True Grit - Confronting Emotion

This society does not recognise the importance of Love and the vital building blocks that it gives you in your journey towards being a complete person. It so concerned with material gain and only recognises material pain. If you bring up the lack of Love you have had in your home or in your life in general, you are told to stop whinging. There are people dying in Africa. War and poverty all over the world, and you are complaining about how your mummy didn't love you. Get a grip.

I don't think this cynicism in the face of emotional stability is smart. I think it masks a deep, society-level stupidity on the part of my own generation to face up to the importance of emotional balance and psychological alignment.

I personally believe that all the poverty and destitution in the world, compares not a hoot, to the pain and suffering felt in the loss of Love, or the loss of emotional support and security. In fact, the latter is more primal. The greatest crimes on a material level, such as war, abuse, violence and terrorism, can be traced to a lack of Love.

What I mean by Love is not some namby-pamby thing either. The annexing of Love, the disconnection from the whole arena of balance and emotional stability in our society, is very much a product of Patriarchy. In this post-feminist malaise, we have not lifted the walls that surround this emotional ghettoisation, either.

Love is a psychological reality. The word stands for a biological phenomenon that has a lot of evolutionary grit and power infused in it. In fact, I want to say that Love is the very force of change and adaptation itself. Love is the will to power, Love is the energy by which we survive.

There is a sort of conceptual dualism that disallows the material consideration of Love, and its importance to human health, social stability and economic balance. Post-enlightenment, post-industry and post-feminism, we still lack the intellectual breadth as a culture to integrate what was once a core philosophical notion in human reality, into the reality of our materialist society.

This same dualism is caused by an over-zealous scientism, a rationalism that is hell-bent on emotional repression, because the mechanisms of repression have become too powerful, leaving a confrontation with vulnerability and tenderness a dangerous proposition for our society.

As long as women were left to be economically and politically irrelevant, then they were allowed to entertain romantic notions. The dualism of Love versus hard industrial and scientific truths was mirrored in the arbitrary lines of gender distinction.

And you'd think, as these gender lines are dissolved, the dualism of emotional reality versus material reality would be dissolved as well. Not so. This is the great tragedy of post-feminism. It subsumes female freedom into the decadent emotionless synergy of materialist culture.

One of the core pillars of Patriarchy remains intact in post-feminism. That of divorcing humanity from its own emotional authenticity. It does this by diminishing the importance of emotions across the board. It even socialises the idea into us, that emotions are a threat to survival, rather than an aid to it.

I read once that Love is not the absence of hate. That it is analogous to the colour white. White is not the absence of colour but the totality of all colours combined. Love is the totality of all emotions, it is the emotional spectrum itself, the combined frequency of emotional reality, rather than simply being one aspect of it.

Tenderness, vulnerability, even weakness itself, are essential emotions to the survival of the human species. Our emotions must be confronted and lived, not repressed. Contrary to the deeply ingrained Patriarchal belief about emotional vulnerability, our emotions can be controlled and experienced authentically at the same time. There is no need to divorce ourselves from Love, on order to make it work in our favour.

In fact, it makes much more material and evolutionary sense to have a balanced and integrated relationship with Love.

Love is a vital developmental resource. It is psychologically non-negotiable. It is biologically essential to the basic health needs of an organism. I want to say that it is not some contingent, irrelevant or extraneous side-show to the science of life itself, but it is beginning and end of the physics of living.

It will take a lot of time to really detail what I mean by Love, both in a scientific and poetic sense. What I want to do now, is just make the point that for masculinity and society as a whole, we need to reconnect with the emotional arena in a workable way.

We need to stop trying to dominate our emotions, but welcome them, even the ones we have grown to perceive as threats. Emotions perform a biological and material function. We ought to be suspicious then, of Patriarchy and post-feminism, those default ideologies that seek to keep us as enemies of our own hearts, opposed to the messages and the functional knowledge that a true relationship with Love can give us.