Wednesday, January 20, 2016

what are you feeling today?

From WBUR's Cognoscenti pages:
The most successful leaders, he suggested, know how to manipulate the emotions of their followers: “The energy that actually shapes the world,” Orwell wrote, “springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war.”
Your own emotions, however, are not what you think they are.

Recent research on emotions http://www.affective-science.org/  points to indications that there is little or no difference between anger, sadness, and other bad feelings:  it just feels bad.   There are good feelings, too, but between these two big groups, finer distinctions turn out to be our own invention.

Here's the rub: if we as individuals form (create?) our own emotions,  we are responsible for our reactions to people identified as "leaders".    Go back to the top of this page.

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