Understanding The Importance of Emotions and Feelings

Because our immediate environment is rich in dangers and opportunities that range widely in importance, our brain needs something akin to a thermostat to determine when a specific challenge is sufficiently important to activate the several systems that focus attention and develop appropriate responses. Emotion, centered principally in a small set of subcortical brain systems, is our biological thermostat and central to cognition and educational practice.

Although emotion is a somewhat vague word, recent scientific developments are clarifying the term and changing some previously held beliefs about the biology and function of emotion. Emotion is an innate, powerful, and principally unconscious process. It alerts us to problems but doesn't bother us with processes that don't require conscious attention. For example, emotion alerts us to an opportunity for food, but it doesn't continually report on the digestive process that follows eating unless the food turns out to be indigestible. Further, we don't consciously choose to be emotionally aroused, and such arousal often interferes with what we are currently doing. In effect, our emotions tell us to stop doing what we are currently doing and to attend to a more important challenge.

Emotion responds most vigorously to high-contrast information. This tendency is biologically sensible. Emotion will merely monitor or ignore steady states and subtle change, staying the course rather than expending cognitive energy on what isn't problematic or fluctuating. Emotion can thus trick us into not recognizing the subtle body language that indicates a gradually encroaching problem until the problem suddenly becomes menacing. For example, the recent spate of school killings came as a surprise to many educators and classmates who had worked daily with the perpetrators and hadn't suspected a thing. We are also surprised when an unnoticed former student turns out to be very successful.

Emotional arousal doesn't define or solve the challenge. Instead, emotion activates the problem-solving processes that develop the response, just as our immune system separates the tasks of recognizing and responding to our body's microscopic invaders. Rather than solve the challenge, our emotions alert us to the challenge's existence, a subtle but important distinction, and then may continue to arouse us to maintain interest in the problem.

Although emotions don't solve our problems, they can bias the direction of the response. Temperament is a seemingly innate element of our emotional system that unconsciously predisposes emotional arousal toward danger or opportunity. A person's temperament typically centers somewhere along a continuum between uninhibited and inhibited, with boldness being processed principally in the left hemisphere and anxiety in the right hemisphere. When emotionally aroused, the bold tend to be initially curious about a potential opportunity, and the anxious wary about a potential danger. Temperament enhances a quick and confident move toward a response. Because we frequently follow our temperamental bias, we tend to become quite competent with it over time.

Emotions (like temperament) are neither positive nor negative in themselves. Emotions evolved to alert us to specific kinds of problems, so all kinds of emotions are developmentally important. Just as theorists have proposed several different ways of categorizing intelligence, so scientists differ somewhat in their classification of emotions. Fear, anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness as our primary emotions and includes embarrassment, jealousy, and guilt among our secondary, or social, emotions. Note that most of these emotions alert us to negative situations. All brain systems, including emotions, must be developed.

But how do we become conscious of the signals from our unconscious emotions?

The Games of Power [Part 3]

The more difficult question is why we need ‘work.’ Very few people, after all, can be said to enjoy working, and as society becomes more complex and technological, and jobs are broken down into ever smaller specialties offering a constantly decreasing opportunity to be involved in the whole process, the number of people who enjoy their work is likely to decline even further.

Imagining myself in a company that is not the biggest in the community, least in industry, almost none recognizable on an international scale – gives me the chills of how invisible or little significance, Master Players who own multiple of such companies I work for is to them. What gives me confidence in my work is the study of Power and Leadership - which is an embodiment of Power itself.

When you begin to recognize Power, you too can start to play Power games within your own smaller circles. And with practice it gives you an added advantage even at your place of work.  

In an age when the Puritan work-ethic seems irrelevant, there are primarily 4 reasons for working. (i) Habit (ii) Pleasure (iii) Money (iv) Power

Habit is a significant factor. Most people are inclined to fall into steady work routine of work, simply because anything else would require imagination, invention and a spirit of adventure. Accepting the routine of work gives meaning order to lives that would otherwise be chaotic and unbearable.

It is not so much that people like work as that they fear having nothing to do and no place to go for 8 or more hours a day. How else to explain the depression that comes over men facing retirement, even in cases when they are leaving with a generous pension. Work is a habit-forming drug, and the habit is hard to break.  

With the exception of skilled craftsmen -a vanishing breed – few people work for pleasure. Most people do not mind working, but feel that it is both indecent and wasteful to enjoy it openly. Half the reason of working at all is the hold it gives us over other people.

 By contrast, people who are interested in Power know how to work, and usually work hard. They have a purpose beyond merely making money or filing up time, because they want their work to lead somewhere in terms of independence and self-satisfaction. Only the person who understands Power can extract the maximum benefit from his work, however skillfully it is performed.

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As you and I both know, there is all kinds of different “work” – take for example, sex work. The human preoccupation with sex is nothing new – but the internet has made it so much easier to explore and exploit every shade of desire. The Online Porn Industry makes billions of dollars in profit every year, but the big winners are Corporate Players, not the women and men performing the sex acts. Stephen Sackur interviewed Mia Khalifa on BBC – HARDtalk, on the 9^th of September 2019, under the theme “Porn is Not Reality.” She was a porn actress, garnering worldwide notoriety when she appeared in a sex video wearing the Islamic hijab. After years of threats and insecurity, she spoke out. Link Here: [https://youtu.be/i2qplvJ6SLs]. What does her story tell us about the Porn Industry and 21st Power Century Culture?

 And if you thought the Porn Industry was a multimillion-dollar Industry, check the stats again after the hit of the global pandemic – Covid 19; When the whole world was forced to stay and work from home, with very few exceptions. Like the Power Money Games, it is not even governments or banks that control the money being generated from these industries. What is baffling is that it is not even paid in hard cash but through Block Chain managed by Tech Companies who have shifted the Power-Balance from governments and banks into their own hands. Transforming medicine from the treatment of illness to the medication of modern life itself. In the large Skim of things, are these Power Games? Beyond our wildest imaginations as commoners?

 

Thank You! For reading this far. My hope is that the 3-part article has sparked something in you. And will cause the slightest change in your actions to obtain Power and total control over what is yours. 

The Games of Power [Part 2]

We tend to or easily forget that the world is still competitive. Common fallacies we come to learn as we live in this modern-day world, for example; is that ‘Facebook’ isn’t political or that ‘Apple’ isn’t political. And then we are told, we are not competitive, we are all teams. If we are all teams, how many Chief Justices in Supreme courts are there? How many CEOs of companies are there against the world’s population? Hierarchy still exists, and not only does it exist. It is inevitable.  

They are people who have more control over life than other people, and therefore, there is competition. It is a situation of mixed motives. As we negotiate our careers, we are both collaborating with people; we are also in competition with these people, for promotions and other things.

We all better or worse at some things. You want to highlight the dimensions on which you are doing the best. And certainly, be vigilant as situations change. Don’t expect fairness or gratitude. And organizations for the most part don’t exhibit gratitude. You can see this in the venture capital community. Where people have made for other people billions of dollars but how often do you see these organizations express gratitude towards the people who have made the organization billions. 

Build personal qualities that create Power. Discipline being seen as a manifestation of Power was touched upon briefly, but perhaps discipline is a manifestation of Will. And hence the term ‘Will-Power.’ I am tempted to dive in deep and explain the abstract concept of Will-Power, but I am not at liberty to do this in this blog. [Details of Will and Power are explained further, in my upcoming book, to be published in July, 2022- ‘Tips to Genius Entrepreneurship’].  

Take for instance – The Power Games of Money. Cash as we know it; Who is killing it and why? In 2014, we tipped into a “New World Order.” It happened without a spike on Wall Street, not a mention on TV, it did not even trend on Twitter. But for the first time in history, card and contactless payments overtook cash transactions. In Holland, a coat developed for the homeless allows people to give money by swiping a card on their sleeve.

 Physical money in your hand – a system of payment that began 600 years before the birth of Christ – Is coming to an end. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook says the next generation ‘will not even know what money was.’ Coins first began circulating on three continents in the sixth century BC. A technological innovation every bit as far-reaching as the iPhone. Coins were a physical embodiment of trust, a simple way of doing something astoundingly complex: creating an agreed value between two strangers. 

By the 1860s, there were over eight thousand separate currencies in operation in the US alone. The US National Bank Act of 1863 tried to end this fragmented chaos and unifying the United States under one currency: The Dollar. 

With the end of cash, the world of eight thousand currencies is returning. Mobile Money, Bitcoin, Digital Vouchers, Apple Pay, iTunes, exchangeable shop credits, everything from overseas currency transfers to billion-dollar deals with the digital hand shake of block chain. All of it is money.

The death of cash is the result of a plan-to cede control of money away from the banks and even governments, and place it instead in the hands of the new players: Tech Companies. This to me represents the shift of the Power-Balance of who controls money itself. Covid-19 global pandemic only actuates this even further. [This perhaps gives me the confidence to say that Covid-19 was a man-made lab deadly virus to depopulate the world, and shift the balances of Power, amongst them Money Games].

Not to reach for power, in the contemporary view, is to limit one’s potential, to set a limit to one’s consciousness. Two world wars, Russia invading Ukraine amongst other worldly events have finally brought men to the realization that existence is finite, that death is real. There are no longer any plausible substitutes for success and fulfillment in this life.

 In former times, power was a game of the elite, a violent activity like jousting that occupied the time of those who had already had enough to eat. Work and prayer were the lot of the unleisured classes, and given the nature of the pre-industrial society, work tended to absorb most people’s energies fully.

SEX POWER Games – And other Power Games examples.

[Look out for Part 3] 

The Games of Power [Part 1]

How do you explain when others achieve things that seem to defy all the assumptions? As it turns out there is a pattern to all the great leaders and big organizations of the world. They all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it’s the complete opposite to everyone else. It’s the Golden Circle of Power.

What if the way we understand the world is wrong? What if it is not politicians and world events that have fundamentally transformed our everyday lives but The Games of Power? Power deals made in secret: On a golf course, high up in boardrooms, or over a drink in a bar.

These deals changed everything. They changed the power balance between business and government; and re-wrote the facts on what even constitutes truth. These power deals often had far-reaching consequences the protagonists did not foresee: Harnessing the science of food to fatten the planet and then using the business opportunity created to thin the human race down; transforming medicine from the treatment of illness to the medication of modern life itself. Selling freedom through technology but automating human behavior at the very moment automation transforms life on earth.

All life is a game of power. The object of the game is simple enough: to know what you want and get it. The moves of the game, by contrast are infinite and complex, although they usually involve the manipulation of people and situations to your advantage.

The master players seek power itself, knowing that power can be used to obtain money, sex, security or fame. None of these alone constitutes power; but power can produce them all. It Reminds me of a scene in the TV show series – ‘Game of Thrones,’ When ‘Little-Finger’ confronted the Queen, ‘Cersei Lannister’ about of the secret she kept of her incest between her and her brother, ‘Jamie Lannister.’ Little-Finger leveraging on this information to gain a favor, alluding to the fact that “Knowledge is Power.” Which of course, almost got him killed when ‘Cersei Lannister’ commanded her guards to do so. Reminding ‘Little Finger’ back – that, “Power is Power.”

To play the Games of Power, it is necessary to discover for yourself what Power is. The student of ‘Power’ ought to begin by learning to recognize its manifestations in every aspect of life. The trick is to develop a style of Power based on one’s character and desires. With that foundation, it is possible to hone the moves of one’s own game to a fine, cutting edge. Those who were bullies at school often develop a very sophisticated repertoire of bullying techniques in adult life, though they may find themselves at a disadvantage if they meet a more powerful bully.

Wang Jianlin, chairman of the Dalian Wanda construction empire, China’s richest man [last I checked]. Wang worth about $32 billion reminded a renowned journalist – Jacques Peretti, that Business, not government, now calls the shots. And business no longer has to even influence government, business is government. The job of the government now is not to serve the people, no matter what politicians say, but to manage the economy as best as it can on behalf of business. This is not a judgement but a fact. 

The power relationship has been inverted. Seeing politicians meeting successful business people like Wang is like watching a simpering teenager meet a rock star. The politicians do not know what to do with themselves. It is embarrassing.

Whatever name we give it, we shall always find in human beings this great line of activity – this struggle to rise from an inferior to a superior position, from defeat to victory, from below to above. True enough: rising “from below to above” is so universal an ambition that it is almost pointless to discuss the morality, or even the common sense of such a desire. Thus, it is easy enough to understand why we need power – without it, we are merely cogs in a meaningless machine.

What are the Manifestations of Power? How can one train themselves to recognize and distinguish between its various manifestations?  ……. Talkative friends or time wasters give us the chance to control speech; they teach us the art of courteous but firm refusal to engage in unnecessary conversation. To be able to say ‘no’ is a difficult but useful discipline. Could Discipline be a manifestation to Power or a precursor of Power itself?

 [Look out for Part 2]