Emotional Fuels and Anti-Fuels

Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side of the force are they.

So spake Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

There's been some pushback against this movie wisdom lately. The burgeoning work about women's anger in particular has sought to dismantle the notion of anger as something to apologize for or be embarrassed by. The Gift of Fear is another, earlier example of reclaiming an emotional state often seen as purely negative. And aggressiveness needs no defenders, having been installed as a permanent feature of masculinity and capitalist heroics. It may not be championed as the best of all affects, but it's certainly better than passivity in the eyes of popular culture.

I'm thinking about these in relation to the roundtable thing I'm pulling together on the deep drives of activist performance. My tendency is to zero in on the "negative" emotions. I'm hopeful to attract participants who can help me trouble my prejudice against these, reclaiming their power.

I am also pleased already to have some folk on board willing to talk about non-dark-side drives like love, hope, or joy. The notion of joy driving a social change movement is . . . refreshing, almost fantastic in its distance from the daily headlines.

I'm trying to think of other affects beyond the cliched ones. Greed, sorrow, and pride, to be sure, have proven motive power. Disgust, I'm sure, has spurred a violent mass act of three. Lust could arguably claim some movements.

But what about awe? Nostalgia? Ennui? Could these fuel social movements, too?

What about shame? Guilt? Embarrassment? Envy?

Which emotional fuels burn longest? What formula of affect proves most efficient?

Are there emotions that simply could never spur long-term group endeavors? Emotional anti-fuels, as it were? I can think of additives to primary fuels like anger or outrage, supplements which on their own do little to promote activity but that can temper the combustion of sharper feelings. Patience. Gentleness. Empathy.

But total combustion-killers? Depression, perhaps (that old companion). Self-loathing. Sloth. I mean the deadly sin, acedia, which we often think of as laziness but may actually better be translated as a kind of helpless-hopeless surrender in the face of everything. It is pathological apathy.

Pity, too, seems like an anti-fuel. It can provoke one to action, to be sure. But usually the action pity inspires feeds into other dysfunctional systems. It's a maintenance emotion, not a change emotion. C.S. Lewis references this in his book The Great Divorce. Set in a kind of halfway point between heaven and hell, the book features souls caught between these two realms making a choice about which path to take. Occasionally a purgatorial soul encounters a heavenly being, one who has already ascended.

In one such passage, the soul of a woman who was much put-upon and misused by her needy, self-centered husband is presented as heavenly royalty for her life of generosity to those in need. The husband is now a ghost who lets a melodramatic Tragedian speak for him. He is in the afterlife as wretched as he was inwardly before. The Tragedian, speaking for him, beats his breast, begging his former wife to join him in hell (which, for the record, is not a place of fire and torment but, basically, a slightly more unpleasant version of Earth). Doesn't she care about him? Can't she see how she's hurting him by remaining aloof? Isn't she aware of how hard it would be for him to change enough to join her in paradise?

Essentially, the wife extends the invitation to change. When he churlishly refuses, appealing to her pity, she turns and leaves him. Her retinue of angelic beings sings a song: The Happy Trinity is her home; nothing can trouble her joy. The narrator, confused, protests that she is without pity. The narrator's Teacher affirms this. Pity had long been a weapon the man in life had used to pull down the woman into his own hell. Here in the After, pity holds no such power over her. Her joy cannot be held captive by another's selfish choices.

I'll have to see who else joins the roundtable to discover what other driving emotions may be worth looking at.