My own chart of animal emotions, based on similar charts by others such as Jaak Panksepp and Karla McLaren; this chart is explained in more detail in this earlier article. I now think the collective name for the emotions in the left shaded rectangle might be hurt.
We tend to think of ‘survival’ as being the primary imperative of living creatures. That’s a very anthropocentric way of seeing things. The prioritization of the ‘survival’ of ‘individual’ creatures would seem incompatible with the optimal health and sustainability of the whole ecosystem and the whole planet, upon which all ‘individual’ creatures utterly depend.
Given our negative, fear-driven human propensity to see everything as a competition and a zero-sum game, and to mistake ferocity for ‘fitness’, this misunderstanding is not surprising. But if we apply an ‘every creature for itself, against all others’ worldview to the operation of the trillions of creatures that comprise a human body, it becomes patently ridiculous. As we are learning to our chagrin as our planet’s ecological systems collapse due to our destructive ‘superior fitness’, either we (all life on Earth) all thrive, or else we all perish. Our planet, like our bodies, is a complicity, an evolutionarily collaborative effort to self-sustain.
My observation is that the primary imperative of all living creatures would seem to be not individual survival, but rather the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. What seemingly drives our human behaviour, and that of all our bodies’ constituent creatures, are chemicals that ‘reward’ certain behaviours with pleasure and ‘punish’ other behaviours with pain. The sum total of those rewards and punishments has evolved over billions of years, though admittedly imperfectly, to help us thrive, and to help the larger organisms — ecosystems and our plant, of which we are merely inseparable parts — to thrive.
The human cancer that is now in the process of exterminating all other life on the planet (and of course itself in the process) is currently being subjected to an immense amount of pain, as nature attempts to rebalance life to restore the health of the entire planet by ridding itself of this uncooperative cancer. And, of course, nature always bats last.
As I’ve written before, when civilizations collapse, they go through stages of rapid, chaotic decline, followed by stages of relative equilibrium, and then the next chaotic stage. I think most of us now, at least in the west, feel we have been plunged into one of these chaotic stages. As a result, we are feeling a lot of pain.
The chart above represents what I think are the emotions that ‘fall out’ of the chemical flows that impel and compel our bodies’ behaviour. Traditionally, we think of the three ‘negative’ emotions of fear, anger, and sadness as being primary and universal, feelings we clearly share with all other animals, and with each other. There are certain chemicals which are instantly and automatically produced when the body perceives the need to provoke these emotions in us, for its own protection: To motivate the body to fight, flee, or freeze. These are pain motivators — they make our bodies act to reduce or prevent pain.
And likewise, there are certain chemicals (most famously dopamine) which are instantly and automatically produced when the body perceives the advantage of provoking the positive emotion of joy in us, to reward us and compel us to continue the behaviours it is rewarding us for: To nurture, to procreate, to collaborate. These are pleasure motivators — they make our bodies act to increase and sustain pleasure.
This rather blunt ancient prescription for driving all animal behaviour towards actions that optimize the health of the whole — the whole body, the whole tribe, the whole planet — worked rather well, I think, until our species entered the picture. The problem with the human animal is that we, probably uniquely, feel a host of additional emotions that stem from abstract judgements about the world — anxiety, dread, hatred, grief, guilt, shame, and the other ‘judgemental’ emotions shown in the shaded box on the left side of the diagram above.
Unlike the universal animal emotions of fear, anger, sadness, and joy — evoked instinctively by all animal bodies through a well-honed chemical cocktail to achieve specific results — these judgemental emotions are accompanied by a complex mix of chemicals with no direct actions associated with them that allow these emotions to be discharged when the circumstances giving rise to them have passed. As as result of this ambiguity, these emotions, instead of impelling specific discharging actions, are actually incapacitating — we don’t know what to do when they arise. So they simply fester until the circumstances giving rise to them have passed. Or if those circumstances are chronic, they can continue to plague us indefinitely.
And as our societies have become increasingly complex, there are more and more circumstances that can arise that provoke these incapacitating, enduring, judgemental emotions. The inevitable result, I think, is serious mental and even physical illness.
I have called this class of incapacitating, often-enduring emotions judgemental emotions, but until last week, I didn’t have a collective name for these emotions, something that described them all not intellectually, but in terms of how they make us feel.
And then I got an email from my friend Paul Heft entitled A World of Hurt, and there was the name I was looking for: hurt. This is the debilitating feeling in a world of unfathomable complexity and endless confusing events that can paralyze us, eat us alive, and afflict us for our whole lives: Dread for the future for our children, anxiety about wars and demented politicians, grief over what has been lost, guilt and shame over what we ‘should’ or shouldn’t have done, hatred of people we may never have even met, jealousy/envy about what someone has that we don’t have and think we merit as well. And so on.
All of these helpless, hopeless, seemingly insurmountable feelings stem from human judgements. And unlike fear, anger, and sorrow, which can even save our lives, these hurt feelings do us no good at all. They don’t steer us coherently towards actions that can release these emotions.
And these hurt feelings are killing us. They are destroying our mental and physical health. They are making us violent, to the point that we are in the midst of an ever-widening genocide and on the cusp of another world war. They are paralyzing us into inaction. Their poison, when we communicate our hurt to others, infects them with the same feelings. They have made us chronically distrustful and hate-filled. And they make us feel helpless and hopeless, as they leave us with no sensible way to turn to relieve them. We can try to deny them, suppress them, and avoid them, but there is no escaping them.
And the consequence is that we now live in a world of hurt. So instead of dealing with the existential problems facing our planet, we are turning away, and within. Licking our wounds as our civilization slides ever further into chaos and collapse.
The tragic cancer called the human race might well kill itself in its desperation to end the hurt, even before nature comes to bat in the final inning.
