Comment by rawgabbit
1 year ago
You are describing moral outrage. The other poster is talking about what academics associate with the fight or flight instinct.
I agree with the other poster anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success. Extreme emotions engages our primal brain which prevents our more advanced brain from engaging.
> You are describing moral outrage.
That's simply a fancy label for a particular kind of anger, as one might be able to tell from the literal definition of outrage: an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.
In my opinion there are few things quite as pathetic as people who twist themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging their emotions for what they are. Certain emotions are "bad" (anger, jealousy, etc), and so instead of addressing it when they feel those things, they just convince themselves that they aren't actually feeling them at all and that their reactions are driven by some higher logic or nobler emotion - all while still inflicting their emotional fallout on those around them.
I side with this school of thought.
Just call the emotions what they are, accept them in the form of not dressing them up and putting some spin on them to make people feel better about themselves (and ultimately dance around the actual emotion, via forms of denial, bypassing, etc.). And once you accept them for the simple, unadorned, and sometimes unflattering things that they are, you can then process them, and decide via understanding the root causes, contexts, and triggers, to then map out decision trees for how to respond to those feelings and emotions as the best course of action.
And like you mentioned, if you don't address the actual emotions and try to pretty them up, you're gonna leak out the actual emotions sideways, and cause unnecessary strain to those around you, and ultimately place your burden of being responsible for your emotions on others, and most likely throw up a big stink (in the form of projection, more denial, more bypassing, etc.).
Emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and responsibility are very difficult but necessary things, and they often times are unflattering. But like also many other things, there's no shortcuts to learning how to manage and deal with them in real situations with real stakes.
> there are few things quite as pathetic
I very much agree with your overall point. But it's literally the opposite of pathetic to elide one's own pathos. I'm actually a bit sad that such as useful word as "pathetic" was literally reversed in meaning to become a disparaging epithet.
All personality types have their own blindspots.
> But it's literally the opposite of pathetic to elide one's own pathos
...a rather important part of the overall point is precisely that the people in question are not elid[ing their] own pathos.
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Hmm. I would argue addressing the root cause of our emotions requires the use of a more precise clinical analysis. Which is the opposite of extreme emotion.
> anger and other extreme emotions are usually negatively correlated with long term success.
But historically when they did not result in negative long term success, they paid off big time.
Anger is not an extreme emotion. It's used all of the time to good purpose. You're thinking about rage. If the "other poster" failed to make this distinction then it's really important to make it now so that we don't start strawmanning or ad homineming based on a misunderstanding.
Personally Joy has been an extreme emotion that has done me bad. As when I experience Joy I start to stop paying attention. On one occasion I suffered a broken bone because of it.
"Engages our primal brain ... prevents our more advanced brain engaging"
That's not how that works.
Moral outrage is when I'm pissed off at someone else bc they don't fit my preconceived idea of how people ought to live or behave - it's not real anger, especially not in 2024.
Being pissed off bc of injustice to my family - that is for sure actual anger.