Is there such a thing as an “emotional truth”? We can answer ‘yes’ to that on two counts. The first is simple: one can say “he is in love” or “he is grieving” whereby we express our assessment of someone’s current emotional disposition based, say, on observation of their behaviour or on what they have said to us.
The second count is more interesting because this emotional truth has more connectedness with what I’ll call “rational truth”. For example, one may hear on the news that this or that factory is closing because of a lack of profitability. This is the (apparent) rational truth: the factory is losing money, is not profitable, therefore, it must be closed. This is the “rational truth” of capitalism’s profit-centric system. The emotional truth of this closure is, firstly, job losses, but this truth conceals a myriad of others: unemployment; depression; anxiety; stress; domestic violence; general health issues; feelings of worthlessness; anger; discontent; victim-blaming; political shifts to the right; suicidal ideation; early deaths. There are many others, but these are the emotional truths that come to mind. What one can do is also describe these “emotional truths” as the “human cost” of capitalist ‘rationality’, or capitalist ‘reason’. The reason (!) we do not refer to these as rational is because of the notion that these cannot be directly attributed to the closure of the factory – however much some of us might argue that this is the case.
One can also ask, in this scenario, why is it the case that profit is the primary concern? Why doesn’t the happiness and well-being of human persons outweigh abstract nostrums such as “market value” and profit? We can also dispute the standardised meaning of profit and how this is profit is achieved. For example, profit is always achieved by appropriating the surplus produced by workers, by maintaining a low rate of recompense for workers’ work, by the exploitation of others. This latter is, to be blunt, pretty much it. In order to profit, you exploit others – whether as a ‘shareholder’, a manager (I would favour an expansion of the term “ruling class” to include those who not only own the means of production, but those who ensure that the exploitation of workers “runs smoothly”), someone who bets, someone who buys cheap goods.
Of course, ‘profit’ in these senses has, ideologically, been tied to the notion of ‘freedom’. My ‘freedom’ is apparently based on my ability to profit from others. This is ‘natural’, just “the way of the world”. In addition, the maintenance of inequality is “common sense”; here we can see that controlling language controls meaning controls the terms of the argument. As language users, we fail to challenge the supposedly “given meanings” of the language we use. This leads back to the idea that ‘profit’ is rational, ‘good’, sensible, ‘adult’ whereas ’emotion’ is irrational, ‘bad’, ‘childish’. A central question here becomes why we accept that any word has a fixed meaning in the first place. Historically, we are aware that words and phrases change their usage over time, fall into disuse, come, in some cases, to mean the opposite of the original. Yet we seem to accept that ‘profit’ has a financial root and that ‘success’ has come to mean “financial success” as if these are definitions rather than the ideological constructs of a system that is rooted in inequality and greed.
I can, and do, profit from my conversations and relations with others. I profit from the state’s provision of services – and my paying tax enables others to profit. However, what these sentences depend on is a different definition of ‘profit’: in the first, it is that I can become a better person, a more informed person; in the second that, for example, education is free and that housing is provided to those who need it. Neither of these though fall under the capitalist definition of profit, which is entirely bound up with ‘individuality’ and the ‘transactional’ form that any interaction with others should take; this definition is designed, as I’ve said, to exclude alternative definitions, making them appear irrational, therefore, inferior.
In this ideological system, ‘individuality’ is uniform, as human persons conform themselves to “the acceptable”, and the acceptable is consumerism. The human person is instructed as to what they should consume, and the permissible reactions to that consumption. Thus, ‘individuality’ becomes an ideological category based on consumption: the more one consumes, the more individual one is. There is, however, another ‘level to this: one’s consumption must be conspicuous AND “better than” that of others. “Better than” involves having “more than” other human persons: it means amassing more money than others, but not simply this. It means amassing more money than others at the expense of those others – engaging in exploitation of those others for one’s own enrichment. In short, one cannot ‘enjoy’ one’s individuality (wealth) unless there are those who have far less which, in capitalist ideology, means that they are ‘lazy’, ‘feckless’ and ‘work shy’. Thus, capitalism instantiates performative cruelty as an instance of rational justification, an instance of rational truth about the world.
This ideological “rational truth” is represented as ‘natural’ which precludes consideration of the consequences of one’s actions as merely emotive. If I have more than others it is because “this is the way the world works”. For me to think about responsibilities to other human persons, or why I might have more than others, is simply emotional reasoning. I have what I have because I am worth it…
My responsibility is to myself and those I deem worthy of my care (and I can, for whatever reason, and at whatever time, change my mind about them), no one else. Others are simply the means by which I enrich myself. My ‘morality’ extends only to myself; I can confer this on others, but only if the transaction benefits me. Which is to say that capitalism has no morality, merely a series of sham performances that are allowed to exist unless they interfere with my profit.
‘Truth’ in this system is whatever gives me the advantage. On the macro-level, we see this in populist politics. Racism, sexism, hatred of “the other” in general is utilised by charlatans to enrich themselves – whether it be Trump, Farage or Le Pen. The great irony is that the supposedly “rational truth” they espouse is entirely emotional. They encourage the instant response, the un-thought action, non-consideration. The individual and the tiny world they inhabit is the currency of populist politicians. They champion non-thought disguised as “rational truth”, whilst rational thought is condemned as ‘woke’. What was previously recognised as “rational truth” – a truth that exists based on facts (science; empirical data), that exists independently of one’s desires – is displaced by “emotional truth” – a ‘truth’ that is based on one’s desire that something be true, however much this ‘truth’ is contradicted by, say, empirical data. As we have, and are, seeing, the attempt by populist politicians is to ensure that “X is true because I say X is true”. They dispute reports, and dismantle the institutions that human persons have designed to enable us to arrive at knowledge. They promote the fracturing of society along lines of race, gender and wealth, using nostalgia as a weapon (given that the definition of ‘nostalgia’ is a yearning for a ‘return’ to a time that never existed in the first place). The first politicians in living memory to do this were Reagan and Thatcher, who both “painted pictures” of times than never existed. Thatcher in particular was nostalgic for “Victorian Values” which, as anyone familiar with history knows, was hardly a time of “heaven on earth”. Reagan, taking one example of the entirely illusory past he claimed to have existed, utilised the Western propagandised version of the Soviet Union (I’m not suggesting that the Soviet Union was a ‘paradise’ either) to end regulation of the banking industry, industry per se and government lobbying , whilst extolling “the free market” and private wealth as the touchstone of a perfect society.
Historically, we have been here before. Anyone familiar with late 20s/early 30s Germany can draw more and more parallels with Trump’s regime in the USA, and with what Farage would like to do in the UK.