Layer 30 Destructive Emotions, Driving Passions, Dangerous Ideas.

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We can’t really get to grips with the idea of emotional intelligence unless we sort out our understanding of the emotions themselves - their nature, origins and components. We need to recognise that the emotions are not just elemental forces residing within us, but rather they are complex entities that contain elements of several aspects of ourselves, our psyches.

Certainly an emotion such as jealousy is made up of a combination of knowledge, feelings and imagination. Collins defines feeling jealous as ‘suspicious or fearful of being displaced by a rival’, often involving being resentful and vindictive.

When I’m jealous I know that someone I feel passionate and possessive about is spending time with someone else and enjoying their company. I imagine the object of my affections might like the other person more than they like me, and may even stop seeing me in order to be with the third party. I have no way of knowing whether this is true but I feel bad about the situation, and I imagine I will feel even worse if my fears are realised.

An emotion like jealousy cannot exist without the interplay of the three planes of experience - knowing (ideas), feeling (passions) and imagination (projections). It’s clear that emotions cannot be located within any one of the intelligences or modes of experience. They are in essence the opposite of intelligence, although they may originally have served as a primitive survival mechanism - in the case of jealousy, for example, something that perpetuates the pair-bond by imposing exclusivity and behaving aggressively towards potential interlopers.

Insofar as pair-bonding as a cooperative partnership helps to ensure the well-being and survival of the offspring then jealousy may have had and may still have an evolutionary purpose. Though we may wonder whether exclusivity rather than inclusivity is an efficient process for more highly evolved and more complex species and communities such as humans. Where injury or death is the outcome of jealousy, for instance, we must surely ask ourselves whether this particular emotion is something we need to reign in, control, and perhaps eliminate from our experience.

We may refer to certain assaults as ‘crimes of passion’, for instance, but passion (or libido) can be seen as a force for good in our lives, and therefore to blame assaults on passion is not logical or appropriate. Jealousy is the emotion driving so-called crimes of passion, and we need to see passion and the emotions as distinct and separate.

Besides, assaults are driven as much by ideas as by passion. We have our heads filled with simplistic and often ridiculous ideas which cause us to have warped understandings about ourselves and our behaviour. Ideas rooted within our culture, for instance, serve to regulate our behaviour and our emotions.

People within our society often take it as a given that they should seek retribution and revenge if someone is unfaithful, or if someone shows us ‘disrespect’, or someone steals something (or someone) that ‘belongs’ to us. Many cultures and sub-cultures sanction the use of violence in such circumstances, and the idea of honour can create a very fixed idea that someone would rather die or suffer injury than passively suffer an insult in silence. Yet in other cultures passivism and non-violence are the dominant ideas that regulate behaviour.

Not only are our prisons full of people who commit assaults because they believe that it’s right and proper for them to do so in certain circumstances, we also imprison people whose behaviour is conditioned by the dominant idea that it’s necessary and justifiable to steal something in order to possess it or in order to obtain money.

Clearly the existence of poverty is a key factor in regulating the emotions and therefore regulating behaviour. We currently have a government that once pledged itself to be tough on the causes of crime, but which has done little to tackle those causes.

Poverty is a key cause of crime, and poverty is clearly a relative concept. The people who commit crimes in our country in order to gain something materially and financially are clearly much wealthier than people elsewhere who are literally starving and without possessions, and yet do not commit crimes. Crime is also much higher within countries where people who are unemployed or on low incomes feel themselves to be impoverished in comparison with others in their society and community whose standard of living is much higher. The gap between the poorest and the richest sectors in our society is increasing, not decreasing.

Anger and resentment coupled with an idea that theft and assault are in some circumstances justifiable and necessary are the fuel that drives actions that are considered by most of us to be anti-social, immoral and unethical.

Morals and ethics are maintained in part by the idea that theft and assault, for instance, are in all circumstances bad and unacceptable. Even the very poorest in our society usually desist from the temptation to steal or carry out muggings because they believe such behaviour to be wrong, and in all circumstances they are deemed unjustifiable.

Children who grow up in cultures, sub-cultures and families where crime is seen as acceptable are clearly at risk. Exposure to primitive ideas and modes of thinking, and to adults whose emotions are unregulated by ethical and moral beliefs, is highly toxic to such vulnerable children and young people. Unless we prevent such negative influences governing the thinking and behaviour of our youth then we cannot expect the mere threat of punishment and retribution by mainstream society to have a deterrent effect. In such circumstances prison and fines for criminal behaviour are seen as merely part of life, which can happen to you if you’re ‘unlucky’.

Schools and teachers have a crucial role to play in developing emotional intelligence - in combatting dangerous ideas, and helping young people to develop strategies for dealing with destructive emotions. If emotional intelligence is not being developed in the home and the community, then it's only in the schools that it's going to develop, and will only do so where enough time and enough skilled teaching are devoted to it.

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Short-term ‘fixes’ for crime are bad investments. Government needs to act consistently on two broad fronts in order to create a better and happier society.

1) Social Justice. Through the redistribution of wealth, not necessarily by taking money and wealth away from the better-off sections of society, but through fiscal policy, a higher minimum wage, higher tax credits, etc, and slowing down the growth in the wealth of the better off, we can and should create a fairer and more equal society. We should all welcome this if we care at all about social justice, community cohesion, reduction in crime, and creating a generally happier society where there are lower levels of mental and emotional ill-health, and higher levels of moral and ethical conduct.
2) Education. The basic curriculum needs to consist of learning personal, social, and emotional skills, and developing the social, emotional and spiritual intelligences, as well as developing thinking skills and the acquisition of various forms of knowledge - scientific, mathematical, linguistic, artistic, musical, etc. Children also need to learn how to learn - how to pursue their own learning agendas - and above all learn to love learning for its own sake. They need commitment to their own learning in the broadest possible sense, and as such, commitment to the pursuit of higher levels of ethical and moral conduct and towards being of service of others, which can be characterised as enlightened.

Needless to say, such a social policy agenda, and such an educational agenda, are not currently on offer, even though the rhetoric of government is towards more social justice and better education. To the contrary, the general perception is that lives are more stressful and less happy, that communities are more dangerous, that crime (including cyber-crime and so-called white collar crime such as fraud and identity theft) is more prevalent, that drug-taking and binge drinking are increasing, that childhoods are more toxic, that schools are increasingly exam factories that fail to address the real educational needs of children and fail to develop all of their intelligences or their creativity or foster a genuine love of learning, etc. Something needs to change, and radically.