In my Previous Article, ‘Tell Me How To Influence People‘, I explained that I have no Morally Conflicting Emotions that I need or have to ‘Set Aside’ in order to Proceed with Acts of Manipulation or Intimidation i.e., which I do Sometimes Engage with so as to Make My Influence upon other people or to Make Them Behave According to My Wishes and What I’d Like Them To Do.
A Reader, in a Comment to My Article, wrote:
“Zhawq, I believe you missed the baby with the bath water. We do have the ability to put our emotions aside, we can detach with ease…when it suits us.”
Though I did Reply to this in the Comments Section at the time, the Reader’s Words stuck with me and I Decided to Elaborate a Little Further on the Topic, but where in the aforementioned article I focused on situations where I do not experience any Feelings or Emotions, pleasant or negative, and therefore also don’t have to ‘Set Aside’ any such, in the Present article I Will Focus upon Situations where Setting Feelings Aside did have a Relevance to me…
I am not about to say that I don’t have any emotions at all or that I never experience discomfort of any kind and therefore have never had to set aside certain feelings in order to complete a task effectively, but for as far as the question about whether a task in nature is Moral, amoral, or immoral, is concerned, the answer is that I really do not have any feelings for or against either of it, and this is because I simply do not have any relationship with morality and moral norms, the exception perhaps being my intellectual epistemological and philosophical view of the role of mores and the Meaning of Being Moral in our (modern) society, which mainly contains criticism. I’ll readily admit that I am really not a very moral person, though I’ll at times behave morally as a token of respect people I’m interested in and/or like and care about (<– believe it or not, this does happen occasionally).
I’ll describe in the following some situations where I have had to set aside my feelings in order to take action, hopefully this way I can make it more understandable where the difference is between these experiences and the moral inner conflicts that were described in the article mentioned above…
I’ve been in situations where I had to ‘clean up’ after something that took place (see Descriptions of ‘Cleaning Up’), but some time had past and it was in the midst of summer so ‘the mess’ had become even more messy and begun to decompose. The smell of rot was really heavy, the air itself seemed loaded by the stench, and I am somewhat sensible when it comes to smell so this is a very good example of a situation where I had to ‘set my feelings aside’ and not allow nausea to take over and dictate my efficiency. So I did what I have seen normal people do when they feel overwhelmed by sadness or insecurity or other emotions as well as unpleasant physical sensations: I went outside and smeared a paste on my upper lip (lucky I didn’t wear a mustache, but I’d have used it even if I had a mustache a la Friedrich Nietzsche on this pic), it’s a paste akin to such which you can buy made for the purpose, crime scene technicians and people who work in businesses with doing autopsy etc. use it too. Mine was home made for convenience, that way you don’t have to bother with receipts from where you bought it leading back to you. I smeared the paste on, lit a heavy flavor cigar, took a deep breath and went back inside and finished the job without problems even though it still wasn’t pleasant (and yes, it’s all on record, there are no new murders to research).
And that was it. Just as the Reader wrote I put aside my feelings in order to go ahead and do what I had to do, but it was my feeling of physical discomfort that I put aside, not an emotion as such. Still it was a feeling nevertheless, it just wasn’t the same as having to detach or set aside emotional issues – be they about influencing, coaching or coercing people or something else – since such emotions are directly related to how you relate to Mores. So again, if you don’t have any moral standards you will also not have any emotions concerning the active possibility of violating common or abstract moral standards or the moral standards of others.
You can of course chose to relate to others individually, but that takes us into the territory of ethics and this opens for the possibility of situations where you may have to chose which feeling is more important to you at that time, the concern for the other person or your need to take an action that disregards or violates that person. More about that in Psychopaths and Setting Aside Feelings Or Emotions – Part 2.
