Word processing emotion

 

After being told in various contexts that I am not comforting to talk to, I looked up how to comfort someone. The AI response suggested nothing that I was unaware of, implying that there is something in the tone or style that I lack rather than intention. But what did catch my eye was the established phrase ‘time to process emotion’.

 

 

                This raises some questions. Do we really mean ‘process’? This implies a raw input and a final, different product. Does suffering naturally get turned into happiness, or resilience, over time? Not for me. Would it be more accurate to say ‘experience emotions’?

                I think that there is an implicit understanding that we adapt to circumstances. We experience mind-numbing pain and grief only in relatively brief bouts. The problem might not be solved, but our bodies are only capable of so much experience of one type before giving up for a while. The physical version of this is a little stone in a shoe: at first it’s annoying, but after a few miles of hiking you’ll have forgotten about it and only occasionally remember that it’s there. If you sit down for a while, you'll feel it all over again when you start. Grief similarly comes and goes in cycles of pain.

                Does this mean that the feeling is ‘processed’? Has the initial input been turned into something else? I don’t think so. It’s very much becoming inured to the feeling. It’s still waiting, ready to be experienced at any time, but not right now. The video is still playing but attention has turned elsewhere, because there are other things in the world. The video has not changed or been turned off.

               

                Calling it ‘processing’ probably perpetuates misunderstandings of how grief and suffering work. Grief is not a thing like a cut that one is supported through and then healed from a day or two later. It’s a change in life circumstance such as losing one’s home and belongings. It’s not something to ‘process’ in a moment or a few days. It is processed in the same sense that all of life is a process.

 

                I do not know if other people genuinely need time to understand how they feel; to introspect and understand themselves. It seems strange not to know oneself, but perhaps what is meant is not so much knowing that one’s home has gone, but working out what one can face doing in the new life: how one might host guests, where to get the right attire for formal events… recalculating how to deal with the myriad challenges of life from a different place.

                I think that many people do like to think of emotions as things to process. It’s part of the positivity cult that forbids anyone from experiencing the full range of life. Life is good and unhappiness must be processed like a carcass, turned into processed joy. Find the positives to death or suffering. ‘Well, at least it was a good life’… it was a good life before death. Death added nothing good.

                Bad things do exist. They are natural, standard features of our world and lives. If we regard them as raw inputs that through industry can be made safe we’ll never address them properly. Death and disease are nightmares: horrors that cannot be made good. Just like right-wing ideology. We might never defeat them, but we must recognize that the only good, virtuous course of action is to eradicate them to the best of our ability, not accept them as key components of a full existence.

 

                If people do not know how they feel then there is a problem beyond the immediate suffering. Perhaps we need to give lessons in introspection. I am aware that this is a concept used elsewhere, such as to explain domestic violence and toxic masculinity, in which the only socially acceptable emotion for men to feel is anger, and so when they feel something they express anger even when it’s something else.

                Anger is appropriate in many circumstances. I have raged against the dying of the light a lot in my life. But I do not know if people really ‘feel’ a different emotion from the one they, er, feel. Can cultural conditioning stop you feeling the way you feel? Could we have toxic positivity that made everyone think that death is cause for celebration? We have tried this, called it religion (with delusions of an afterlife) and people still grieve. Toxic positivity turns out to make people feel worse, because they feel guilty or responsible for their sadness when they feel sad.

                So no, I don’t believe that people process emotions. Nor should you. What we do is cope. We become numb to the immediate feeling. If it was a good one, we crave more extreme versions. More love. More affection. More text messages and validation in an addictive cycle of impatience, never waiting for the numbness to fade and the original version to be fulfilling again.

If a bad one, we call it resilience and endure the constant dread of the moment that the numbness fades and the full horror returns to steal more of our lives and joy.

I believe that I have, through necessity, become very resilient. I have self control: I can continue to function rationally and sensibly (as much as normal) when experiencing emotions. The emotions’ effect on me are dampened compared to some, who feel obliged to whoop for joy or collapse in sadness, their brains and identity lost temporarily.

Self control is an archaic virtue not much respected any more. The economy wants us to spend; to give in to the advertisers and shop layout artists. Media wants us to get distracted, or to perform like hooting monkeys to distract others. Even live performers expect audience feedback to validate them, on top of the audience money that’s already been paid. The toxic positivity movement wants us to be happy and whimsical, and thinks that if we believe hard enough somehow we can wish away sadness and process it into joy.

This is all nauseating. We should aim to think, not feel. To be human, not animal. To experience time flowing by as a river, to be watched from the stable shore of rational thought rather than drowning in the river bed. If someone gets flooded, the goal should be to help them find solid ground somewhere, not to let them ‘process’ the experience by developing gills or imagining that the water is actually wine.

                Self-control; the existence of life outside of emotion, is part of what we teach in therapy classes for depression and bereavement. Some drugs for depression seem not only to treat the symptoms, but also to deaden libido. People complain about feeling dampened. I guess that when everything in your life seems bad, dampening might be a rescue, but many then feel that they have nothing to live for.

                Is it possible to have self-control but relax it for nice things? I have rarely felt safe enough to let go in any context. People have a disturbing tendency to abuse such moments as weakness, sometimes long afterwards when they think it somehow becomes alright to be nasty. Can one endure horror and yet experience the nicest things in life as fully as a whimsical candle in the wind? I don’t know.

I do know that ‘processing’ is a delusion. We don’t ‘process’ them and return to normal life. We help others by promising, implicitly, that we will always be there for them. That support and concern now won’t turn into mockery in a year; that we will never say ‘remember when you cried like a baby!?’. That we understand that the emotion is not processed: it exists in one’s life and memory exactly as it is, and always will.

'Revealed preferences' reveal economists' preference for cruelty

 

Economists like to cite the results of natural experiments or observations, in which people’s preferences are revealed by behaviour, rather than discovered by asking them. This is often said to be a truer reflection of someone’s preferences, as they must put their money (often literally) where their mouth is.

For example, you might ask someone in a questionnaire whether he would gamble £5 on a 10% chance of winning £60 and he might say that he would, but if you give him £5 and then ask him whether he wants to take a chance, he might not.

                People often talk the talk but when faced with a real choice do something else. Sometimes it’s about projecting an image; not only to other people, but sometimes to themselves, so that even an anonymous survey can be affected by the effect.

                I encounter this a lot when discussing whether things are good for us: people do it, so they must want to do it. Why should we regulate gambling, since people clearly benefit from it… i.e. they do it, and that must mean that the pleasure they get from satisfying the desire to do it is greater than the losses they incur?

                People behave a certain way, and therefore that way must be best for them; who are we to judge other people’s preferences?     

                I might first answer that for a rational person to behave optimally he needs perfect information, which is often not the case. And a certain type of political person might suggest that we spread information rather than regulating or taxing things that we think harm the doer. Sometimes teaching people is harder than outright forbidding them from doing something. This is why parents need various rules; children can do a lot of things that are unwise, and it takes time and effort to make them understand why they should not do them. If many such dangerous behaviours are available, a parent needs to forbid them all while (one hopes) gradually teaching the child.

                But beyond all this we might ask what advertising is for. If people are rational actors who only need information, why are adverts not bland descriptions and portrayals of the product on offer, merely ensuring that potential customers know that it exists? Why are we so familiar with, for example, pretty women in adverts? Why do we have an advertising industry at all?

                If I have a need and I discover that there is a product that satisfies it, and I am entirely rational, that should be sufficient for me to buy the product (or look into it and see that it is overpriced). Advertising exists to persuade us: to make us want a product.

                The ‘revealed inference’, through the existence of a whole industry (even if we were to ignore psychology as an academic pursuit), is that preference is malleable. We are irrational creatures, weak-willed and foolish. An established way to treat alcoholism is with a drug that is taken once (per day) and makes the user feel very ill if he then drinks alcohol. It relies on a person’s preferences changing through the day: he must be strong enough just once a day to take the tablet, and then he ‘locks in’ that strength, which otherwise might fail. If humans were consistent such a treatment would be unnecessary or impossible.             

                People also bemoan their procrastination. We have a whole word for putting off what one ‘wants’ to do. Should we assume that a person’s true preferences are to avoid doing what he claims to want to do? In a world of distraction machines, full of creations designed to take attention, fighting one’s way through to one’s own goals takes effort; effort that we do not always have, especially after long days of work which sap our focus.

                I think it’s naïve to treat all this behaviour as people’s true preference. People often clearly articulate what they want even when there is no social benefit from concealing truer preferences. What we have in conflict are different aspects of humanity.             

                In modern terminology, we might call it ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’, following Daniel Kahneman’s categorisation of instinctive and thoughtful behaviours respectively. But he didn’t invent the idea. We have known about the contrast between hedonism and contentment (, for example,) for centuries. Even ignoring addiction, attention-theft and persuasion, there is a conflict between the experience of fun now and pleasure later. This conflict is one tool advertisers can use to persuade and addict people.

                If a person says that he wants contentment, and pleasure later, why should we take that as the lesser preference? We have a conflict between what he rationally says, and his behaviour, which can more easily be swayed by irrational concerns: impulsive weakness perhaps. We should probably trust his statement more than his behaviour. After all, what is the seat of humanity; of a soul? Is it the instinctive lizard-brain, or the sentient, thoughtful brain?

                Where behaviour does not match stated preference, that should tell us that there is social or market failure. False impressions, uncertainty over the future, or need for some happiness right now are all things we could avoid in a society that cared for its people. This would make far more sense than assuming that people truly wanted to self-destruct.

                For example, I would like a career in writing. You might find this short essay bad, or good. It doesn’t matter: I don’t pursue a career that I believe that I would find very fulfilling because it is uncertain. I could put a lot of effort in and not get anywhere, or get only poorly-paid tasks writing mostly under someone else’s creative control. I could learn and train if I’m not good enough, but I have no information about how good my work is nor how good it needs to be. The world is full of people who would like some artistic outlet but instead work in admin. jobs.

                Their revealed preferences are that they do not really want to be artistic. This contrast with their stated preferences shows that society is not set up for them. And what is society for except satisfying its people? We should listen to people’s ambitions and dreams. These are not ‘unreal’ preferences. They are dashed hopes, replaced with the fodder fed to us by advertisers.

                People might seem to be satisfied when they buy a new car whose adverts have repeated the idea that this provides freedom; that sitting in the driver’s seat makes one sexually desirable and powerful. What has really happened is that people who would have been fine were rendered unsatisfied by advertising, and some of them lose their money in order to make good that dissatisfaction. The same happens in grossly unequal places even without advertising: if you see other people who are fantastically well-off, you desire their lives even if you cannot have them. It doesn’t matter if outrageous wealth is achieved through obvious luck or luck masquerading as ability; the masses will still want such lives, and be less satisfied as a result. Inequality itself causes stress and suffering. I do believe that we should allow some difference in wealth and income, to reflect work done in life. But no human being is worth £millions a year when others receive mere £s.

                We should be helping people to achieve full person-hood, curing them of their addictions to procrastination, social media, advertised products, processed food or whatever else it might be, rather than cruelly deciding that people should be worse off and unhappier. We should help people's thoughtful, rational sides win in their lives; help their souls conquer their whims and shine freely. In just the same way that we give alcoholics disulfiram, we need disulphiram for the economy. Instead, many economists recommend more alcohol for the alcoholic, as it’s what he clearly wants and it would be patronising to think he needs anything else. Let’s have some doctors in charge instead.

The Right needs fealty, not just electoral victory

 

The nature of bullying

                When I was young I was bullied. I can’t read minds, but the bullying wasn’t triggered by one specific thing, such as my home life. It was a host of things: I wasn’t already their friend, I was awkward, quiet, thoughtful, ugly and clever. I stood out and for a long time it didn’t even occur to me to try to conform or obey, which made me stand out more. Bullying attacks difference but the motivations don’t form a major part of the bullying. Bullies don’t say

“Hehe, son of an alcoholic, hehe”, or “I feel bad about being stupid so I will try to make you feel bad too”.

They say things like “F*** off, gaylord”, or “Hey loser [teehee], hey loser! Why won’t you answer to your name, Loser?”

But the conventional understanding of bullies is that they feel insecure and try to make themselves feel better by putting others down: they try to establish a hierarchy in which they are not at the bottom. Sometimes they will pick on specific things to help to justify this: being the son of an alcoholic might be evidence of inferiority (although I’m not sure how, and clearly nor were my school peers). But mostly the pecking order is established by the insults; by who gets to be mean to whom, and therefore who respects and fears whom. Bullying establishes dominance… or attempts to. I didn’t understand others’ malice. I resented it and disliked them, but I was very far from respect or fear. I was fortunate enough to be strong enough to defend myself against physical bullying, and so the rest of the year feared me, enough to make a joke out of it. My nickname became ‘Psycho’, an attempt to dismiss the fear.

                I did not have tantrums in which I wailed, complained and lashed out ineffectively. If someone hurt me, I hurt them more. Carefully and deliberately. They could not laugh at my agitation; they could only accept the inevitable. Trolling and needling me did not get a fun display; I ignored it until I didn’t, at which point it was too late.

                I was called ‘Psycho’ because people found my violence unpredictable. This benefitted me; they were cautious about a lot of the bullying that had previously been prevalent. In fact it was entirely predictable: I had firm boundaries and would not overlook them being crossed. When people were violent or took what was mine I would respond but words I’d just ignore.

                Now I look back, I think some of the shock the boys felt was because they were merely posturing, like apes. They were trying to establish dominance, not start a fight. They felt that a punch or a shove was a justified escalation when their words failed to elicit fear or respect; when they failed to confirm their place in a hierarchy.

                I did not acknowledge their hierarchy. Yes, the popular children were popular and could rely on social support, being selected for sports teams and so on. But I enforced the rules. No matter how popular, I didn’t let people push in front of me in the lunch queue. They had not earned freedom from queueing by insulting me: quite the opposite! They got a scuffle and, because they were usually so entitled that they didn’t anticipate my response, flung back. If you absolutely must queue with your friends, ask them to join you at the back.

                Sometimes a school prefect would demand that the queue be in alphabetical order to make ticking people off easier; and sometimes in reverse alphabetical order. I disapproved, but obeyed legitimate authority. When I lost places, the entitled boys would laugh and celebrate; as far as they were concerned I had been put in my place.

                The natural order of things for many is that the dominant rule; they get social privileges that others do not, and are entitled to respect that they do not show. It comes as a shock when they encounter a worldview based more on universal laws such as 'no-one gets to queue-jump in front of me', 'if you attack me, I hurt you [more]', or in the news right now 'the president is not a dictator'.

Bullying in politics

Trump and the political right are bullies at heart. They seek status; winning grants that status, no matter the lies or economic harm. Winning is all the matters. This is why they are less concerned with rule-breaking than they should be: for them rule-breaking is the whole point; status grants dominance and dominance can be exercised however you want.

It is also why they demand unity from opponents. They won, and they now want the status of dominance; they need the fear and respect of those they have conquered. They need the social position that can only be confirmed by agreement. They hate the idea that despite winning the competition for dominance they are not respected by those they triumphed over. The scorn and hatred is fine when it can be seen as the impotent bitterness of losers, which is how it rapidly becomes portrayed. But, like the putrid orange pustule himself, their narcissism is fragile and the ongoing disagreement and disrespect still rankles because modern right-wing politics is driven by the desire for respect and status above all else.

They do not fully understand rules or justice. When rules work in their favour and others accept this, it is a sign of their status; a step up in the hierarchy. When rules are against them, it is the powerful dominating them. At school, prefects who re-ordered the lunch queue were not an external rule to be obeyed, but another tool to be used in the struggle to win. In the modern world, laws, trials and indictments are obstacles that sufficient status can and should overcome. Just like the ultra-wealthy front-men, right-wing supporters will consciously agree with broad, sensible statements such as ‘the law applies to everyone’, but they don’t really believe that this is as important as winning. The law applies to everyone until it doesn’t. Until it matters to them, and then it’s an unjust hindrance.

There are those on the left who are tempted by this approach: who think that we should be merciful, and that firm, impersonal rules are unfeeling, uncaring and unkind. This might be true, but that is why they are good. We are all equal under the law, for good and bad. Bad law can be a problem, but unequal enforcement of the law is not the solution. If we have rules, they should be obeyed and enforced.

Betraying allies

This is why right-wingers feel more comfortable with dictators than with allies. Because we have recently been a somewhat civilised, sensible country, our allies treat us as equals; with civility, in a spirit of co-operation in which we work together and all benefit. Right-wingers do not experience the dominance and fealty that they expect. This sort of respect as partners feels like disrespect; they instinctively feel (not think) in terms of dominance and ranking. One is higher; the other must submit.

Dictators live in that reality too. They deal in fear and power. They can act with deference; give the respect to a man that no self-respecting civilised man would. Neither Donald Trump nor Kemi Badenoch deserve any respect because of who they are or because they are dominant figures. It is their position in a system that has value, and the system itself that has the respect and fealty of thoughtful people. For right-wingers, the system is just a way to achieve dominance, and their leader, and hence they through association, should be given the fealty and dominance. Emperor Putin can do that in a way that a principled man cannot.

Theirs is a crazily unpatriotic attitude. A patriot would value his country’s good characteristics, not one man.

Bullying perpetuates itself through the generations

This search for belonging to a powerful mob – the search for power and status by association with victory – appeals most to those who do not have status. People who are insecure and fearful, the ignorant and the unskilled are the natural target for such politics. People who have little chance in a supposed meritocracy. Thus the right-wing politics of the past, creating undeserving winners at the expense of the poor, has created the constituency of current right-wing politics, which preys on those marginalised poor, bereft of education, support, connections and, above all, respect.

The left has talked about the moral worth of the poor; of helping to lift people out of poverty, but has been too busy bending to the whims of the rich and powerful in an attempt to get a glimpse of power to do anything. The rich and powerful are not friends of progress, and pleasing them was never going to help the left-wing cause. While the rich were happy to indulge demographically minor policies and culture-war campaigning, real redistribution and help for the poor never appeared. So the left appeared even more out of touch, supporting others whilst excluding many of the marginalised poor who were supposed to be its main support.

The demand for unity, the requirement for fealty from their opponents, and the belief in dominance and power unfettered by rules or principles, all lead to the right wing’s shock when they find that they cannot do as they please in power. Even though the rich and powerful are overwhelmingly conservative, the right wing does not feel dominant, and so there must be something more dominant left to conquer.

This is why we hear them chunter about some sort of left-wing blob of power resisting them; a hidden deep state of all those powerful teachers and academics who control the millionaires, bankers, CEOs and media magnates and must be crushed. Because the election is the way to determine who won, and the winner is therefore top of the hierarchy and should get to do what he likes, with the respect and fealty of all. If they do not have these things, then they are not top, as they think they should be.

Structures, systems, checks and balances... these are either not understood or are dismissed as paper walls to confine the weak, Nietzchian-style.

There is no left-wing deep state. The only thing more dominant than the wealthy few are the poorer masses. If the right wingers want to dominate all, they must enslave whole populations.

They will try.