(Note this essay was a prologue to what has ultimately become “Time Light Love.” Now on Amazon Kindle.)
So I have been making mention here and there of a project I have been working on for quite some time, which at the moment I call “The Periodic Table of Emotional Energy.”
Like so many of my pet projects, this started out as a wistful idea: If we could map the entire physical genome of the human body, why can’t we map the full range of emotional energies that drive us to do just about everything we do?
It’s not that it hasn’t been worked on already. Lots of people have a very good grasp of these energies. In fact, as I relentlessly talk about the great conductors vs the also-rans, this was really at the heart of it. And of course con artists throughout time have been experts at it as well.
So I am not going to do the whole chart here, but I thought I would start with emotion #1, which I believe to be . . . Loyalty.
The reason I bring up loyalty is because this emotional energy is being so ruthlessly exploited these days. Loyalty is a powerful force . . . it motivates many good things, but is also key to making war. (People who are not loyal to a cause or a leader are not very likely to risk their lives in their service.)
The worst misuse of loyalty these days has to do with the political climate here in the USA. There was a time ( I think) when politics were about discussions of policies and approaches to how society should be. Nowadays, it has been reduced to a question of blind loyalty. Are you a blue state or a red state? Are you a republican or a democrat? To which party does your loyalty lie? Never mind making any logical argument for your support. Most people don’t even know what their party stands for.
The trouble with loyalty energy is that its negative polarity, i.e., DISloyalty, is immediately felt to be repugnant, so much so that we want to rid ourselves of the offending party any way we can. Thus, political stalemate.
The people who buy the ad time that rules our political discourse know what they are doing. They seek control, and our ability to think independently has been largely overridden by loyalty issues. When we have political discussions these days, it is not an objective discussion of the merits or long term effects of a given policy; it’s a process of determining your loyalty, sort of like the Spanish Inquisition. Logic or common sense or arithmetic don’t enter into it. This is the power of emotional energy, and the people who DO understand these energies are ruthlessly exploiting our vulnerabilities, just like some sort of computer hacker.
I have stopped having political discussions if they involve loyalty. I will discuss a given piece of legislation and its potential benefits and problems, I will discuss budget issues, but if you put a party or politician’s name on it and make my opinion an expression of being totally loyal or disloyal, we’re done, as we are no longer having an intelligent conversation. You’re just asking me if I am loyal to your leader, or disloyal. I am neither.
© Justin Locke
