A post to
[email protected] on the topic of "feelings are the most
important thing.
posted to [email protected] by Soulhuntre on 06/06/2005 @
17:24:00
[ a comment that the idea that feelings are most important is a Western
and especially US foible ]That’s not entirely true. It isn’t something that the "west" or even the US"
as a whole agrees on. In fact it is a relatively recent development in the USA.
For a long time the values of the US emphasized work, advancement, duty and
responsibilities to family, country and job… at the expense of personal
feelings. That may not have been perfect or healthy, it wasn’t even universally
agreed on but it was predominant.The idea that anything that makes you feel good is an excuse for anything you
want to do is pretty recent, and pretty much a construction of the
PC/left/victimization movement. The corollary is that anything that makes you
feel bad is also an excuse for almost any behavior is inevitable (don’t leave
that abusive husband, kill him!)When your political power draws from your status as the downtrodden and
oppressed you create a situationw here you want and need to be more oppressed,
and more and more people want to consider themselves oppressed. Since they all
those people are NOT, in reality, as oppressed as they need to be to gain power
they have to shift their arguments from reality to feelings.One can argue with whether someone >is< oppressed and fight them. You cannot
argue whether someone FEELS oppressed. Once they convince people that their
feelings are more important than reality, then they have all the power.It is in their interests then to emphasize feelings over reality. In doing so
they have to destroy the idea of absolutes or the value of objective concepts.
It is a clear path from there to the belief that words mean whatever the people
involved say they do.That lets anyone be a "slave" or "submissive" for instance, even if they are
neither. Follow the current silliness around the idea of "self esteem" and all
this unravels.What annoys me is the tendency to paint the West / US as backwards in just
about anything… (not by you specifically) because it is always so, no matter
the stance. Of course the real question is "compared to who"? And the
implication that we are the fat kid in the short bus 🙂If we focus on sex then "Americans are superficial", if we don’t focus on sex
then "Americans are repressed". If we focus on religion then "Americans are to
religious" and if we don’t pay attention to religion then "Americans have no
spiritual depth".It’s like it is automatically assumed that any yak herder who has been on the
same hill for 20 generations must have wisdom, but any American who build a
company or invented a medicine must be an idiot.Baffling – again, I don’t say that was the motive behind your comment… just
a tangential rant 🙂