Love and Desire, From the Diary of Peyton Dracco

On the Need for Love and Desire

Saturday, April 11th of 2015. 11 minutes after 3:00 pm

I see most emotions as hindrances to logically productive lives. Even within the vice of subjectivity, all we need to thrive as a society are what I used to call (and may get into the habit again) the Essential Two: Love and Desire.

As I see it, love requires us to desire the best for ourselves and those around us, and if that desire is nurtured with reason and kept pragmatic, it will only arrive at communally beneficial outcomes. All other emotions are to be treated like the cognitive functions that they are. When studied, they should be scrutinised only to be fixed and keep them from inhibiting the intricately beautiful processes of the human mind

This proposition clearly cannot mean that we must ignore them; on the contrary, we need to pay distinct attention to them. We must learn to control our emotions to prevent them from taking control of our experience and our behaviour.

Emotions must always be something that happens to us, not the other way around.

I have done my work with them; experimented on myself for many years; saw them from all angles available to me, and allowed others to see them in me. This endeavour was time-consuming and, at times, uncomfortable. I will admit that the reasons for my investigation were less than noble, but the findings were quite rewarding. As a result, today I may [still] be unable to “feel” as severely as others can. Still, I understand emotions (better than they do) – this has inevitably brought me closer to knowing why people do the things they do, and it is how I build my most enduring of constructs: empathy.

— The Devil Unbound, for Peyton J. Dracco

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