Thread by @wayfinderfenix, Every perception, every "rational" thought is pre-gated thru emotion, below the threshold [...]

Every perception, every "rational" thought is pre-gated thru emotion, below the threshold of conscious awareness. Far from irrelevant, or mere "chemical reaction," emotion is the very foundation of thought. "Reason" is mainly a passenger--and a backseat driver, at that.

Rationality is useful tool--but it's not in charge.

It only works once emotions have done the heavy lifting--sifting billions of bits of sensory & internal data down to the rough 100 or so your rational mind can handle. The ones that really matter to you & your goals.

What you think of as "reality" is just the tiny sliver of the whole that's actually relevant to your needs at any given time. You can't tell, since your perceptions feel complete.

But your conscious rationality can only make plans once the unimaginable noise of 99.9999% of everything has been filtered out, so our dumb slow neocortices can focus on meeting our little ape needs.

This is why I find it so infuriating when people utterly discount or dismiss the wisdom of the heart.

Fact is, we literally can't function without it.

And of course we can't make decisions on emotion alone. But emotional reasoning is not the same as Emotional Intelligence.

Reason & Emotion need to work in tandem in our lives or nothing works. They need to be integrated--which is a parallel, if not identical process to integrating the Jungian Ego with the Shadow & the larger Self to be a completely individuated, psychologically healthy person.

But we have a deep schism that still persists in western culture--which manifests as both a kind of cognitive chauvenism; which places "reason" as superior to emotion, which is discounted, relegated to mere brute chemical processes or animal nature and not to be trusted.

So the rational ego makes a shadow issue of emotion; and therefore never learns how to handle emotion or integrate it.

And we can see this also play out in the sexism of intellectual arrogance we see, even today, in academic defenders of patriarchal systems.

Reason is seen as Order, and masculine. Emotion is regarded as feminine, and irrational -- as Chaos. Such even that some authors seek an antidote to it-- as if they could innoculate themselves to their insecurities by simply pretending that their emotions don't matter --

and likewise pretending that women don't matter either, nor anyone displaying too much emotion.

And that's nothing but a recipe for narcissistic psychopathy, and dominator culture--which is exactly what we have in the prevailing civilization around us.

All because far from being rational, this idealization of reason at the expense of irrational or brute emotion is nothing but a mask for deep insecurity--which again, can't be faced because it's disregarded as relevant, or even real. Certainly not counting by "rational" standards

So in truth, there's nothing rational or reasonable about it. Not by Popperian standards (the willingness to revise one's beliefs in the face of new evidence).

There's a complete fear, which renders the bearers incapable of seeing how integrated emotion leads to wisdom and growth, while either extreme of rationality or emotion--single mindedly trusting one at the total expense of the other--leads to certain disaster.

But that's the view that much of modern science, even today, still teaches. I say even today, because in addition to the deep intuitions of many, including wisdom traditions dating back thousands of years--modern science, psychology has provably known it is bullshit for 20 years.

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for demonstrating it -- that reason is not the master, that human cognition is far more contextual--and emotional--than science ever believed before.

Neurology backs that. We know the thalamus & hypothalamus filter perception in emotionally motivated ways. Before we can think about anything with our hundred thousand yr old neocortex, we have million-plus yr old systems pre-processing every data-point the neocortex works with.

If we want to talk of the dominant narrative of a world in peril--then this dangerously antiquated & flatly wrong normative / prescriptive notion that only reason matters & is worth considering is--by far--the greatest existential threat we face.

It disconnects us from our own emotional lives, from each other, and from the flow of all the Life around us.

And it inherently posits itself as the arbiter of truth. Rationality is king and any dispute of that view is irrational by definition.

Can you see the trouble there?

And again, there's gross misogyny that comes with all that; and an inherent veneration of the status quo, however cruel or unequal. After all, the dismal science may be dismal but certainly views itself as rational.

What a gaslight!

And yet the holders of this view wonder why average people distrust science and academics; when it's plain to everyone but them how cold and disconnected they are. -- which then does alienate average people from the real usefulness of rationality as a tool.

So you get these deep polarizations--between science and the religous / anti-science right wing; and between centrist academic scientists, & tech people--and leftists / feminists, because hard rationalism is inherently sexist.

And if it weren't, you wouldn't get shit like the Google Memo, or other instances of insecure, emotionally stunted cis white men, esp in STEM fields, quoting statistics in the attempt to gaslight women into disbelieving their own lived experience and accept the status quo.

It's often asked what single skill we could teach en-masse to improve the future of society.

Emotional intelligence is that skill.
That means rationality & emotion in balance.

Because rationality to the exclusion of emotional awareness is indistinguishable from psychopathy.

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