Feelings don't care about your facts
Weโve all heard the iconic conservative mantra that โfacts donโt care about your feelingsโ when debunking the logical fallacies and the uncontrollable outbursts from the radical Left. Its an important one, in a postmodern and gynocentric climate that rejects any sense of hierarchy today such a statement is an absolute breathe of fresh air. After all the saying continues to still be repeated by right leaning Zoomers on Instagram and TikTok six years after Shapiro went viral saying this for the first time at University of Missouri.
But at the end of the day, none of your political stances held are due to the facts at hand - it just makes you feel better positioned to justify your stance with numbers.
Conservatives prioritize a very picturesque image of familial life molded by truth and beauty, tradition works after all. If your lost in the woods and see a trail built by a thousand foot steps, the probability of a safe exit is very high. Liberals on the other hand pretend to prioritize fairness and equity but are covertly using those terms for power and control. And this all occurs at the gut-level, not because of your deductive reasoning. We believe we are practical but in reality we are using the evidence to fortify our initial diagnosis onto the social landscape.
Iโve always said, conservatives are romanticists masquerading as pragmatists and liberals are pragmatists masquerading as romanticists.
I liken this to the analogy of the elephant rider by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt. The man riding the elephant is your intellect or rationalization, the elephant is your intrinsic natural emotional frame and having a good father is the path being road. The ego will convince you the rider is in charge but when the rubber meets the road we always go with what feels right, the elephant.
When the swarm of Hilary supporting single mothers wore there obnoxious pink hats in Washington, DC in 2017 it was all emotion. When the George Floyd riots caused $2 billion worth of tax payer damages surpassing the LA riots last year, it was all emotion. And when you proudly gaze at your children and wife playing together on the playroom mat, these decisions were not based on calculative computations, its again all emotion.
As written in The Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt, โI believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than Plato when he said, โReason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.โ
Of course one is better than the other, thatโs my point.
When you recognize that your desire to preserve tradition is rooted from an emotional impulse you immediately stop the distinction of public and private speech, it is freeing.
Rather than failing to discuss the detriments of Roe vs. Wade and its implicit proliferation of the single motherhood rate to the zombified masses one can instead speak frankly and just be honest. That men wouldnโt fornicate with the majority of the women protesting which is why they wonโt shut up in the first place, a humorous yet valid sentiment thats been repeated behind closed doors in right leaning cirles. The people on one hand need to remove their modulated filters (shame) to communicate properly and on the other abandon the stoic constitutional inner-robot that repeats intellectual talking points as if they were auditioning for employment at the Babylon Bee, neither is attractive nor seductive.
No one is advocating men to become dramatic and quaking emotional messes, but recognize that it is positive not negative to justify your feeling on patriotism, the sacred, family values and tradition outsides the bound of political researchers. It is the recognition that freedom of speech is the articulation of your core values, not the repetition of facts. It reminds you that standing up for whats right is a moral imperative, not an economic one.
The individual that can articulate his emotional mind is perhaps a hundred times more dangerous than the man who simply โreads the data.โ
Its time to level up my friends.
Arthur Kwon Lee