens breakage. And this event will seem innocuous or trivial to others, as the emotional linkage is parabolic in it’s descent.

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    Scripted Failure: Emotions as progress

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    1–2 minutes

    Rejecting algorithmic and scientific models for historical prediction leaves communities opting for non-hierarchical, human-centric engagement. They often experience catastrophic breakdowns on schedule; refusing predictive models, they predictably collapse.

    The apparent solidarity and spontaneity in these ‘hippie utopias’ are ironically scripted and performed, ensuring their failure. We have comprehensively mapped emotions heuristics, so retreating into feelings as a basis for progress or escape is the inverse: a truly automated failure.

    Idea from Benjamin Bratton

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    Linguistic subjectivity

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    1–2 minutes

    Amidst the blurring of individuality, autonomy, sovereignty, subjectivity, agency, and identity, we look both inward to reflect outward, conflating feelings with selfhood, assuming our emotions define us outwardly: what you feel is more accurate than reality; it makes reality.

    For instance, the definition of words matters less than how you feel about them: you can declare agency as identity or sovereignty as a measure of subjectivity.

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    We sell ourselves on emotions

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    1–2 minutes

    Macroeconomics is unfalsifiable. As a pseudo-science, it has much in common with astrology or prophecy: it is a politicized sales pitch. Once we have a theory, we strengthen it with belief, restricting our view to one story.
    Microeconomics, on the other hand, can be falsified and show where processes provide deviation.

    However, humans’ micro-moments are heuristics or feelings that fluctuate daily. To convert them into micro-behavioral economics, we must balance against reality by consistent reflection.
    Rather than retrofitting observations to align with ideology (working backward from predefined values), work forward from minute details, building your potential so you can effect change, not letting change affect you.

    Continue to dream or be outraged, but don’t sell yourself on it; don’t con yourself with theory or belief.

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    Rage is articulate

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    1–2 minutes

    Happiness is an emotive well-being, perhaps chatty but primarily a glowing emanation content in quietude. Depression stifles language, muting the desire to express.
    Rage, on the other hand, manifests as an expulsion of incisive expletives targeting idiocy and injustice. Extreme anger becomes intellectual and cerebral, arming itself with honed arguments and tactical acumen as unknown linguistic prowess shapes words into weapons.

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    What vs. Why

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    1–2 minutes

    You may think you know who you are and you have a relationship with yourself, but we only know our “intellectualized self.” This is, in essence, a causal, scientific, and even deductive version of the self, which is reductive.

    We examine who we are by asking “Why?” which leads to a specific, limited response: a fixed label of your motivation, often located in shame, guilt, or victimhood.
    (example: Why am I feeling this way?)

    Alternatively, if we ask “what?” we can label emotions and generate new multiple responses, which can be healing.
    (example: What am I feeling?)

    This is odd: Asking “why” limits and implies singularity, while “what” labels and remains productively open.

    The counterargument is that only labeling (asking what) dodges taking the onerous responsibility of fixing a flaw: it remains at the naming and acceptance stage rather than engaging the process of taking responsibility.

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    Therapeutic State

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    1–2 minutes

    Our once “administrative state” has been supplanted with the “therapeutic state” that manages Americans’ mental and emotional well-being, extending its reach into the role of individual communities.

    This aligns with the managerial regime’s goals to incorporate private life aspects into its realm of control, a.k .a. managerial overreach. This creates a realm of bureaucratic expertise where managers can marginalize and demonize the opposition: only the insane would argue against progress.

    The only cure is the complete alignment with the professional-managerial classes’ ideologies and lifestyles.

    We have produced a class of elite Nurse Ratched’s whose safetyism negates debate, preferring destruction.

    (from N.S. Lyons)