This is the most important essay on how intelligence, IQ, emotions, and logic work that I have ever read.
Internal blindness and emotional barriers
I have studied the human mind for at least 20 years and this essay has explained things I observed but could not really explain fully or at least well enough for my own satisfaction until now. Mixed with my experiences of martial arts of decades, it reduced to some observed truths.
One being that people avoid reality unless or until, physical pain is administered as a direct consequence. This is true and even animals can be trained to behave in certain ways through such methods, but it is not ideal or even practical, certainly not at a societal level, but also at a personal level.
Spartans were efficient and violence and pain was the main teaching instrument, so it absolutely does work, but it is not ideal for good relations in say a family unit.
The contrast between such methods being accepted say 50 or 70 years ago (or in my own raising, as older Gen X) and now is drastic.
Society didn’t have so many emotionally incontinent dyslexics! And everyone got by.
So that brutal method works, BUT, what if instead one approaches the situation from childhood so that a child gets taught to do something and his emotions of it are linked to it when they are good, and instead taught when a negative emotion happens to try and process it differently, say as a motivator, or marker of excellence.
Anyone that has done martial arts seriously will know that every one of us “forces” ourselves to process our pain, injuries, even fear itself as a “necessary” thing that once overcome makes us into better people. And it’s true, it does.
Sometimes you need to fool your brain into saying “this pain is ok, it’s good for me even if right now it hurts and maybe it will even cause serious or even permanent damage,* but I am choosing to go carry on past it, because it’s better on the other side of it and I WILL get there.” The fact is we don’t really know for sure what is on the other side, but all those who do get there know it was worth it after all.
And in that way our scars and so on are more tolerable. And we then learn to do the same emotionally, and again, overcoming your own emotions is always a positive for the most part.
The one exception is if you become so scarred over you can’t feel any good ones anymore. But then… you can reverse that situation by doing more of the same… forcing yourself to feel the good too. My living a year in the most beautiful city in the world (Venice) was essentially an aspect of doing that. It was very difficult to accept and be surrounded by such heartbreaking beauty alone. But I also knew it was healing.
So to get back to people who have a lowered ability in this capacity, starting with children, how do we teach them to use their emotions intelligently without limiting their ability to face diversity from the start? As I said, I suggest the method above of linking emotions to learning.
* The point is NOT to be so bull-headed to rush towards permanent injury with little thought, quite the contrary, one should become more hyper-aware and focused to avoid it, BUT, one MUST be willing to risk it at least in order to really overcome your own emotions. And evolve.
This post was originally published on my Substack. Link here
