 Let's talk about emotions. How do I switch from classical liberalism to emotions? And I guess this came about from, you know, I encounter a lot of people who think objectivists, that objectivism advocates for this detached, emotionless, cold view of the world and the objectivists of these robots that walk around being rational. And think about the old television show, the original Star Trek, one of the greatest television shows ever in my view, partially because it presented this great emotion mind, mind-body dichotomy, right? You had Spock who was pure reason and felt nothing. And then you had the doctor, what was his name? Doc, forget his name. Anyway, you had the doctor who was pure emotion, no reason, right? And the program creates this, you know, mind-body dichotomy, this dichotomy between reason and emotion. And I like it because it gives it an opportunity to deal with some philosophical issues, and it gives it an opportunity to present, in a sense, a philosophical point of view. So it's kind of interesting. And I think a lot of that show dealt with some philosophical issues. And, you know, the sci-fi allows you to do interesting things, and so I'm a fan. So a lot of people, Dr. Bones, that's right, McCoy, Dr. McCoy, or Bones, Bones was his nickname, that's right, they called him, they called him Bones. So I often get this question about, well, objectivism, you guys don't believe in emotions or you don't believe in cultivating emotions. And then from people who are interested in objectivism, I often get the question, well, what is the role of emotion in a human being's life? What is the role of emotion in a healthy human being's life? You know, is reason in conflict? And therefore, once you suppress our emotions, once you reject our emotions and just, you know, reason, it's all about rational self-interest, not about emotional self-interest. And indeed, we make the point of, you shouldn't follow your emotions and seeking your values, you should follow your, your reason, you should follow, you should follow rationality. So how does all this integrate? Now, this is a big topic and we're only just going to touch on it today because also I have to get to this issue of, it's photography art, which is kind of fun, that'll be short. And I actually also want to, one more thing that I want to do, remind me if I forget, I want to say something about Dunkirk, the movie, which I watched last week. So I want to give you a quick review of Dunkirk in addition to that. So let me start by saying, whoa, emotions are incredibly important. Emotions are how, in a sense, we experience life. Emotions are important. I mean, you can't be happy. Happiness is, in a sense, an emotion, a state of being. But what is a state of being? A state of being is the, is the, is to a large extent the collection of the emotions that you have. It's how you feel about yourself and about the world. Emotions are crucial survival mechanisms. They give you information about you and about how you are responding to the world. And just like pain and pleasure are mechanisms to tell you stay away from embrace in a sense. This is good. This is bad in some primitive physical sense. Emotions are telling you, ooh, something's wrong there. I feel fear or I feel anxiety or I feel, and, oh, this is great. I feel good now because emotions are not cognition. It doesn't mean the emotion is right. You have to evaluate that emotion. You have to look at the facts of reality and figure out where that emotion is coming from and whether it's right or not. But it's giving you that signal and that experience of living. And it's so silly to be anti-emotion when emotion is life. It's part of life. It's an essential part of life. It's an essential part of a biology. We have emotions where the spark likes it or not. And I love it. How could you not love emotions? I mean, this is what, joy, joy is an emotion. And fear is healthy. Fear is a healthy emotion, right? When something is to be feared, when something is dangerous, you should feel fear. Now, the emotion of fear is not enough to justify not doing something. You have to understand why you're feeling the fear. But the fear is an automatic, quick, almost instantaneous response to something in reality. And that is important in emergencies. But it's also important in living because it tells you something about what you think subconsciously about the things out there in reality that are happening. And sometimes you'll discover that your emotions are in contradiction to your conscious, explicit views about the thing in reality. And that means you have to do some work. Why? So let's step back a minute. What are emotions? Where do they come from? So I'm going to read you Inran's definition. Emotions are the automatic results, well, that's not exactly a definition, but emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments, integrated by a subconscious, right? So emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments, integrated by subconscious. Emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him. So emotions are quick, subconscious evaluations of reality, of events, of values that are out there. And they are good indicative to you, and this is what makes emotions so valuable, they're indicated to you of whether your subconscious is integrated with your conscious, views of the world. I don't know. So you might, you might get a thrill every time you see Donald Trump get on stage and speak, and you get this positive emotion. And yet you know how awful a human being and an awful president he has to be. And yet emotionally, I love this example, emotionally you're spawning to him like he's John Gault. Now that would say there's some issue going on. There's something wrong, even though you could say, well, it's causing me joy. This is a good thing, joy is a good thing, right? But the conflict with your conscious minds has to also cause you anxiety, stress, worry. It's also the case that getting joy out of something that is in reality harmful to you is not going to lead to non-contradictory joy, to consistent joy, to happiness. So I don't get joy when I see Donald Trump, the emotion I feel is discussed. Because on this issue at least, my subconscious and my conscious mind are integrated. Right? But think about the importance of justice in the world, for example. I mean, one of the, one of the justices of virtue, the importance of justice is a virtue, is you want to stay away from people who will do you harm. And you want to bring close to you people that will contribute to your life, because they would add to your life, increase your possibility of happiness, increase your possibility of achieving values, and stay away from people who are going to hurt your ability to be happy and hurt your ability to choose your values. Now, let's say, let's say you fall in love with somebody who, when you evaluate them consciously, you find they're not good. Well, that is very dangerous. It's very dangerous for your ability to thrive as a human being, because you're getting a positive emotion for something that's bad for you. And that has consequences. Reality is reality. You're not going to change reality based on your emotion. Say, you're going to suffer the consequences of this person being bad for you, even though, in the moment, you feel love towards that person, and that requires working on yourself. It requires evaluating your emotion. So, you know, as I mentioned, this is what introspection is about. Introspection is really about asking yourself two questions. It's not easy. It requires effort. Everything about living requires effort. Nothing about living a good, rational, healthy, happy life is easy. It all requires effort. To introspect, you have to ask two guiding questions. What do I feel? What is the emotion? And why do I feel it? And answering the why is very hard. It's very hard. And if, you know, but that's what you got to do, and you got to figure it out. And if you find conflicts, then you've got to think about them and you got to get rid of them. And what happens is that as you make your philosophy more conscious, as you integrate it into your life more, as you integrate your ideas more with one another, as you introspect more about your ideas and about any potential conflict in those ideas, you will find that your subjective, your subconscious evaluations, your lightning-like estimations start conforming more and more with your conscious evaluations. Now, this happens to us all the time. People do this all the time, whether they, even though they don't think about it, you're in love with somebody and you discover that they've done something horrible. They've cheated on you and you don't want to have anything to do with them because you understand that they've had for you. You walk away. Now, sometimes the emotion of love, it takes a while to go away because your mind needs to integrate this new information. It needs to integrate it completely. And as it integrates it, the emotion of love fades away and disappears. And if it doesn't, you're in trouble. If it doesn't, it means there's something else going on. There's some reason why in spite of the betrayal, in spite of the fact that they've done something really, really bad to you, and assuming it really is really, really bad. It's assuming we're objective about this, then what is going on inside of you? What false premises do you have about yourself, about this person, about the world, about reality that is causing you to continue loving a person that continues to do harm to you? That requires no introspection. But people's emotions change all the time based on new information. So it surprises me when people say, reject this idea that emotions are consequences of ideas that we hold and conclusions that we've come to. Emotions are consequences of ideas that we hold and conclusions we come to. Now some of those conclusions, we came to, for example, when we were very young. And because we came to them when we were very young and integrated them and automated them and brought them into our, into our subconscious, we can't, it's very hard for us to undo them because we can't go back and find the experiences and find the exact concretes that led us to those conclusions, to reevaluate them and change them. And it's hard. And this is why some people in some circumstances need to see a psychologist, a psychiatrist, in order to dig deeper, in order to discover the source of these emotions, to discover where they come from, and how to change a subconscious. Or you have to do some real introspecting in a psychologist a psychiatrist can help you do that introspecting. And I think I think at the end of the day, I think the value of psychology as therapy is in helping you introspect, because at the end of the day, only you can fix yourself. So it's about helping you introspect and helping you understand where the emotions come from, undo the conclusions you came to that were wrong. And, you know, come to new conclusions. And your emotions will change, they do, we see it every day, new information, new conclusions, change your emotions. I, when I, many of you know this, but before I read Atlas Shrugged at 16, I was a socialist and a collectivist and a tribalist and an altruist, a committed altruist, or at least I thought I was. And reading Atlas Shrugged changed that. It didn't just change it intellectually. It changed it emotionally as well. And it took longer for the emotions to change. So I got it rationally. I got Ayn Rand's ideas rationally. I won't say easily, but I got them. But the emotions took much longer to actually change, to actually come around, to actually, you know, so for example, I'll give you a silly example, right? When I was young, every time Israeli flag would go up and the national anthem would ring, I would get teary eyed, because I was a real collectivist. I was a real nationalist. And to me, there was nothing greater, more important than the Israeli flag and an anthem of the state of Israel. And after I read Ayn Rand, it took years for that to go away. But it went away. I don't feel that way. And at some point, to some extent, to a large extent, I'm much more attached today to the American flag and the American anthem. But I don't get teary eyed up because of the reality of what America is today. I don't get teary eyed up. If I get teary eyed up, it's because of memories or the imagination of what America could be and should be, and to some extent was. So emotions are products of evaluation. And to be happy, to be successful in life, to be successful at living, to be successful at living, you need to understand your emotions. If you're feeling anxiety, if you're feeling immense stress, if you're feeling depression, it's really important to understand where it comes from, why it is, what is the source? Is it justified? If it's justified, if you should feel depressed, then how do I fix the reality that is causing me the stress? How do I change the world in which I live in so that I don't feel the stress of this depression or whatever it is? But often it's unjustified. Often it's about a wrong assessment. Often it's about often it's about a wrong identification about yourself. Often it's a lack of self-esteem. Now we're in a whole other area, you know, your sense and your idea about your own value and about your own self. And altruism does this to us. Most of us, all of us I would say, all of us, maybe there might be a few exceptions out there. All of us were raised in a culture of altruism. All of us embraced elements of altruistic thinking, altruistic conclusions, some point in our lives to some degree or another. I certainly did, hugely. And to get that out of you, so that you don't feel guilty about not giving change to a beggar, or that you don't feel guilty about not giving to the United Way, all of these other things, you don't feel, but more importantly, that's those negative examples, the positive examples, that you actually feel pride about your own achievements, that you actually strive to make yourself the best that you can be. You actually strive towards moral perfection, which is what leads to self-esteem. Altruism undercuts that. It tells you, no, don't be too pride. And if you're born, if you were raised Christian, don't pride is a vice. Don't be pride. So I think you cannot be successful in life without untangling all these things. And it's hard. It's very hard. And I think one of the reasons why people don't accept objectivism, because they don't want to untangle these things. It's too easy to keep them as they are. It's too easy. And today, we're taught that we're deterministic, that we're, you know, genes dictate our emotions, which is ridiculous, given how often my emotions change when I get new information about people or events. It's just absurd. But we're genetically programmed to feel certain things, you know, the whole evolutionary psychology. Now, I'm not saying the whole field is bogus, it's not. There's a lot of interesting things there. And I think it's still a good scientific question about what we actually is genetic and what isn't genetic. What is ingrained in us and what is not? Because something is, right? With Tableau-Rassa, when it comes to ideas, but there's certainly things that, when I look at my two sons when they were born a day old, they were different. They were different. What accounts for that difference? There's a lot of science that still needs to be done. But the science that's done today, a lot of it is complete nonsense. A lot of it is using evolutionary psychology to come up with stories to explain the conclusion you want to have to begin with. And they were all motivated by an anti-free will, view of man. So you have to be very careful when you read, when you read these guys and when you read these people who claim to be determinists and so on. So, all right, so going back to emotions, I love them. I love them. You got to be passionate about life and where does passion come from? People say, you are so passionate. Why are you so passionate? And I don't know how many of you know me, but it's funny because when I'm with my wife or with close friends, I'm a pretty quiet guy. And here I am, I get all excited on stage and excited here and everything. And it's interesting. I'm passionate about certain things. I'm passionate about ideas. I'm passionate about objectivism. I'm passionate about communicating the ideas. I'm passionate about teaching. I love the idea of teaching. I love teaching. Not the idea of teaching, but the actual teaching. And why am I passionate about these things? Because they're completely integrated into everything else that I am. They're integrated into my values. This is the philosophy I live. It's not just a theoretical construct for me. It's not like here are 20 questions. Objectivism answers them better than anybody else. This is my life. This is what I live day to day at every point in time. And it's, I've integrated into my life, into who I am, into what I am. So when I teach it, when I lecture about it, when I discuss it, you're discussing me. You're discussing the most personal thing to me possible. So yeah, I'm passionate. Yeah, I'm emotional about it. Yeah, it's fun. I love it. Because this is the pursuit of rational values. This is what it means to me. All right. And you know, I love teaching. And if I introspect why I love teaching, you know, you can do that. You can figure these things out. And then are they consistent with, yeah, teaching is very consistent with the rest of my philosophy with the rest of my life. All right, I'm gonna have to end it there. If you guys have questions, now's the time, 347-324-3075. Any questions on emotions? Emotions, the quinter emotions? 347-324-3075. There's a lot to say here. And of course, the funny thing is I'm not exactly qualified to say it because, you know, I can do a little bit of that. But what you want is a real psychologist to talk about these things, who actually has gone deep into these issues. But I think I've given you a good kind of introduction to the field of emotions, to the question of introspection, to the idea that emotions have a cause in our thinking, not in our genes, but in our thinking. Those are the ideas I wanted to give. And that, as objectivists, we should be emotional. Not let our emotions guide us, but respond with emotion, experience our emotion, understand our emotion, integrate our emotions.