I Don't Care

[Yonadav]

I think that your analogy about throwing out the baby with the bathwater is backwards. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater over, and over, and over, and finally you just stop caring.

I'm not arguing that it's not a loop, or that it's not desensitizing. I'm simple positing that emotions are a driving force for good and bad actions that can't be easily divorced from cause. When we want something and are excited about it, it is a positive loop reinforcing our creativity and investment in a topic. When we are pessimistic (or less feeling than we once were) about something, we are more apathetic,which could feed a negative feedback loop. ie. This jerk always does x and he'll never change, I don't care about his opinion anymore. When you could be excited that This jerk always does x, but didn't this time, I wonder if he has a new insight I might learn from.

Caring, or feeling emotion about something, engages an emotive amplifier to our feedback loops. A more apathetic approach might prevent us from spiraling down on a topic, but it also prevents us from acting positively about a subject. If you're more apathetic about certain topics, I'm advising you should identify why it doesn't interest you anymore (assuming it did once). If it's not an effective use of your time and energies without the emotive amplifier, then don't waste your time discussing it, that's being a good steward of your energies. If it's because you have unresolved bias issues, communication issues, repressed emotions it's not. Jung always believed they will bite you in the ass eventually.

As far as your recent discussion on bias, you can't destroy someone's framework. While you're working on your own Johari window realize that "the other" category is populated with people that are looking through the tint of their own glass. Sometimes it's good to get a completely different tinted input, it's one of the reasons that I'm here. It helps me learn to communicate better. Much like women and men speak different languages, different ideologues speak and see through different tinted windows. Just try a different tack to get your points across if you want to.

  Emotions are routinely divorced from cause. That's exactly what makes emotional reasoning so abusive. An emotion divorced from its cause is basically what creates memes, and memes are routinely applied to people, things, and issues that they were never intended to be applied to. Reason becomes emotion, emotion becomes a meme, the meme gets applied to things that have to do with the original Reason, and frequently the meme goes full circle to directly contradict the original Reason. I gave a good example of that in another discussion where a meme that promoted diversity went full circle and ate its own tale.

I basically agree that apathy prevents us from working positively on a subject. And yet, apathy is sometimes the most positive thing that you can do. There is nothing that you can do to collaborate constructively with emotional predators. Walking away is the right thing to do.