On Emotions and Judgement

I love many things.

I love watching the sunrise. I love the taste of chocolate. I love collecting trinkets and vinyl and cameras. I love seeing a child smile, or a girl laugh. I love the coolness in my lungs when I breathe in the air on a winter day. I love being surrounded by a surplus of sweaty bodies during a concert. I love to feel. I love to feel sad, I love to feel content, and I love to feel the release of anger. I love communication, appreciation, argumentation, and the ability to see. I love many things.

Every day I am enchanted by the multitude of experiences I encounter for which I can really express a love for. It's because of this emotion as well as others such as pride and curiosity that I believe we chose to continue living in cohesion as a race divided amongst itself by ethnicity and religion. In a nutshell, few, but highly influential reasons, are the overall reason for our decision to continue procreating and making advancements in our society.

This morning, sitting by my window, holding a mug of warm wine, two burning candles and a crackling vinyl spinning on a record player before me, I thought about how happy I was to be where I was. Then I thought, why?

It's rare that people chose to analyze why they feel good, especially when it pertains to something as little as a little wine and music. Really, the concept fascinates me. We are a race so contained in our curiosity and research, yet so few stop to think about what it is that makes them feel better about one emotion than another.

From birth, much of our population has been taught that while whatever actions that lead to laughs and smiles are encouraged, those that lead to cries and bursts of anger should be lulled away, and acts towards greed and disrespect induce punishment. We have been raised to feel a certain way about many of these actions and emotions from the day we were born.

I wondered, if I were not raised to see smiling and laughing as something that is good, if I had not received punishment for bursts of anger and violent acts, would I still have enjoyed sitting by my window with a mug of warm wine and crackling vinyl music in the background more so than I did yelling or even punching a guy?

I wondered why it was that we considered feelings such as "love" good, while others such as "anger" bad. From that thought, I began to wonder how we ever decided what feelings were "good" and which were not in general. Then, on a more specific scale, I began to think about how it is we judge who is "attractive" and who is not, what will determine whether somebody is a "slut" or not...What the hell gives any single one of us the authority to judge anything really?

Few men have walked the Earth who have been considered living, walking Gods. Really, most of us believe that no gods, if they do exist, walk amongst us with that "higher divine authority" to lead our lives. One of the last more influential type "Living Gods," Hideki Tojo, the leader of the Japanese empire during the Second World War, led his men with the slogans of "no surrender" and "kill ten of their men before losing your life." His "godly" rulings led to an unnecessary expansion of an already brutal war, which ultimately led to a considerably larger death toll and the second release of an atomic bomb on his own civilians in the city of Nagasaki. This man, recognized as a walking god amongst most of his population, caused what we consider to be absolute mayhem and reflected tyranny. Why did a full race of people choose to embrace this cynical man as a legitimate God?

In reality, this group of people was raised differently: in many Asian cultures, it is custom to have a more apparent respect for authority than people do in, per say, the United States, where our newly elected soon-to-be president Donald Trump is very often made fun of, as seen by the very large number of existing memes made to mock him publicly. This behavior is not only closely monitored in places such as Japan, but it is also considered to be wrong and is rarely really expressed.

I will admit that for a large portion of my life I had been a pretty judgmental person. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that whatever anybody else does that does not affect my well being requires zero commentaries from my part. Had my younger self been more aware of the history relating to Japan during World War II, I honestly believe I would condemn the Japanese people for being so ignorant, and that I would even support the decision of the United States to have sent their citizens of Japanese descent to internment camps. Now, I realize, that they were only acting in a way which they truly believed was right.

The point my random thought infused brain is trying to make is that not a single one of us really have any reason to judge any of our peers or fellow beings than for personal entertainment. Each and every one of us was brought up in our own unique way, with our own set of beliefs and our own views and opinions, whether they had been influenced by exterior influences or not.