Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Warm Fuzzies

This country is suffering from an emotional meltdown.

In the age of Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, opinion polls on news outlet websites and reality courtroom TV shows, emotion has become king. It seems the question any reporter nowadays asks at the very start of any interview is, “How did this make you feel?” Televangelists manipulate congregations and viewers, cracking their voices with emotion at just the right moment to bring the donations crashing in. Anchors like Jane Velez Mitchell and Nancy Grace manage to insinuate in their broadcasts that the beauty and age of a victim of violent crime contribute to the heinous nature of said crime (i.e. the more beautiful the victim and/or the younger they are, the more evil the murder.) An acquaintance of mine saw George Stephanopolous on the news one day, and commented that she liked his reporting because he was “such a nice-looking man.” Also, splattered all over the news are stories of Herman Cain and Michael Jackson's doctor: the former deals with the court of public opinion convicting as guilty a presidential candidate without very solid evidence but only on a gut emotion of distaste; the latter deals with a real courtroom case that has been sullied by calls for a guilty verdict by Jackson fans and supporters, who are quite ready to punish Dr. Conrad Murray regardless of whether he killed the singer or not.

We as a people crave that moment when the contestant is told by the show judges that his performance stinks to high heaven, and relish in watching said contestant walk dejectedly off stage in tears to be interviewed later by emotion hungry reporters. We watch countless shows and movies of how the heart trumps the mind at every turn. We excuse or applaud disobedience to authority, chalking it up as being merely overwhelmed with a certain emotion and acting without thinking. Temporary insanity pleas plague this nation's courts as convenient ways to avoid harsh punishment. As Spock puts it at the end of the most recent Star Trek film, “Put logic aside. Do what feels right.”

What is wrong with us? Since when have reason and sound judgment become so unfashionable? And since when have we become such an unruly mob out for blood?

These are hard questions to answer, for there seem to be many origins of the problem. Other civilizations have been indulgent and sensual, and not living in those times and places I am not privy to the extent of their rejection of logic and reasoning in favor of sensuality. However, it seems to me that we are unique in one respect: other civilizations have upheld the ideal of reason and sound judgment in life, while many times not living up to that ideal. We are different in that we not only don't live up to that ideal, we seem to have simply pitched it altogether.

One contributing factor oddly enough is materialism. The intelligent thing to do for the average Joe is to save as much money as possible, in order to be financially protected and comfortable later in life. But rampant production by corporations that manufacture myriad goods requires equally rampant consumption to sustain itself. Thus the modern encouragement is to buy as many things as you want because stuff is so much cheaper now, and more abundant. So, if the logical thing to do is save, then it follows that the emotional thing to do is to buy and consume. The latter is what most modern ad campaigns will play to, and these ads are ubiquitous and insidious. You “owe it to yourself” to buy these companies' product. Why? Because it'll make you feel good.

Another component of our descent into emotionalism is the sexual revolution. I know I tread into charged territory by making this claim, but stick with me. The “pill” was designed specifically to liberate women from the “threat” of pregnancy. In so doing, it made the unspoken assumption that not only was getting pregnant something bad that inevitably happened to women, it was also something that occurred only through an emotional decision-making process. In the end, what the pill and all subsequent contraceptives have done is to separate the baby-making part of sex from the emotionally bonding and pleasurable part. Suddenly sex became a tool for emotional satisfaction and pleasure only.

A third factor is more of an outgrowth of the second: the overthrow of the male. With laws now allowing women every avenue and opportunity available to men, along with women being “free” from their own bodies, women have rapidly overtaken men in many areas that were once almost exclusively male. Modern technology has removed much of the need for male muscle and grunt, and so women have moved in to claim a share of the load. All of these, coupled with a mid-twentieth-century ultra-feminist push in the United States, has led to an apparent annulment of manhood. Women made the intellectual leap from “I am able to do,” to “I should do.” The result? Absent fathers and skinny boy-men who live in their parents' basement and play video games all day. Boys are raised far more by their mothers now than their fathers, leading to a skewed sense of manliness. The natural emotional support of a mother is suddenly all that boys receive, not balanced out by the masculine and intellectual vigor that a father must provide. Effeminate boys are the end product.

There are most assuredly many other reasons for our current emotion problems, but this makes a good starter list. We are an emotionally skewed and self-involved country, and we must end that obsession now before it gets us into any more trouble. The masses become much less easy to manipulate when they use their intellects to decide things, not just their appetites.

1 comment:

  1. If the seriousness of a murder is determined by age, then I wonder why the media hasn't been consistent with itself and defended the unborn more fiercely than all other murder victims.

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