The reason we all have emotion is so we can experience a meaningful existence. Of course since this is an existence of rampant contradictions we can only expect both positive and negative facets to the existence of emotion in our lives. In simple terms, if you’re feeling good, it’s great to be alive, if you’re feeling bad, you wish you were dead.
So what are the most basic emotions? Happiness, sadness, anger, and… Well, anything else would be a mix of these emotions. How do you feel when you’re depressed? …really Sad. How do you feel when you’ve just missed the bus? ….Angry with a mixture of sadness every now and then. How do you feel when you’ve just solved a problem? …Happy. Is jealousy or envy an emotion? Nope, it’s an expression of Anger. What about hysteria? …extreme uncontrolled Happiness. What about when you’re moody or flustered? A mix of Sadness and Anger with more emphasis on Anger and Sadness respectively. What about when you’re calm? Well it’s allowing Happiness to appease and sooth the inherent turbulence of the human psyche.
What about when a person becomes insane or suffers a nervous breakdown, or jumps off a bridge screaming in sheer delight? Well that’s what happens when people completely lose control of their emotions (or control of their mental faculties… this similarity or relationship would warrant another discussion for another time). Or the phrase would be… “He’s/She’s lost it.” Yes, when you’ve lost it, it’s off to the shrink you go. Or in extreme cases the asylum becomes your new home. Then we become an unproductive part of society. Man, even criminals as long as they remain in control of their emotions can still maintain their productivity. But when you’ve really lost it, you can no longer function. You become the weakest link… bye bye.
See the power emotions can have over us? And how it directly relates to our usefulness in society? So what if we do like the Vulcans and eliminate emotion? A decrease in the emotional quotient (EQ) equals an increase in the efficacy quotient (E2Q). The lesser the impact of emotion in your life, the more productive you become. Isn’t that great?!!!
But wait a minute, what about the reason we have emotions in the first place? Doesn’t being more productive make you more valuable to society? But doesn’t eliminating emotion also eradicate meaningfulness? Now we start swimming in the sea of subjectivity and ambiguity versus logic and objectivity, since with logic you deal with well-defined absolutes. When you talk about emotion, value, and meaning, absolutes go on a vacation.
Let’s move on and talk about productivity and emotion. How can a decrease in the impact of emotions allow you to be more productive? Well, let’s take an example of a situation where emotion totally botches ones productivity. Let’s say you’re working on an important report you have to give the next morning. But you can’t seem to stop thinking about your friend who, you’ve just learned, is suffering from a terminal illness. You take a break, make a call and decide to visit your friend. One, because you’re overcome by sadness and two, because you want to lift your friend’s spirits. You tell yourself the report can wait. You couldn’t possibly abandon your friend in his/her time of need. Now, does this moment of unproductiveness make you of less value to society, in this case represented by the recipient of your report? To answer that, I’d have to define what I mean by value in this particular case.
Well, when you really think about it, there are two kinds of “value.” Quantitative value and qualitative value. Quantitative value is a type of value that has numerical, logical, or technical worth. Whereas, qualitative value is made of something intangible, formless, naturally unquantifiable. So in the case of failing to complete your report, your quantitative value to society is obviously reduced. The absence of the report may have produced negative ramifications to the processes necessary for the success of the report’s recipient(s). Does this automatically mean your qualitative value increased due to the concern you’d shown over your friend? Let’s keep in mind that your actions have also, in a way, reduced your qualitative value in the eyes of the report’s recipients. So how can we now measure your overall qualitative value in this case?
Allow me now to bring in the concept of “the greater good” for the purpose of discussion. We can use this concept to attempt to quantify qualitative value by relating it to the number of persons affected by the result of a certain action. Of course this requires that we know how many people were affected positively and negatively to the friendly visit and concurrently to the deficient report. Another problem that comes to light is it’s still not as clear cut as we would like. You see, you’d have to determine the degree to which each person has been either positively or negatively affected by the action in question. And to determine that, I would have to bring in the concepts of employer-employee relationships, business policies, office politics, personal networks, nuclear and extended family relationships, and many more specifics in this particular case. So many that in the interest of time I suggest we simplify matters and just give an opinion based on what has so far been discussed and marginally defined. Someone once said opinions are the cheapest commodity. I beg to differ. There are opinions that have given more value to existence than emotions themselves. Why? Because some opinions have stimulated emotion and caused greatness out of nothingness. I call these opinions proverbs…
If you had no emotions and were the most productive person on earth would you be extremely useful to society? Yes very much so. Your value would not only be quantitative in nature but also qualitative. How so? Well, having benefited from your productivity, representatives of society would most likely experience a positive emotion, thereby subjectively raising your value. So can we now conclude that increased productivity equals increased value both qualitative and quantitative? And that the absence of emotion would make you more productive ergo more valuable to society?
Yes. But, that would make you a/an ………………………
If you’ve read the whole thing and come this far, I admire your patience in my mindless rambling. Hey, that’s what friends are for, right? Now please complete the unfinished sentence and send your comments. Heheheheh…..
