Emotions

Foreword- Please note that I wrote this essay several years ago. Hence the current events, and even my views can be a bit out dated. Also, the seed of this essay came to me after reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Would highly recommend it!

Gunfire can be heard the world over every day. In Asia the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban rages on. In South America, FAARC continues to terrorize the Colombian people. In Mexico the drug war goes on unabated, having already taken thousands of lives. In the Middle East the rebellion against the Bashar Assad regime in Syria has already cost more than sixty thousand lives. In Africa Islamists reign supreme in Mali and other countries, punishing those that do not match their strict Muslim codes, In Somalia, war against the government continues as does piracy, and war is brewing between Sudan and South Sudan. Even in usually the usually peaceful continent of Europe, terrorist attacks have become more frequent; in places such as Norway and France. Civil disobedience in France, Greece, Spain, Italy and the UK has caused violence in recent times. In the USA gun violence is getting more and more frequent, often at the horrible expense of young lives.  

How long can the world afford to continue in this violent trend? How many lives can we stomach being lost prematurely before we decide that there must be an overall solution for violence and war? Humans are vengeful, judgmental, intolerant and hateful creatures. There can be no realistic worldwide fix for violence and murder and war, as it is in our nature. People always have motives for murder, war and violence, such as subjugating another people to one’s own beliefs, or conquering others for their resources and their freedom. These motives will never go away, as it is an affliction that the human race suffers from. Sadly there is no cure. Our best solution is to limit the violence and warfare through  changing perceptions in society and through laws around the world. This however will not completely solve the problem.

Allow me if you will to be extremely unrealistic and naïve. A solution does exist for our problems, and not only would it end violence and warfare, it would also enable the world to be free of hunger, crime and hate, thus enabling us to focus our resources on the advancement of mankind as a whole. Imagine. Imgaine a world where emotion did not exist. Sounds horrifying, doesn’t it?

It does indeed sound horrific, for wouldn’t living life without feelings be pointless, boring and depressing? What would life be without all the joy, elation, and happiness? What would it be with it’s relative companions, suffering, sadness and anguish to give us true meaning to our joy or despair? What would be the point of living without feeling? Wouldn’t life and existence be meaningless and incredibly dull?

Wrong. In a life without emotions you would feel no such things. One would live in a state of indifference, and would work to further his or her life through logical and sensible means, while working together with the community as a whole in order to allow man kind to reach its true potential. I realise that this also sounds horrible, living in a state where you do not realise how horrible your life is, but that’s just the way it seems now. In the hypothetical state of mind without emotions it would not matter at all. How could one realise how joyless life is without knowing what joy means? What would the absence of love mean if there was no love to begin with. And what would be pain be if there were no previous experiences of it?

That’s the beauty of it, no more pain, no more suffering, no more horror and loss.

Let’s take a deeper look into it; What is the purpose of living? There are myriad answers to this ageless question. Starting from simple procreation; passing on your gene, to fulfilling some stated passion, to doing your family justice, to serving your country, to making money and acquiring beautiful mates. How many of these purposes are social constructs, and how many of them are true to your nature. Of all those stated, the two that are true to your nature as a human are the survival of your genes, and the acquiring of a beautiful mate (in order to better your genetic lineage).

If I were to remove emotions, culture, religion and the idea of nationality from a person’s mind, the most important things to that person would be to survive and procreate. And so it would be in an emotionless world. Individual are naturally selfish and conceited. In a society without caring and connections- what would stop a person from back stabbing- figuratively or literally. What would stop someone from murdering animals for meat and clothes, what would stop us from doing horrible things? We need a code of ethics. We need a moral guiding force to keep this jungle of humanity civilized, right?  

Wrong. Society is an age-old construct that’s in need of a massive update. Religion- Redundant. Marriage- Social construct, we’re naturally polygamous. Nation State- Extension of Tribes or Chiefdoms for the needs of collective security. I could go on, but entire books can be written on each of these things mentioned. However I will simply state that as I see it, all of these tools (and I use the word tool extremely deliberately)- marriage, religion, the state are by and large extremely redundant. Point by point:

·         Religion- Gave us a sense of right and wrong, and established authority of the ruling class. Brought homogeneity and order. In older societies explained why it rained (or whatever other natural phenomena) because the science at the time was either inadequate or non-existent and could not explain daily occurrences. In today’s world, this is all redundant. We have been socialized for long enough to be part of our DNA so to speak. We don’t need religion to tell us what is right and wrong, and we do not need it to explain what we know today as scientific phenomenon.  

·         Marriage- Highly handy and useful tool to help raise stable, and successful children. Said children would take care of the parents when they grow old. Very functional system, but it has been given over romantic meaning and religious significance. In today’s world we know that two parents are better at raising children than one. The whole marriage covenant is unnecessary, but not the worst thing in the world- like religion.

·         Nation State- Still important and today’s world and does serve many purposes, such as law and order and the creation of public goods- which the free market would never do. Still in today’s global condition, the idea of a nation state is a strange one. Race, Religion and Geography are no longer as important as before. And as such it seems a matter of time where we have one global state. That would certainly solve the migrant and refugee issues for one thing (admittedly in a very technical, literal sense, as the words migrant and refugee would not apply in a world with one nation).

So without these things how would we function?

There are several key benefits of the lack of emotions in a person. The first being that emotions would not be able to cloud decision making and logical thought processes, allowing for the best possible decisions to be made in the long run. The second is that without emotions, things like racism, sexism, stereotypes and mutual hatred between religions and cultures and countries would cease to exist. In short all the reasons for confrontation, violence, crime, death and pain in the world would no longer be there. There would be no fighting and killing and murder and starvation to face. There would be no need for nations to constantly arm themselves with more and more advanced weaponry. And in casting away the burden of the nuclear deterrent and the military projection of power, hundreds of billions of dollars would be free to be utilised for far better purposes, such as ending hunger and poverty, putting money into the war on disease and in generally improving the way of life for everyone all around the world. Is this not reason enough for us to do away with these pesky emotions? Imagine how many lives we can save just by taking away something that not only hurts us, but hinders us.

In a world without emotions it seems hard to believe that society and mankind can make any progress. This is because these days progress is not made on an individual basis, but on collective efforts by members of the community. Hence you may ask, what makes you think that anyone is going to care to help other people and society and mankind as a whole without emotions. Why would a person help another person if he/she didn’t care about that person? Or what would stop us from murdering someone to steal what theirs and add it to our own personal belongings?

Again, such an assumption is only skin deep. Sure, right now it seems like we help others because it gives us a warm fuzzy, or no sorry, because we care about people. But even without emotions, we would still help each other, live in a stable society, and care for each other. A simple study of game theory would let you know, that in today’s world society does not function as a “zero sum game”, wherein there is only one winner who gets all the spoils and one loser, who gets absolutely nothing.

The world is a lot more complex than that. Two parties in any given situation can win, not necessarily equally, but both can gain. In today’s global and technological context, survival is not that hard to achieve. Therefore the real goal is to optimize for the best lifestyle possible, with the given resources available. In a survival of the fittest situation (which probably really existed in cave man times, or perhaps tribal society times) non-cooperative game theory would be the optimum solution. But in today’s world where survival isn’t dependent on conquest or hunter-gatherers- cooperative game theory is a better bet.  This is because cooperation can lead to higher yields and production- thus leading to a better lifestyle; By myself I could make ten cookies an hour, and by yourself you could make twenty, it would still make sense to cooperate as two players can streamline the process and colectivise resources and specialize production in order to increase total yield well beyond the twenty cookies an hour without cooperating. Thus in terms of logic, humans would not resort to being individual, selfish and murderous as it would be counter productive to their lifestyles.

If you’re worried about humans limbic brains taking over and everyone getting involved in a murder fest, that would not happen either. In a society where people do harm to other members of society, those people that commit the harm are either punished, removed from society (prison) or face capital punishment (the death sentence). I don’t see why the situation would be any different for an emotionless society, but let’s entertain the notion for arguments sake.

Logically speaking, if a serial killer or rapist was to be running around hurting or killing people, individuals that did not care for each other on an emotional level would still care about others for logical reasons.

·         If people were murdered willy nilly- economic output in the collective based system of cooperation I mentioned before would go down as there are less producers, and less people to collaborate with, so it would not be tolerated.

·         If people could get away with rape, murder and theft without consequence, no one would be safe from such harmful things, thus; individuals would collectivise their efforts in order to stop the people harming society for fear of their own individual well being getting affected adversely. It would not be tolerated.

Therefore- even in an “uncaring” emotionless society. There would be little or even less crime than in a society with emotions.

But there’s two sides to every coin. Having said that we must acknowledge that life without emotions would also disable the ability to truly enjoy life, to be happy, be surprised, to be loved and to feel joy. This is an unfortunate side effect of my proposed solution, but I believe that the overall benefit merits such a tragic loss.

This is a fairly reasonable assumption to make, and hypothetically would be mostly true. Humans help each (according to current social contracts) other only because they have feeling towards the other person (or perhaps also ulterior motives!). If we were take out emotions out of the equation it seems unlikely that any progress would be made at all. Therefore a solution must be thought of before implementing the emotion genocide I have suggested. Again, imagine, imagine a world where the nations of the world collectively agreed to a set of codes, ethics, morals and laws that are to be followed. This agreement must be binding to such an extent where people who don’t follow it must be corrected or shielded from society. Now imagine a world where the new social contract is to treat everyone of every race, country and creed equally, where everyone must help society to fulfill its potential, where murder and crime is explicitly forbidden and impossible to commit, because without emotions you have no reasons to commit crimes and you have no biases against not helping people. For now humans follow their logic and their brains rather than their emotions and their heart. Hence people would help one another as the most logical path to furthering prosperity and stability is mutual cooperation and the pooling of skills and resources.

In a world where this social contract is somehow enforced, and there are no emotions to hinder our reasoning process there would be very few man made problems left, if any. In fact resources and attention can be diverted to more naturally occurring problems, like dealing with disasters and curing disease. In a world where there are no reasons to do harm to another person, there would be no unnecessary death and the making of orphans and bereavement of families and friends. Looking at the way the world is heading now with war, natural disasters and disease seemingly increasing all the time, would it not be worth it to focus our efforts on progress and stability, at the expense of our emotions, which if you think about it, really get us nowhere?