[Tanada]

I think all emotions have a survival advantage when you allow yourself to experience them in the proper context. Love is the right response for finding a long term relationship that leads to procreation, and builds strong secure tribes that promote the survival of your relatives or descendants. Hate can be the driving force that lets you fight off an attacker in a kill or be killed survival situation. lust can drive you to take chances looking for romantic entanglements you would have otherwise avoided widening the gene pool of your tribal group by bringing in fresh lines of DNA into the mixture.

The way I see it there are no 'dark' and 'light' emotions because it is all about the context. In the proper place all emotions are the appropriate genetic survival response to a given situation.

[SeaGypsy]

& that folks, is about as objective as one could dream of being. Problem is emotions aren't, they are the epitome of subjectivity.

[roccman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', ' ')Love is the right response for finding a long term relationship that leads to procreation, and builds strong secure tribes that promote the survival of your relatives or descendants. Hate can be the driving force that lets you fight off an attacker in a kill or be killed survival situation.

[Ibon]

“However much we describe and explain love, when we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.”

“Love is a madman,working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,
running through the mountains, drinking poison,
and now quietly choosing annihilation.”

quotes by Rumi


Like the rest of you my analytical brain likes to tease out the evolutionary origins and sociological dynamics of our emotional states.

I am also though humbly aware that what lies in the region of logic and reason cannot get very far in really and truly understanding the workings of these emotional states.

[roccman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', ' ')

I am also though humbly aware that what lies in the region of logic and reason cannot get very far in really and truly understanding the workings of these emotional states.

[asg70]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('roccman', '
')In my mind - there is no "self-regulation" rather it is imposed by a yet undefined "third party".

[roccman]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('asg70', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('roccman', '
')In my mind - there is no "self-regulation" rather it is imposed by a yet undefined "third party".

[asg70]

"It has to do with the fractal nature of that which animates life. It has to do with fear. It has to do with yahoos, the power of belief, and egregores. It has to do with assumptions we believe to be true."

This is cryptic to the point of uselessness. If you have something useful to say, please be direct about it.

[Ibon]

I agree with your post Asg70. This resistance to man up and deal comes of course from entitlement but also from something I think more important.

Humans accept regulations when the authority is not from man but from nature.

For example, building codes for earthquakes or hurricanes. Of course the codes themselves come from human authority but the reason comes from natural events that everyone recognizes and accepts.

Contrast this to human authority to force you to believe a particular political or religious ideology.

In both cases human authority implements regulation. In one case there is little or no dispute or rebellion in the other there is a huge potential for divisiveness.

The question arises, could a society ever recognize limits to consumption and breeding and even rationing of resources in the same way that we today pretty much universally accept building codes for earthquakes and hurricanes?

Is it too far fetched to assume that consequences to human overshoot could provide the catalyst to submit and yield in this way assuming that the feedbacks demonstrate that there is no choice.

A hailstorm that destroys a farmers crop does not illicit rage like a thief who steals his cattle.

Newfie mentioned how humans have this innate sense of fairness and that one of the reasons we feel this political rage and divisiveness at the moment is that all sides feel somehow that the other side is cheating or manipulating. Trump and Hillary both as royal scheisters.

What is unfair about the natural consequences of human overshoot? You can't take sides. You can't blame god.

You can however worship the overshoot predator which is a way of saying that you humbly yield and submit within limits that prevent awakening his wrath.

There really is a way to codify this within a set of taboos that will only be better understood looking out at the ruins one day of abandoned human landscapes.

We walk about today as a top predator unhindered. This veneer of control and power is about to be confronted with volatility that will humble us collectively. To what degree this can make us collectively yield to self regulation remains an open question.

[evilgenius]

Speaking of blaming God. Well, not so much God as those who insist upon this interpretation of the story of man and God that places man into something they call sin.

In the garden the 'original sin' was eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That's nothing more than coming to the point of achieving the ability to choose. Man came to the point where he could make choices, unlike the other animals, or men outside of the garden. The fact that man was naked before God when they met again is important because it signifies that man was in this place where he had the ability to make choices, but he didn't have wisdom. He was ashamed because of his lack of wisdom.

Jesus, the guy that Christians give credit for removing their sins, but don't very often listen to, had a lot to say about wisdom and choice. He liked to talk about faith a lot. Faith is nothing more than having confidence in your decisions, specifically those which reflect upon what your nature must be if those decisions say something about who you are. And how do you gain enough wisdom to make decisions with confidence? He also said not to judge. There is a corollary to that in art. When a person is learning how to draw one of the exercises they do is to make line drawings of a subject while looking at the subject the entire time, and not allowing your pencil to leave the paper. There is something very important one learns by doing that. Suffice it to say that no great work of art was ever done that way, but what it teaches a person about how to do art is necessary to the creation of a great work of art. Where you come from fills a person with all kinds of prejudices. Those things are like doing the line drawing. If you stick with them, however, and allow yourself to make your decisions based upon those prejudices, you will never come to the point where you are really making a true decision. You won't have that confidence. God doesn't seem to respect decisions not made with faith.

The ultimate decision, of course, is to decide to respect others as selves like yourself. When it says that 'greater love has no man than to lay down one's life for another' it speaks about that. If you are going to let an other have their turn it signals a kind of death, loss of control etc., for you. Now, that takes real faith.

[asg70]

Ibon, I think we're already seeing the way people are going to cope with natural limits. Even after they concede AGW is a thing they will argue over how we'll adapt to it. The developed world and the developing world will continue to bicker (Paris agreement or no Paris agreement).

You can call it...crying over spilt milk, but it's something we do a heck of a lot of.

There's a scene in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams that I always think about in relation to this. It's similar to the end of Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston rants that "we" (the collective "we") blew it all up. But it's some nuclear scientist walking around a wasteland (think Fukushima on steroids) and feeling guilty for having become the bringer of death in a hell-like future of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

That's kind of how I see the future. The only thing that will consume society other than trying to secure the safety of their tribe is to play the endless game of coulda-shoulda-wouldas now that it will be the age of consequences and weighing different bad and worse outcomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncmzgkVz9KI

Same deal with Children of Men.

There comes a time when the hope in the future that once offered some comfort to all mortal beings fades and it is just replaced by seething anger and hatred. That is what I would constitute as the end of the world as we know it. This sort of thing has happened before in times of regional collapse, like the plagues in europe when there was this belief that the death being exerted on us was ultimately a punishment for our collective sinfulness. This lead to things like the flagellators who would go around whipping themselves in order to sort of soak up the moral punishment for others like martyrs.

There are all sorts of destructive behaviors like this which will come to pass.

I think what's far less likely is the sort of green wizardry and coming together that was once espoused with the Transition Town movement. I think that's largely a figment of hippie imagination. I believe the opposite of Anne Frank, that people are fundamentally evil in the sense that they are selfish. That expresses itself in tragedy of commons consumption on the way towards collapse and in the sort of Lord of the Flies survival tacts during collapse.

[Tanada]

Anger is a high energy state, it burns itself out and becomes simple resentment in a short time. You may get flare up now and then from resentment back to anger, but you can live in a state of resentment for decades without consuming yourself. If you lived very long in Anger you would lash out repeatedly until someone or something ended your ability to do so.

[Revi]

People find someone to blame when things start to run out. It's call witch hunting, and it will happen again. It doesn't make any sense, but it's human nature.



https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/di ... witch-hunt

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'A')nger is a high energy state, it burns itself out and becomes simple resentment in a short time. You may get flare up now and then from resentment back to anger, but you can live in a state of resentment for decades without consuming yourself. If you lived very long in Anger you would lash out repeatedly until someone or something ended your ability to do so.

[onlooker]

This creates a filter of sorts where all the level headed sane and socially integrated people are no longer heard and the social media sites increasingly are frequented by pissed off and socially dysfunctional individuals.----
Yes, this is a kind of a self reinforcing loop. The Media trying to polarize issues and make them binary along with retching up the rhetoric. In turn this attracting, the more extreme individuals on both sides creating ever more polarization. In regard to politics this is something which I think we have been observing for decades now, as voters disengage and voting totals have gone down in this period even as the mutual vehemence between both sides grows.

Surprisingly, it is interesting that akin to to this in the political sphere is what is happening in the economic one. People are losing hope to find a decent job and are opting for government assistance or a startup self employment on the Net.

So across the social, political and economic spectrum, I think you are seeing a profound dysfunctionality in American society and this is leaving people profoundly disenchanted and disillusioned with the System and so where possible people are "dropping" out from the System. This phenomenon is itself under reported it seems to me yet clearly growing.

[SeaGypsy]

Addiction is a major theme, is it a 'dark emotion'? I'm getting involved in NA a bit lately, not in a big way, but enough to kind of start seeing a lot of what people do through the lense of addiction psychology. Social media addiction is huge, obviously. So too media more generally. Like other addictive substances, the stuff has legitimate usefulness, but there needs to be some self regulation/ limitation, or it becomes a life wrecking disease. Also similarly, sometimes some people find the only safe limit is total abstinence.

[onlooker]

Yes, addictive disorders is for sure a major theme in the world we live in.
I wonder what is the current recognized definition. I ask because Social Media can potentially be addictive but it also can serve to have useful discourse and commentaries on the state of the world. I think it certainly is useful to keep two attributes of an addictive disorder in mind. One, it is compulsive or obsessive, meaning the person has a difficult time to stop. Second , it generally leads to some negative outcomes for the person with the addiction.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('onlooker', '
')
So across the social, political and economic spectrum, I think you are seeing a profound dysfunctionality in American society and this is leaving people profoundly disenchanted and disillusioned with the System and so where possible people are "dropping" out from the System. This phenomenon is itself under reported it seems to me yet clearly growing.

[GHung]

"So maybe it looks and seems a lot worse than it is."

Or maybe not. I see a lot of people who are clearly disillusioned and are simply going through the motions because they have no choice. In spirit, they are dropping out, even as pretense is the necessary order of the day. Trump's election is merely an artifact of this. When people don't see viable solutions, they throw shit at walls hoping something will stick.

[onlooker]

Fascinating discussion guys revolving around this issue of Emotions and their practical and more opaque manifestations. I especially liked Tanada's assertion that all emotions are or can be useful. I agree totally. For the purpose of the wider discussion of humanities predicament, reading how Ibon alludes to our capacity to via sufficient impact from Consequences incorporate self regulation both collectively and individually is quite apt. I can imagine a future society where this concept holds a position at the pinnacle of what the survivors hold as necessary and sacred. From out of the harrowing ordeals wrought by the Overshoot Predator, we emerge unified firmly in the Conviction that we must live in harmony with each other and with Nature.