From Humanoid Faults to Manipulated Consensus, 24
We’re emotional:
Emotions are a form of energy that tends to take us up. Not only we can create this form of energy, but we can also allow it to grow unchecked and engulf us, to the point where we are trapped into thinking that we are emotion, instead of observing that we can feel emotions. The trap is in the shift from have to be: from being aware of something as a separate entity from us to losing that awareness and that differentiation.
To our purposes here we can compare emotion and its operation to an overload in an electrical circuit: suppose that a complex electronic circuit controlling a complex system is flooded by high voltage, and then imagine the consequences on the controlled system… well, that is the effect of emotion over thought. Furthermore, a thought overwhelmed by emotion is being relegated to a position of effect – and we know that one makes things go either right or wrong in direct ratio to how much cause or effect one is.
Suppose you go out for a personal errand to run, and you bump into a moron that provokes you for reasons totally irrelevant to you; if you rise to the bait, you can pile up any reasons why you did, but the hard fact is you did what someone else wanted you to: you have been effect. If you didn’t, and managed to stay on or resume your planned course of action, you did what you wanted to do in the first place: you have been cause. That’s it.
It’s perfectly well to use emotions as additional petrol to let more power off the wheels, as long as one remains at the steering wheel. Being overwhelmed to a point of swearing that it were you in the first place who freely caused the overwhelming and decided the change in the course of action in order to react is an entirely different thing. The word reaction itself tells it all: a re−(hyphen)−action is an effect and the cause is a previous action. To cut it short, when we get overwhelmed by either hostility, anger, rage, pain, resentment, shiftiness, fear, grief, apathy, death feel and the alike, from a resource we turn into a deadweight to ourselves and our fellows, and the wisest move is to pull the plug until we snap out of it – a bucketful of cold water would perfectly do –.