Don't Trust Your Feelings Luke!

This is not politics, nor religion. Call it philosophy or education or philosophy of education. Whatever!  I keep getting called ugly names by people who don't know me because of my political orientation. If I had an alternative sexual orientation I'd have been alright. The persons in question would, in fact, have defended me for that, but because my "label" makes them feel uncomfortable. It can't be right.

I blame George Lucas and the Romantic Poets. For many generations now we have been telling kids that feelings were important. The romantic poets started it off with the inane idea of courtly love - 90% emotion and 10% stupidity. George Lucas finished it off by having Obi Wan Kenobi give Luke Skywalker the second most inane idea "Trust your feelings, Luke."
Feelings cannot be trusted unless properly trained. Let me 'splain.

You want to learn to hit a baseball but you've never done it before. You take a swing. It feels awkward. You swing again, your brain working feverishly to try and adjust the trajectory of the bat by making adjustments to your finger pressure on the handle at the opposite end of the bat from the end you are trying to hit the ball with. It's a difficult task and at first it appears awkward.

But after repeating the process over and over and over again, eventually you get good at connecting with the ball. When you do finally get it right, when you swing correctly it just feels right. It's actually a positive emotional response that lets you know more quickly that you're doing it right. It saves your brain time by building thicker neuron pathways that trigger proper bat swinging. It skips the upper brain pretty much altogether and goes straight to the brain stem. After that, you swing the bat almost without thinking. When you feel good about the bat and ball coming together, you're probably swinging the bat correctly and way more likely to connect with a solid hit.

We train all our emotional responses that way. Even responses to labels, political opinions, religious beliefs if processed repeatedly come to feel "right".  The more we reinforce our belief systems, the more emotionally attached to them we become and anything that challenges those belief systems provokes a visceral response. The more firmly held the belief, the more powerful the response. So what we have now are people who feel first and then think and often they never quite get to the bit about thinking.

This is how holocausts happen.
Feelings are, for the most part, trained responses. Nine out of ten "feelings happen as a result of a previous series of "thinkings" Feelings are designed to be a backup to reasoning. As we encounter facts and ideas, process them and decide how we feel about them, our brain thickens pathways to the matching neural responses (feelings). If we agree with an idea or experience enough times we soon automatically feel good. Soon the limbic system stops sending incoming stimulus to the thinking part of the brain and short circuits it to the brain stem and triggers "feelings" If we train ourselves to believe that something is bad, we soon automatically have bad feelings about it. Obi Wan, in some ways was wrong.

You can only "Trust your feelings, Luke" if those feelings have been properly trained. One of the hazards of eliminating all contrary ideas from a child's training is that the child learns an emotional response to certain "facts" if those facts are incorrect or lies, the child still learns to skip the reasoning bit and go straight to a gut feeling that certain things are wrong and certain things are right. We create precious snowflakes that way - unable to tolerate a difference of opinion because it doesn't feel right and therefore it must be wrong.

It's why liberal-trained college students react so viscerally to anyone who challenges the Marxist ideas they've been trained to believe through positive reinforcement from their numerically superior numbers of Marxist college professors. We are no longer teaching young people to think (which makes them more resilient) but to feel (which makes them less mentally tough). Why do you think colleges deploy counselors and safe spaces every time college students are exposed to ideas different from what liberal professors teach?
It's just sad.

© 2017 by Tom King