Sentimentality versus Goodness

Just because watching baby seals get clubbed to death (or, incongruently, polar bears who eat baby seals drowning) makes you cry does not make you a good person.  Emotions, per se, are not positive goods.  They are nothing.  They are of no more intrinsic significance than breathing.  We need them. They serve many positive functions.  But you are not what you feel. You are what you DO.

What is important is action, and quite often the most important action is perception, thinking, seeing.

Consider for just a moment how much productive energy is locked up in dark cages in our world by bad ideas: by “defunct” economists like Keynes; by ideologies like socialism, which decry wealth accumulation, but rely on it for power. 

Just imagine how liberating it would be if we could get accurate information dispersed and understood by the entire world.  The world would bloom instantly.  But we can’t: too many powerful forces of habit, evil. sloth, arrogance, and simple stupidity oppose us.

In large measure, much of our difficulty lies in the emotionally immature position that feelings are perceptions.  They are not, or at least not necessarily.  Virtually all great errors have been accompanied by strong positive feelings. And this can include, of course, an excessive reliance on what you call reason and/or science.

I have a specific, personal reason for posting this, which I am not going to share, per my own habit.  It’s incomplete, but I feel better.