XVI - LOVE AND OTHER EMOTIONS

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what the word love means, but the question “What is love?” is one of the tough ones.

It is a bit like “What is time?”*—We all know what love is until we try to define it. But let’s try. We say we love our families, we love our cars, we love a good joke, we love skiing, we love our country, and we love chocolate chip cookies. Obviously, all these loves cannot be the same, but there may be some common ground shared among them we can find.

If all these are our loves, then what can we say about them as a group? To start with, they are each a part of our lives. We like that they are a part of our lives, and it is important to us that each is a part of our lives. We have meaningful, positive involvement.

They all help us with moral demonstration. They have key roles in it and also have become symbolic of those morals. Our lives are spent in the demonstration of many morals, some of which we like and admire and others of which we do not. Love is primarily associated with the moral demonstrations we feel good about. This is why love and beauty are related. We feel good about our ideals. We see what we love as beautiful and love the beauty we see.

Can love be dark and nasty also? Yes, I think so. If one’s myth is somewhere between contradictory and dysfunctional, a twisted sort of love could be a way of making sense of the
moral mess of the myth to allow a forward progression and relief from being mired in life.

Love is felt toward that which releases our myth to move in the direction we would like, toward that which allows us to become what we would have ourselves be.

Love is a powerful force in our socially bonding with other people and in our commitment to tribal affiliation. People we love get embedded in our myths. We come to depend on them both for the practical and the morally symbolic. We have difficulty fully disconnecting ourselves from someone we have loved.

Similarly, places, things, events, and experiences we have loved stay with us in our memories and in the shape of our myths, for love is associated with mythic high and low points. This is not to say love is all extremes, but that it is a time of heightened meaning.

Intimacy
In any discussion of love some mention should be made of intimacy. What is it to be intimate? Some people use the word as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. Sex can be intimate. It can also be impersonal or alienated. Intimacy is associated with closeness, sharing, and bonding, especially involving one’s vulnerabilities. More specifically, in intimacy one opens one’s myth to another, including those parts at odds with the group myth. This exposure requires trust in the other person that the revealed mythic deviation from the group will not be used detrimentally against oneself to enforce conformity with the group myth where it had been avoided.

Why would anyone do this? Why would one want to reveal his straying from the group myth? One reason is that we seek reality confirmation from others, even of those sides of
ourselves that prudence would suggest we keep hidden.

Another reason is that if the other person accepts what we reveal, we can create a new group myth from it and thus the two of us form a new group, emotionally bonding us together. Sharing personal myths is central to becoming friends, lovers, or partners.

Emotions
Love is a feeling. Perhaps we should discuss the whole topic of emotions. What are they, why do we have them, and how are they related to myth? Emotions seem to spring up unbidden from within. It is hard to force one to come up on demand, or to directly force it to go away. They act as if they had a life of their own. They are not in and of themselves rational, although they can appear as a result of rational thought.

We are always in some emotional state, even if in a neutral, unmoved condition. The question is not if we are having emotion, but which one and how it is changing.

We think of emotions as mental experiences, but they are also physical. They are accompanied by various patterns of muscular tension, changes in blood pressure and metabolism, and numerous other physiological effects.

But what is the point of emotions? Why would we have evolved to experience them? What good are they, really? Emotions affect our actions and thus which morals we demonstrate. Clearly, other animal species have emotions. We did not invent emotions. They are filling deep biological function.

In humans, at least, emotions arise from the relation of myth to experience, real or imagined. (This would imply that other animals also have myths, even if simple, nonverbal ones.) Look at how emotions occur. The strongest ones often show up as the result of surprises, events not foreseen in the progress of myth. Myth and reality are always converging and diverging simultaneously on many different fronts. As these shifting incongruities come to our attention, emotion arises. We have feelings as reality forces changes in our myth and the myth drives us to change reality, to take action.

Another function of emotions is tribal unity. If another person shares our emotions, we take that as a sign he understands our situation and is there with us in the myth, that his experience is similar to our own, that we are not alone. The desire for shared emotion is a major motive behind storytelling. If we feel happy or sad or angry or worried or excited, we like to tell someone else a story that shows why we feel that way. We feel we have succeeded if our story causes in the other person emotions similar to our own.

Our emotions are often induced by those of people around us. We are social mammals and tend to follow the example of others. We are swept along in the group myth. The emotion of a group is indicative that each member is in the same myth. If you feel like they do, you feel a connection with them. Your anxiety about tribal membership will be put at rest. Emotion helps keep the tribe together in its myth.

Let us look at a few emotions and what might be said of their function. We have already mentioned love as a response to reality becoming the right setting for our ideal myth.

Fear
Fear is a reaction to the possibility of the overwhelming of the myth. Something is out there. If it gets into our myth and we do not overcome it, there will be a shift of moral demonstration to one we do not want. Yet sometimes we willingly head into situations full of that which we fear. Why would that make sense? First, the myth may be contradictory. A need to demonstrate toughness might override a fear of pain. Also, fear is a guide to bigger obstacles for the mythic plot. Fear is an antidote to boredom.

Difficult obstacles, when overcome, make for more convincing moral demonstrations and thus greater self assurance and alpha legitimacy. Also, being in a state of perceived risk focuses you on the moral demonstration at hand and minimizes its competition, uncluttering your mythic progression and giving you a better story. It also keeps you from worrying about things you fear more. If you are riding a motorcycle at one hundred and sixty miles an hour, you can’t think about your disastrous love life, nor will you be worried about the speech you are terrified to give at the convention next week.

Fears are often too powerful to face directly, so we may create other fears that are metaphoric or symbolic expressions of the deeper fear. A fear of disordered surroundings might stand in for a fear of life getting out of control. A fear of wilderness might stem from a fear of straying beyond group myth.

Worry
And what is it to worry? Worrying is a mixture of fear and uncertainty. Although there is fear of the unknown, fear usually knows what it is doing. Worry does not; it lives in the land of What If? And I Hope It Doesn’t, But It Might, And Then What? If the object of worry is central to the myth, then the myth can stall out in worry since the forward dramatic direction has become indeterminate due to the impending uncertain situation.

Guilt
Commonly associated with worry is guilt. Guilt can give rise to worry, but they are different. Guilt arises from mythic contradiction. Two or more incompatible morals vie for demonstration. Whichever is chosen negates the other and the myth demands both. Guilt is anxiety arising from your being forced by the myth to negate the myth. Really bad guys do not feel guilt about their crimes. They are mythically unimpeded in their evil.

Most guilt, however, arises over the small choices in daily life. You want to finish cleaning up the house before doing anything else but the sun has just come out for the first time in three weeks and you want to seize the moment. Take your pick—the place has been a wreck too long and good weather is not to be missed. You can’t do both and the path not taken complains.

Guilt often arises from our inability to live up to our mythic ideals colliding with our need to see ourselves as alpha and virtuous rather than incompetent or otherwise flawed.

Guilt usually results from internalized group myth. There is a collision between the moral priorities of personal and group myth. You need some time for yourself but they need you to get the job done. Being a member of more than one group means internalizing more than one group myth and inevitable conflicts. Do you give all that is asked by your career or do you take time to be a good father for your children? Group myths are in themselves usually contradictory. A good student gets the highest possible grade on the exam. A good student also never cheats. She also does not constantly study, for she is very popular and takes time for a full social life.

Contradictory group myths make the members feel guilty, which increases group stability. Conflicting morals befuddle a clear sense of mythic direction, making it hard to be alpha and reorient the myth. You are torn—which moral path do you follow? If you don’t know, you can’t lead. If you choose one over the other, you place yourself outside the myth, where the group has cause to discover your heresy and abandon you. So there you sit, stuck in your pool of guilt, waiting for the group to pardon your sins. You can wait a long time. Most people do.

Anger
Another emotion based in conflicting moral demonstrations is anger. The difference is that with anger, the moral being contradicted is seen as legitimate and the one being demonstrated is not. We are moved toward righting the situation. Anger is a call to action, even when we feel constrained by our roles to repress it. It can be a challenge to maintain a cool exterior when our muscles are tensing and blood pressure and adrenalin are rising.

Anger expressed, the action taken, if it does not result in guilt, can give an intense sense of moral clarity and rapid mythic progression. It can feel very alive and rewarding, a high point in life. Fighting can become an end in itself and will cause a group to self destruct. Thus most groups frown on anger except in certain structured situations clearly defined by their myths, such as defense from external attack or internal heresy.

Much use is made of anger as a defense against changes in mythic direction, against learning what we don’t want to know. Anger gives us permission to enter into dominance conflicts otherwise outside our role in order to keep mythic material we find threatening at bay.

Pleasure
When things are going our way, the moral demonstrations we want are successful and we feel pleasure. It feels good. It is a reward for successful mythic progression.

We seek out pleasurable experiences both for the positive quality of the event itself and also for the reassurance of the dominance and legitimacy of our own myth. The reassurance effect is strongest if some anxiety about the myth has developed. We have difficulty maintaining a constant state of pleasure for an extended time.

Boredom
When mythic progression stalls or is limited to moral demonstrations too trivial to be significant, boredom results. Boredom can make you feel trapped in a situation where nothing worthwhile is happening, will happen, or can happen. You feel trapped because you cannot move. Move where? Forward on your myth.

The need for forward mythic motion will make people do almost anything to get the story moving again. The easiest, quickest, and most common interim story line is dominance conflicts with any other people present. Anyone who has driven cross-country with children in the back seat has seen this firsthand.

Do not confuse boredom with periods of rest. Both exhibit inactivity, but at rest, the proper action is inactivity. In boredom, the inactivity is in spite of a mythic need for more dramatic involvement.

Humor
Humor is a reaction to the myth hitting a discontinuity, especially those not strong enough to trigger fear, anger or grief. The effect is stronger if the jump is sudden and unforeseen. The unexpected status shift, false threat, double meaning, and safely tweaked anxiety are all very commonly seen as funny.

We might ask what is the point of humor. Why would we have evolved to perceive some of our experience as funny? How does humor help us survive? One possibility is that it is a way of dealing with issues that might otherwise be too overwhelming, such as human futility, fear of death, sexual insecurity, and the inherent flaws in communication. The discontinuity can lie between the weight of the issue and the lightness of its treatment. The pratfall is funny; the real fall is not.

The normal reaction to humor is laughter. When we laugh, we combine facial expressions related to smiling with breathing patterns akin to sobbing. Indeed, strong laughter can provoke tears.

Laughter could then be an expression of simultaneous pleasure and grief. On one side of the humorous discontinuity we feel pleasure in the solid mythic ground underfoot but on the other side is a different meaning which puts our myth’s validity in doubt.

Another purpose of humor, especially jokes, is tribal unity. If I tell you a joke and you laugh, you not only share my delight in the joke, but also show you went through the same anxiety-relief pattern I did, so since you are like me, you must be one of us. Also, if I can make you laugh, I feel alpha. How often does a friend tell you a joke? Probably fairly often. How often does a stranger, not in the course of a staged performance, tell you a joke? Probably almost never unless he is trying to win your acquaintance, establish a tribal connection with you. That is why so often you hear a joke at the beginning of a speech. The speaker is trying to make a tribal connection to the crowd and mythically link them to each other through his leading them into laughter. The crowd will then be a tribe and he will be their alpha, so they will be likely to accept what he says.

Jokes often depend on a mutually shared pool of prior knowledge. Here’s a joke. I hired a man to do some work for me. He told me he was well qualified for the job since he held five graduate degrees. But I had to fire him. He couldn’t do the work. His hands were full. This joke works not just off the two meanings of holding, but also off an assumption that the audience brings to the joke a preexisting awareness of a common belief that overeducated people are often no good at practical physical work. The joke is funnier if you are of that opinion, if that idea is part of your moral package.

Thus jokes are not just confirmation that your reality snaps in and out of focus where mine does, but also that we are of similar morals. If the jokes I like consistently make you laugh, I can feel certain you are of like mind, of like myth, with me. You are a member of my tribe, one of us. Humor holds us together.

Since humor depends on discontinuity, having a sense of humor is tied to our ability to see more than one level of meaning at once. This is why fanatics rarely have a sense of humor. Their single-mindedness precludes the multiple points of view that humor depends on. Ask a fanatic this question: If a native of Austin is an Austinite and a native of Dallas is a Dallasite, what is a native of Paris? He will probably answer “a Parisian” and never guess he was in the presence of a joke.

We have already discussed grief in the chapter on Death. Happiness gets its own chapter later on.

There are other emotions, but the general pattern of myth-reality relation should be clear. One frequently has more than one emotion at a time, a state known as “mixed feelings.”
_________________
* Our subjective sense of time is related to our perception of mythic progression. Thus when we are bored and our myth is stalled out, time seems to crawl. But when our myth is racing along, the hours seem like minutes. "Time flies when you are having fun." Conversely, if our myth has progressed a lot in, say, the last month, the previous month will seem like much longer ago than it would have otherwise. Both our time and our world are in terms of our myth.