(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
For millennia, we have practiced our minds to think remotely and in the absence of emotion. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call our split mindset a "disembodied style of thinking" – an unforgettable way of thinking. They think this way of thinking is so crazy that everything that has been thought must now be rethought. And the difference is dramatic.
The opposite of thinking disembodied is to think close to the emotions, – embodied or embodied, with a embodied mind. In order to learn this way of thinking, we must act counter-clockwise to our present split thinking. I have done this myself and know that the difference is dramatic.
For both sense of reality, reality experience, knowledge and morality, our perception patterns and valuation criteria, power structures and power relationships are based on just one disembodied style of thinking. We believe what we believe, and the powerful are powerful because they have the power to shape us from the time we are born.
Reason and feelings. Of course, we do not think completely disembodied. It is impossible. For as author and brain scientist Antonio R. Damasio has shown, the brain is the body's enthralled audience, and the body is the scene of emotion. The emotions, which come first, provide a frame of reference for how the rest of the brain handles its affairs (Descartes' mistake, Damasio 2001). The fact that the emotions precede the intellect makes a dramatic difference to what we previously thought.
My claim is that after millennia we have neglected, denied and suppressed emotions – in the belief that reason and emotion are in different places in the brain and in the philosophies of storytelling that emotions are senseless and something primitive that we should disregard – is our mentality and way of thinking now so divorced from the emotions that the rationality that sets us apart from other animals has, by the way, been lost.
In Materialist 1/2013, I wrote the following: “First we vandalize the emotions and then accuse the emotions we have raced not to make sense. Worst of all, we continue to rage our emotions even though we have long known that thinking is emotionally engaged and influenced ”. I call that unintelligent. We make the absence of emotions, raging, frustrated and deceptive emotions, the frame of reference or the basis of our thinking.
Studies of the brain-damaged patient Elliot led Damasio to understand that the absence of emotion destroys our judgment and thinking ability. Elliot did not manage in daily life, was without practical reason and ability to make decisions, precisely because the injury meant that he no longer had an emotional life.
Damasio could eventually conclude that absence of emotions destroys for the rationality that sets us apart as human beings, that such a state is a reliable correlate to defective core consciousness (The feeling of what is happening, 2002). What about our absence of feeling empathy?
Is empathy hypersensitivity? Hardly anything has led to more misery in the world than a lack of empathy. This feeling may be so absent that those who have the power of definition believe that empathy is something intellectual, or something one can cognitively "understand"; something that can be pugged similar to the multiplication table. There must be something wrong with the emotional basis of their thinking, their core consciousness.
Centuries of echo of the man's fear of emotion ring in my ears, in his struggle against the woman and her way of thinking.
It is mostly men who have never understood the role and meaning of emotions that have the power of definition; Men who think in the absence of emotions have decided and still decide what is hypersensitive, skinless, hypersensitive and so on.
Now Eivind Tjønneland (Ny Tid 4/2017) and his like-minded people believe that hair soreness has prevailed in the world, and that we hypersensitive people must be fought. Tjønneland & Co is now attacking "the new skinless rulers", a "new type of potential dictators" who grew up in the 2010s, a "thin-skinned Frankenstein monster" who wants to ban everything that "does not like to hear".
Where are these dictators, the rulers? What systems of influence and power have become hypersensitive? Today, youth politicians from all parties – those who became "adults" in the 2010s – decided to serve the sick and weak in society through changes in social support schemes, even more than their thick-skinned role models.
The attacks on us sensitive have changed character. Before we were just stupid – now someone feels threatened. Any tendency for increased sensitivity should be suffocated at birth. One must prevent the prevailing neglect of and distrust of emotions from being weakened. New knowledge about emotions must not be known to most people.
If they fail in this, I think it could be an unparalleled intellectual battle in history. One embodied style of thinking will undermine prevailing power structures and power relations; it will change our perception of reality, our patterns of perception and our
criteria. We will understand that what we have not incorporated into our own world, we can not reconcile in ourselves – as little as a psychopath can see his own insensitivity.
The brain is the body's enchanted audience, and the body is the scene of emotions.
Fear of emotions. Centuries of echo of the man's fear of emotion ring in my ears, in his struggle against the woman and her way of thinking. Men excluded the woman from helping to shape the thinking and perception of ourselves of all of us, because she thought more with emotions and for that reason was considered unintelligent. It has cost us dearly.
At a time when everything seems to be going to hell with the planet, we have now gained knowledge that can save our species if it is spread and managed wisely. Our problems cannot be solved by the way of thinking that created them (Einstein said something like that). Now we have the opportunity to get rid of this way of thinking.
But if this is to happen, our brain, body and emotions must become one cohesive organism that cooperates with the surrounding environment, as our "body mind" is meant to work. We must not let ourselves be stopped by the powerful, but even actively pursue our split mindset to get a more embodied mindset. And I am convinced that those who are best suited for it are people with more closeness to emotions.
Perhaps the egocentric hypersensitivity Tjønneland and his like-minded people see, is a failed attempt to pursue such counter-dressage. Perhaps the sentimental "perverted feelings" of the sentimental can one day be transformed into the feeling of empathy, which secondly after love threatens prevailing power structures more than anything.
post@loyd.no
