No more emodom for you!

In Orwell’s “1984”, the chocolate ration was only 43 grams weekly. However, a year later the weight of the bar "went up" to 25 grams. The process of re-writing that piece of bad news without altering the reduction was named, in that particular case, chocorat. 

By extension, emodom has become nowadays a state of renunciation to emotional freedom. Let me explain what I mean by emodom. A person that is considered mature and balanced has emotions that are directly proportional with the intensity of the emotional factor. Meaning, if your boss just gave you a load of crap, you do not throw the laptop in his head, you rather try to repress your genuine emotions of anger, maybe frustration or even pure hate, and pretend you have a state of calmness and inner-poise. Your heart beat goes up, your eye is twitching, you get an extra-systolic every five beats and your pulse hits 120. Yet, apart from extreme redness in the face, you show no other signs. How could you? You are a civilized adult and being an adult implies not necessarily having emotions which are proportional to the emotional factor, but lying about how we express them.

However, we often react indirectly proportional to the situation. Regardless of whatever we know about emotions and emotionality and how we label others ('Oh, she is an emotional mess', or 'He is so over emotional') in the end our emotions do not necessarily take the best of us, but reveal our true inner selves. 'The best of us' is just an erroneous collocation, an uncreative cliché, which can never be taken by a genuine expression of emotion.

During our childhood, our educators inculcated us the idea of self restraint. In some societies, emotional honesty is highly appreciated and even recommended. In some others, it is regarded as mental unbalance. An emotional person is not predictable and society mechanisms require predictability. Hence, what is considered normal (within norms) in the Japanese society (eg: smiling respectfully when you are scolded) is not considered normal in the American society (eg: accepting the scolding, eventually bowing your head, avoiding eye contact).

Although truth is greatly valued, most of our dissensions are basically generated by the way honesty and emotional expression is perceived in our societies. The emotional sincerity is not always regarded as a virtue, even though was considered ideal by certain societies. In order to socialize properly you need to mask a certain amount of sincerity in social wrapping.  To be accepted means to keep your feelings restrained. We are turning into emotionally mutilated machines as apparently, modern psychologists view sincerity as a construct rather than a moral virtue, and we seem stuck in an answerless conundrum where the joke is on us.

Some cultures even consider expression of emotions as a possible threat to the social order. Others went further and imagined how a world without emotions and Two Minutes of Hate would look like. It looked bleak. The two minutes of hate were not necessarily a way to allow people to “freely” express their emotions but were a mode of brainwashing by throwing them into a controlled frenzy of hatred. In Romania, The Pitesti Prison (known as the Pitesti Experiment) was a brainwashing experiment carried out by Communist authorities between 1949 and 1952 and was meant to "re-educating" the political prisoners, opposed to the authoritarian regime. The experiment's goal was for prisoners to dispose off their political and religious convictions, and to adjust and rewire their personalities to the point of absolute obedience. The number of people that have been brainwashed in three years was estimated to 5,000 and Pitesti was considered the largest and most intensive brainwashing program in the Eastern bloc.

The usage of emotional torture followed by physical torture was a main stage of the re-education program. Humiliation was the one that worked best. The inmates were forced to denounce their beliefs, loyalties, and values, betray family members, forced to clean the WC floor with a rag clenched between the teeth, or eat their own feces. Frequently, they were asked to torture other prisoners and repress their own feelings of mercy, empathy, pity, clemency, and kindness.  Sometimes beating was not even necessary. Humiliation would suffice. After a while, an inmate became a re-educator. The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), conducted 19 years later, confirmed what communists knew already: that the best and most efficient punishment is the psychological one, aiming at emotions, such as fear, shame, guilt along with coercion and intimidation. All extremely powerful tools. And while Stanford Experiment was just a science experiment that went bad, the Pitesti one was an applied and atrocious one that went well.

Nowadays, 50 years later, in a society that fortunately eliminated (at least theoretically) torture and repression, we are told to repress our feelings as a sign of civilization and maturity. Yet, torture (of any kind, psychological, emotional, or physical) is still practiced in some 45 countries. As of June 2008, only 145 states are parties to the Convention against Torture. As the research in the field of psychology refined, so did the coercion methods, and torture by proxy or extraordinary rendition became a modern technique. Meaning, the torturer apprehends and extrajudicial transfers the suspect/victim from one state to another where torture is practiced, without getting his hands dirty. The rendered suspects are denied due process because they are arrested without charges, deprived of legal counsel, and illegally transferred to third world country with the intent and purpose of facilitating torture and other interrogation measures which would be illegal in the USA, let’s say.  According to a European Parliament report of February 2007, the CIA has conducted 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention against Torture. The Patriot Act became the Über Alles rule. All authoritarian regimes had a supreme utilitarianist rule, of group welfare versus individual liberties, and the excuse that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome. If the outcome is justified by the potential group safety, any action prior to that (torture included) is morally acceptable.

Apfelbaum and Sommers claim there is an inner bigot within us and we choose to celebrate the power of mind to make hard choices, despite our emotions. So, I am asking you, where it will lead this rejection and repression of our true feelings? I hear someone in the back said happiness. Civilization you say? Oh, really? You think so?