The Fourth New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Restrict Instinctive

(especially sexual) Gratification

I think you can now see why I said that the theory of chance-directed evolution is "agenda driven." Rather than looking at the data and drawing the conclusion that seems most reasonable from it, scientists start from the conclusion that there can't be a God directing things on earth, that there's nothing but measurable, physical forces; and so they gloss over difficulties in their position, and simply ignore evidence that is staring them in the face.

As St. Paul said (in the middle of Romans 1, if you want to look it up) about the scientists in his day (I'll give my own translation): "The evidence for God is there before their eyes; God himself has made it obvious. His invisible presence from the creation of the world can be seen from what he made by anyone who puts his mind to it....And this means that they got nowhere in their scientific investigations, and their empty minds were filled with darkness....And the result was that God left them the prey of the hungers in their hearts, so that they acted in filthy ways and disgraced their own bodies."

I hasten to add that Romans goes on and doesn't allow believers to be complacent about this, still less to want these people punished for their blindness, since to do so would be to commit the very sin (of blindness about what God is) that you condemn in them. But that's for Scripture scholars to argue about; I just thought it interesting, among other things because the moral position of the present age is nothing new; you can find it in Paul's pagan Rome.

But I do want to remark that evolution, even as I analyzed it, does not form a conclusive proof for the existence of God, however suggestive it might be--and this for at least two reasons. First, as far as the chance element is concerned, no matter how unlikely it is that evolution as we know it occurred based solely on the physical structure of the initial radiation and what developed from it, the probability that the universe would evolve in this way is not zero (it never is) and can't therefore, be ruled out. It's just that it's irrational to say that this is how it did happen, if the odds against it are ten to the trillionth to one. But the unlikelihood doesn't prove the opposite.

Secondly, the leaps which I said were impossible, based on the (known) laws of physics and chemistry, might either actually be possible on the basis of some physical law that hasn't yet been discovered, or might be a misreading of the evidence on my part, and so might actually be perfectly consistent with known physical laws. I don't personally see how, because I know the arguments on the other side, and they ignore evidence rather than give better evidence than mine. But that doesn't exclude the possibility, by any means.

So let's not be too hard on scientists who have an atheistic bent, especially in this poisoned atmosphere of secularism every educated person is plunged into, in which "of course" Gods and things are on a level with witches and ghosts and horoscopes and alchemy.

For those of you who are curious, I think there is a conclusive proof that there is a God (which I have given in my text The Finite and the Infinite, and also in Part I of Modes of the Finite), but believe me, you don't want to hear it here, because the last chapter is nothing in comparison to an attempt to be rigorous about this question.

(In fact, I once taught it as a course in a rather conservative Catholic seminary near my college. I began by showing that all the standard arguments, as well as all the traditional arguments given throughout history, for God's existence were fallacious--at the end of which a delegation of the students went to the dean saying, "You've got to get rid of that Blair character! He's an atheist!" The dean, who knew me, answered, "Now just be a little patient. He's a good man; give him a chance." Having demolished all the reasons they thought they had for believing in an infinite reality, I then started my positive argument, which took three weeks of classes to get through. It is, as I say, conclusive (supposing I haven't misread the evidence, of course), but one thing is sure: it is anything but convincing in the sense of "satisfying"--because to be rigorous and show that an infinite being is the only possible explanation for otherwise contradictory facts, you have to be very, very careful, and very, very abstract and abstruse. I shut my seminary students up, but I don't think I satisfied them, because the complex argument I gave tends to repel people; so let's drop the subject.)

I'm really trying to do four things in this book, as you've probably figured out by now. First, to lay out what the New Morality position is, and its basis, since it's hidden now as not even a moral stance; second, to show why, if you don't look at the evidence extremely carefully, very intelligent people would sincerely hold it; but third, to point out that there is evidence, if you know where to search it out, that reveals that in fact the position of the New Moralists is not rationally tenable--and finally, to indicate that it is possible to show that the world and our lives do (or perhaps I should say "can") make sense, if we are willing to use our heads rather than our "hearts."

(To paraphrase Pascal in the light of what I quoted from Paul: "The heart has reasons that the mind knows not of; but the gonads are quite familiar with them.")

But as I was saying, let's not fault the people who were brought up in a secularist environment with believing in chance evolution as if it were scientific and not a dogma of secularism, and let's look once again at what this position implies with respect to how humans ought to behave.

The evolutionary basis of the sexual revolution.

In the first chapter, I outlined how the sexual revolution took hold in our country's moral consciousness. But it wouldn't have done so without what seemed to be a pretty solid rational, scientific justification behind it; after all, as I mentioned, contraception using condoms was known and practiced back then, but was not regarded by the people as a whole as moral.

But that justification was waiting in the wings for its curtain call. The Theory of Evolution as a chance development of species by means of natural selection has a couple of very strong implications here. The first and obvious one is that what distinguishes a new species is not so much that it has some new organ or bodily configuration, but that this newness makes it reproductively successful. Thus, the essence of the new species (according to this theory) is sexual prowess. It is new and distinctive because it can reproduce more efficiently than organisms that went before it.

Granted, human beings are distinctive because they can think; but in the evolutionist's view, thinking is just another one of those accidental accretions that happens (always by chance, remember) to make the organism more efficient reproductively. It doesn't, as I mentioned, get us at "the truth," according to this view, but is simply a vehicle by which we can spread ourselves over the earth.

Which, of course, "scientifically" validates David Hume's dictum that "reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions." Precisely, on the evolutionist view. Reason is "special" only insofar as it makes for reproductive success. If an animal were gifted with reason and reason happened to be maladaptive, then natural selection would get rid of it as a detriment, not an asset; and so it is an asset only insofar as it is adaptive--which means, insofar as it promotes reproduction.

The logic is inescapable. Reason is and must be subordinate to the reproductive instinct, which is what we, like every other organism, are really all about. Everything else about any organism takes a back seat to this, because without it natural selection inexorably destroys the organism, and with it the organism is blessed with prosperity and posterity, however gross its distinctive character might be to the observer from another species. Flies like to crawl around on dung; but hey, it works for them. Look at all the flies there are.

But what's important is that it follows from this that any attempt to use reason to restrict or limit a person from following through on what his sexual instinct urges upon him is (a) an abuse of reason, because it presumes to dominate rather than serve, and (b) an abuse of the person as a whole, since it is the instinct (not reason) which is the person's true reality, which is what is driving him and all of us ever onward and upward through evolution's constant progress.

That is, when President Clinton had a desire to do what he did to Monica Lewinsky, and she had a desire to have it done to her, who are we to say, as I did at the end of the last chapter, "It's not food, Mr. President," as if he shouldn't have done it? For me to say this implies that I know what sex is "really all about" because I've reasoned to it by looking at what I think are "the facts."

But, according to the evolutionary theory behind New Morality, all this amounts to is that in the past, this type of sexuality has been maladaptive and so had a taboo against it; but after all, it has been there as long as there have been human beings, and in fact analogous sorts of things can be seen in a certain percentage of other animals. How do we know that this sort of sexual expression has not been there just waiting for the opportunity to predominate once the environmental conditions would favor it over the missionary position?

And, in fact, with overpopulation, you could argue that environmental conditions do favor a great deal more of things like this, as well as homosexual sex, because we've been so successful in "missionary sex" that we have to be careful or we'll encroach on our food supply.

But at the same time, our instinct is also telling us that we can't just give up sex altogether and become monks, apparently because, like everything else, "use it or lose it." Just as nowadays when all we do at work is sit around clicking on a keyboard instead of toting that barge and lifting that bale, we go over to the gym three times a week and run on the treadmill and strap ourselves into that Torquemada dream called the "Nautilus" to keep our muscles in shape. Monica was Bill's sexual Nautilus, that's all. What's to condemn?

It makes a lot of sense when you put it this way, doesn't it? And now you can see why New Moralists are indignant that Bill Clinton was impeached, for heaven's sake, for doing this (though thank Aphrodite the Senate had enough sense not to find him guilty). It's the Religious Right that should be impeached, with their obsession that certain forms of sex are evil, and their lack of recognition that the instinctive urge you have to engage in sex is actually the true nature you have as the product of evolution. Suppressing these natural urges as "perverted" simply prevents evolution from working and therefore selecting what happens to be best adapted to the environment.

That is, if people can't experiment with sex as their instinct urges, then you freeze evolution in the stage it happens to be in at the moment; but since the environmental conditions are changing all the time, then you risk pushing the organism into a maladaptive relation to its environment, and killing off the species altogether. Thus, on this view, it's contrary to nature not to allow all the sexual experimentation that people feel like engaging in.

And as to the canard that the Republicans issued that it wasn't about the sex, but about the lying, the perjury, the subornation of perjury, and the obstruction of justice, this was just a red herring thrown out by the Religious Right, and it's just as pernicious.

Because, as I've said so often, for the chance evolutionist, reason isn't something divine that gets us at the "absolute truth"; it's a device that evolved whose function it is (or rather which happens by chance) to make reproduction more efficient. Hence, reason's first task is to protect the reproductive drive. And this, of course, means that, in a hostile environment (and the Religious Right is certainly a hostile environment), lying is perfectly legitimate--in fact, it's the only correct action to take.

That is, when the lying is about sex, it's not only permitted, it is demanded by the nature of the human being as an evolving organism. And to the rejoinder that "Yes, but what you said wasn't the truth," the answer is, "That's bad only on the supposition that reason is supposed to get at absolute truth. But it isn't. It's function is to protect the sex drive." That is, that's what it evolved to do, isn't it?

The same goes for perjury, obstruction of justice, and all the rest of it. As even our Founding Fathers showed, when the government is violating the nature of the citizens, then it isn't just their right, it's their duty to rebel, even to forming a totally new society. We confirmed this in the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Viet Nam war. Bill Clinton is simply extending the noble principle under which Martin Luther King, Jr. was operating, and disobeying laws that are not real laws, because laws are for the good of the citizens, and the law that says you can't experiment with sex is directly counter to the very nature of the human being. Enforcing it is a kind of slavery.

So what is the problem with what he did? If what he did with Monica doesn't seem natural to you, then you haven't got the same gene pool he has, because you obviously don't have a genetic structure that drives you in the direction of that kind of act; but who are you to say that your genes are superior to his, and must prevail over what his nature is impelling him towards?

And your attack on him prompted him to defend himself against your blindness. Organisms defend themselves against attacks. What's wrong with that?

Sensible, what? It's all perfectly logical, once you accept the premise that evolution is driven by sex and natural selection.

--Wait a minute. Logical? I thought logic was out, and you were supposed to listen to instinct, not logic. You see how insidious this is? The people who are trying to tell us that we should abandon reason as our guide and listen to instinct have the need to justify (even to themselves) what they are saying by a resort to reason.

It is reason that is behind their position: the theory that human beings evolved by chance driven by the reproductive urge, which logically results in that urge's being paramount with reason as its handmaid. It is the assumption that this theory gives us the facts about what we really are as opposed to the myths that have been around ever since we got scared of lightning and earthquakes and invented angry gods and resurrections and whatnot to "explain" them. And so, now that we have a handle on what the facts about us really are, we can draw the proper conclusions from them, first and foremost of which is the First New and Great Commandment, that we have to abandon reason as a source for getting at what the facts really are.

But any use of reason which comes to the conclusion that reason is useless is an abuse of reason.

Now of course, the New Moralist at this point will pull another Clinton on us and say, "I never said reason is useless. It's very useful in figuring out ways of gratifying instinct so that it's adaptive to the changing situation. All I'm saying is that it doesn't get you at the "real true essence of things."

Oh? And why do you say that? Because reason evolved by chance and natural selection, and so is something simply useful for reproduction, not a divine power that gets us at Absolute Truth. And why do you say that? It's obvious; look at the facts; what other conclusion can you draw? Precisely. Reason (you think) tells you that the truth, based on these premises, has to be that reason is only the servant of instinct, and can't get at the truth. In other words, reason got you to the "real essence of things": that reason can't get at the "real essence of things."

And what this means, of course, is that if the theory you base this conclusion on is worth anything, it isn't worth a damn.

And do any of the advocates of this position really want to say that if your sexual instinct urges a certain type of act, you should follow it no matter what? What about Jeffery Dahmer's sexual urges to kill people and have sex with their parts? What about child molesters? What about incest?

As to this last, Edward O. Wilson in Consilience cites cases of incest avoidance in primates and Westermark's theory that infants reared together don't seem to have an interest in each other. He favors this as "solidly based" over Freud's view that infant sexuality is present and gets inhibited by training. After page on page of this, he says, (p.180) "By translating the Westermark effect into incest taboos, humans appear to pass from instinct to rational choice. But do they really? What is rational choice anyway? I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules. It is these rules and this hierarchy of their relative strengths by which human beings have successfully survived and reproduced for hundreds of millennia. The incest avoidance case may illustrate the manner in which the coevolution of genes and culture has woven not just part but all of the rich fabric of human social behavior."

You see, I'm not making this up. Reason, according to his reasoning, is simply a vehicle by which we discover and codify culturally the "epigenetic" rules: the ones selected for in our genes. Never mind that reason is what led him to conclude this, and I defy him to find some epigenetic rule that prompted his book. Incest is to be avoided because we have an instinctive repugnance to having sex with our immediate relatives.

But is it basically instinctive and not reason? Consider this: If incest is allowed, what is my relation supposed to be with my sister who's simultaneously my wife and my daughter, or to my mother, who's another wife of mine--or for that matter, to my youngest brother, who's the grandson by my sister (who is thereby my aunt) of my father, who happens occasionally to be my lover? Would it be at all surprising to find that, irrespective of dominant and recessive genes (which, as Westermark showed with adoptive children, have nothing to do with it), any parent with a smidgen of common sense is going to nip any interest in this direction in the bud--just as they do with playing with feces? There's a perfectly simple explanation of why incest is taboo in practically all societies without resorting to elaborate genetic hypotheses.

(I should add here that these people who find incest so repugnant don't seem to have any problem making their pets and farm animals commit incest for the good of the breed. The genetic argument cuts both ways. True, incest can allow for more cases of bad double recessives; but it can also, if carefully done (by removing the defective offspring) result in a vast disproportion of double (good) dominants, so that the recessive gene and the bad traits are consciously selected away from. How else, with sexual reproduction, are you going to get rid of these defective mutations? But of course, this side of the story is not even mentioned in Wilson's book, because it undercuts his case that reason is supposed to be the servant of instinct.)

As I say, Wilson seems prone to pick out traits he likes, find some evidence in genetics for their being selected for, and then run with this ball toward the goal line, completely oblivious to the tackles rushing at him from all sides--not to mention the blatant contradiction in using reason to "prove" that reason's function is to cast about "among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules." (Don't you love the terminology? It makes the whole thing so scientific and profound, yet it's perfectly clear to us unwashed, except for "epigenetic.")

I'm probably being hard on Mr. Wilson, who's not by any means as dumb as I'm making him out to be here; he's just fundamentally wrong, based on a buying into the chance-evolution dogma. And I hasten to say I'm not denying that there might be a genetic base underneath much of our morality. After all, the evidence seems to indicate very forcefully that there is an evolution; my quarrel is with the chance-and-no-director theory. It's also undeniable, it seems to me, that the genes we've got have a lot to do with what we are as a species, as well as what each individual is. And morality says, however you got to be what you are, you are what you are, and so you should act consistently with it.

So, for instance, there are indications in primates that (in the wild, at least), there is an avoidance of incest. My point is that even if there weren't this instinctive aversion, and even if there weren't genetic consequences from it, incest should still be avoided, because of what I said above: that it's impossible for a person to know what his role is as a member of a family if it's allowed.

Put it another way. We have an instinctive urge to pop someone on the nose when he disses us--or to pull out the old Swiss army knife and decorate his face. Why not act on that urge? It's certainly been selected for genetically, since it keeps the organism free of threats and able to maneuver in a hostile environment. But it doesn't adapt us to the environment we're actually in; so who cares if it was adaptive when humans lost their tails and came down out of the trees?

My problem with the idea that our essence is sexuality, and that we should follow our sexual urges, is that this undercuts any reason for saying that any of these urges are inconsistent. If they're urges, they are automatically consistent, on this view.

But certainly, human males' sexual urges are promiscuous, and have been from time immemorial. Then why has monogamous marriage been the norm in practically all cultures--even ones like the Islamic, which permits polygamy? True, Margaret Meade thought that the Samoans couldn't be bothered with such nonsense, and wrote ground-breaking studies on this earlier in this century. But we have recently found out that the culture she was studying considered sexuality a very private thing, and resented this outsider's intrusive questions; and, being pranksters, her liaisons to the culture made up these elaborate tales she so faithfully and naively recorded in books like Coming of Age in Samoa.

Again, there's a simple explanation that has very little to do with genetics. When a child is born, that child can't survive unless cared for; it has to be given food, shelter, clothing, education, and love--and therefore, the child has a right to these things. Now Hillary Clinton is big on the notion that "it takes a village to raise a child"; but is the village responsible for the child? Does the child, in other words, have a right against the whole village for what it needs to survive? No, because it wasn't the village that caused the child to exist, it was the two parents.

Therefore, even if the village takes over the job of rearing the child, the two parents who caused him to exist in the first place still have the responsibility for him (because he's the result of their act and not of the village's); and if, for instance, the village is remiss, they have to step in and see that the child is brought up right.

But that means that, if you're going to have a child, who is your responsibility whether you like it or not, then you have to be in a position to bring that child up to live a decent human life, village or no village. And that, in practice, means monogamous marriage.

For President Clinton simply to hand Chelsea over to a government-run child-care program and wash his hands of her would be for him to say that he performs an act-with-consequences without the consequences. And that's inconsistent.

Having said that, then you can add that evolution seems to have put into human instinct the desire to nurture children as well as the (contradictory) desire to have promiscuous sex; and since one of the instinctive desires coincides with the real situation, we "give in" to that one and we fight the other one, just as Jeffrey Dahmer has to fight the instinctive tendency he has to have sex with the corpses of his victims.

What I'm saying is that you can see what instinctive urges are "natural" and "unnatural" if you use your reason and look at the objective situation first; you can't derive the reasonable thing to do from your instinctive urges.

But that's what the evolutionists do. And the notion that you can do this this leads us to a corollary of the chance-evolution view of human reality.

The view that the way you feel is the "true you."

If you accept that humans are just the result of chance evolution and that reason is basically the servant of the sex drive, it also follows that reason is the servant of all our drives, because our drives are the genetically-determined adaptation we have to our environment. Thus, what you think your reality is is not what your reality actually is; what you feel is your true reality, and you have to come to terms with your feelings in order to get in touch with your real self, not this manufactured self that you have invented by perverting your use of reason.

Psychotherapy is for practical purposes based on this. To repress your emotions only means that you are bottling them up. But since they are the expression of what you really are, then they are only going to burst the bottle sometime, and the last state is worse than the first. You have to learn to come to terms with your feelings, to stop regarding your natural feelings as evil, and to express them in healthy ways, or they are simply going to express themselves in unhealthy ways, and destroy you.

Well, what's wrong with that? It's true, isn't it? Doesn't the whole science of psychology give ample verification of it? Well, it's not quite so simple. The human unconscious is not directly accessible by an outside observer and not even by the patient who has it. What's in there, and what it's doing, is very often based on post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

Take the notion that suppressing (that is, deliberately refusing to express) emotions bottles them up inside you, and they get more and more of a head of steam until they burst into really destructive behavior. That's almost a given nowadays. But we have over two thousand years of Stoic tradition which says that if you deliberately act against what your emotions incline you to, and deliberately suppress them, then what happens is that they get weaker, not stronger--just as our muscles atrophy if we neglect to exercise them. "Use it or lose it." So instead of finding that they explode into some kind of violence, you find that now you don't even want to do the things you've trained yourself not to do. Reason is in control.

"Oh well, sure, that's what they say. But it doesn't work. People who try this and repress their emotions and 'live their life based on reason' will find that in the long run they're miserable and make everyone else around them miserable too."

The problem with this is that it's a gratuitous statement, which is belied by thousands of years of experience. People who followed the Stoic way of life (a) certainly have thought, throughout history, that they were happier than those who give in to their every whim, and (b) there's every evidence that people who deal with self-controlled individuals have a much easier time with them than with those who are at the mercy of the latest instinctive impulse.

If Stoicism were that self-destructive, why did it last so long? And are the New Moralists that much happier and contented than those who try to live their lives based on reason and the objective situation? The suicide rate in recent times wouldn't seem to bear this out; nor would the land-office business therapists are doing trying to get people to "come to grips with their feelings."

No, what's really behind this view is the New Morality. Sigmund Freud, who started all this off, was an atheist who bought into David Hume's view that "reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions." He tried to make a psychological structure of the self in which reason (the ego) was simply an outgrowth of the conflict of the instinctive desire (the id) with the hostile environment which thwarted it (the superego). It didn't get at the truth of what we are; it was a form of adaptation of the instincts to their environment. So the true reality of the person is not reason; it's instinct. And the inhibitions that get put into us (which result in conscience, or guilt feelings) have nothing to do with reason, but are simply the environment "talking back" to us, as it were, and getting programmed into our unconscious, habitual behavior--showing up as this "voice of God" we call "conscience."

But that's a theory, not the inevitable conclusion that has to be drawn from the observable data. And it's another one of these theories that uses an elaborate rational structure in "proving" that reason doesn't have anything to do with the real truth of things. And I mentioned in discussing the Second New Commandment that the theory predicts things that are the exact opposite of what happens.

But, of course, if you don't see this, and you are predisposed to accept the dogma that humans evolved purely by chance driven by sex directed only by natural selection, then it makes perfect sense, which is why it caught on. It's been modified, of course, in sundry ways, because it doesn't work--and neither will its modifications work, since they all put the true reality of the human being in what he feels rather than a rational assessment of what he in fact is in the situation he's in.

Actually, very early in my life I lived the refutation of this view. I had a Chinese friend and playmate, Kang Ng, who was one of those people fate seems to single out for hard luck. His family was rather prominent in China, he once told me, but in the revolution had to move to the States, where his father opened--of course--a laundry down the street from my house. After having four children, he died of tuberculosis, and left his wife to tend the store and the kids. Kang, the oldest, used to help out with the ironing (they lived in the one room at the back of the store), which used to annoy us, because many times he wouldn't be available to play.

One time when he was, I think, in Junior High School, he was flying a kite in the lot opposite my house, using wire for string; and the kite got caught in the electrical lines overhead, and Kang couldn't let go and writhed on the ground in agony--and wound up in the hospital for months, emerging with huge scars on his body, and two fingers missing from one hand. During that time his brother Thin (whom we called "Little Sunny") more or less took his place, and so we didn't miss him much.

We welcomed him back, and life resumed until one day in his Junior year in high school, when he was watching the school's baseball team from a seat along the first-base line. A wild throw hit him in the temple and knocked him out for a while; but the trainer on the field eventually said he was okay, and could go home. He went to sleep that night and never woke up. He was in the hospital again for months, in a coma, during which we once again played with Little Sunny, and didn't really miss him much. (Hey, we were kids, remember).

Finally he died, and we friends were asked to be the pallbearers at his funeral. I didn't feel devastated or tragic about it (I'd got, as I said, used to his not being around), and I remember how much of a hypocrite I felt, in my best clothes in the front row of that Baptist church, as I looked at that waxen figure in the coffin that had only the remotest resemblance to Kang. I wanted to stand up and shout, "What's the big deal? Why are we all looking so solemn?" and cursed myself for being too much of a coward to do anything but look as if I was desolate when I didn't feel a thing.

We took the coffin out to the grave, and as the body was lowered into the grounds Mrs. Ng put on top of the coffin the food and things that the Chinese bury with their dead--and I saw the look on her face.

"Thank God I didn't act the way I felt!" I thought. She knew what the situation really was, and she was acting appropriately with the real situation--and so was I, and I was condemning myself for being a hypocrite, when I was being honest with the real situation, and it was my feelings that were screwed up. The real me was the mourner, not the smartass; I loved Kang, whatever I felt at the time. I still do, and I hope he hears this tribute to how much he taught me, after all these years. I hope to meet you fairly soon, Kanga, and we can take up the wrangles we've had to table while I finish up my rather more prolonged gestation.

Let's face it, ladies and gentlemen--many, many of you, I hope: I'll grant that our instinctive urges are the way we are programmed genetically to behave. But they adapt us to the environment humans emerged into; but the environment we now live in, because of our use of reason to adapt our environment to make our lives easier and--yes--more human, is no longer the environment they adapt us to. They are often counteradaptive, as were my feelings about Kang.

And even the psychologists admit this when they talk about "healthy" expression of the emotions as opposed to bottling them up and having them explode in "unhealthy" ways. What do they mean by "healthy" or "unhealthy" but rational, based on the real situation we are in? If the emotions are king, how is any expression of them preferable to any other? Oh, well some are maladaptive. Yes? Well, they don't think so. I know, but it's obvious. Precisely; because reason can get you to what the facts really are.

And therefore, you should base your actions on what reason indicates is the appropriate behavior, irrespective of the way you feel. And the Stoics are right; if you suppress your emotions in small things, you'll find that you don't have to suppress them in big things, because they'll be under your control. And which would you rather be? Someone who knows what the right thing to do is and can do it easily, or someone who knows what the right thing to do is and either has to fight the feeling that it's the wrong thing, or gives in to the feeling and does the wrong thing?

But this doesn't mean the psychologists are all wet. They have this profound truth in their favor. The feelings themselves are neither good nor evil; they just are. They're just the conscious aspect of the automatic program in your brain starting from a given stimulus. But we have, to a large extent, conscious control over the flow of energy in our brain, and we can in ordinary situations block the automatic impulse and direct it toward behavior that our minds know is the appropriate one for the situation. That won't get rid of the feeling, but so what? You're no more responsible for the feeling than you are that your heart beats at the rate it happens to be beating at the moment. It's what you choose to do based on the conscious, factual information you have that's important, not what your feelings prompt you to do, or even what the feelings themselves are.

And, of course, since we don't have absolute control over our actions, if feelings get too strong and cause inappropriate behavior, then we must somehow try to get them under control. When psychotherapy is used with that in mind, it's a very good thing. But its function is not to make us "better adapted," or to replace the instinctive urges with other, more appropriate ones. Who cares if you feel guilty when you're doing the right thing, as long as you're capable of doing the right thing and you do it?

So don't be fooled by all this. You know that the way you feel is fundamentally irrelevant; and evolution, if looked at without the agenda driving it, would tell you this. Since instinct and emotions are genetically programmed into us, and since genetic changes occur only after enormous lapses of time, while the world, because of our use of reason, is transforming itself every year, it seems, then it's colossal stupidity to listen to your feelings as if they were what you "really are" instead of to your reason, which can find out what you objectively are.