Error Amplified

It occurs to me that precisely those sorts of people–often men, but certainly not invariably–who fear emotion tend to be attracted to fields in which they can be productive without it, or in which apparent “objectivity” is even valued.  Sciences of various sorts, of course, are the paradigmatic examples.

Thus fields like biology and medicine become populated disproportionately with people congenitally disinclined to embrace the qualitative side of life–the inchoate, indefinable, mythic, constantly moving side– and THOSE ARE THE PEOPLE who get to decide what constitutes science, what data, what useful research and what frivolous.

I want to be clear: if you are not able to digest emotion habitually, with roughly the same diligence that you digest food, you are stupider than you would be if you had this trait; and this stupidity is made greater and greater the less value you place on feelings.

Feelings are not everything.  One must have reason, and one must have data.  But feelings drive the engine, and if you have not contacted them, processed them, they are driving you.  You only have the illusion of being a sovereign mind, uninfluenced by factors extraneous to the “equation”.