Sentimentality

About ten years ago following the end of one of my relationships I phoned a friendly ex to find out what was wrong with me. Come-on, we've all done it at some point. She quite bluntly told me that I see the best in people, I see their potential, I see what they could become, but I never really see the person. Forgive me for I have sinned and I paid for my sin, not in the next world but where all sins are paid – here and now.

I have yet to write on the 7 Romantic Vices, but top of the list would surely be the sin of sentimentality. Mind you, a vice is a bad habit that leads to self-destruction, and I have a habit of sentimentality. But I am not the only one.

An emotion is a pre-programmed response to external or internal stimuli. I like to think of them as very advanced and complex human versions of animal instincts. For animals, including the human variant, the primary concerns are: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? For humans this translates as whether something represents the gaining of a value or the loss of a value. Gaining the value causes the baseline emotion of happiness and the loss of a value causes the baseline of sorrow; it is from these two that many other emotions are derived.

These emotions are sudden sparks triggered by the stimuli. We cannot plan them or expect them. These are natural, proper, and pure emotions. However, there are other types of emotions triggered by imagined stimuli. Desire is the imagined gaining of a value and fear is the imagined loss of a value.

In other words, these emotions are not real. They are derived from nothing but our thoughts.

These imagined emotions serve their purpose. All of human art exists because of this principle. Our feelings are sparked by images, through paintings, words, drama, music, and such, which inspire our imaginations and thus our emotions and then actions. It also allows for human empathy and sympathy not to mention the fear and worry that can help keep us safe. 

The problems start when these imagined emotions become inappropriate, excessive, or extreme. Consider a person who gushes over the cuteness of a kitten, a lover who idealises their other half to the point of nausea, or the hippie who cries when a tree is cut down as if their mother just died. These are all examples of sentimentality.

Psychologically, sentimentality represents a disconnect from reality. It is a form of avoidance and escape from unpleasant truths as the idea of people and things supersedes the reality of people and things in the person's mind. One place where this is seen is with former relationships where they become glorified in memory, but the realities that caused the break-up are forgotten or ignored because they are too painful. The same hold true with any form of nostalgia.

The facts of reality become brushed aside in favour of a world of the imagination. The perception of reality is tinted rosy because it is just easier to cope with and far more preferable, thus blinding people to the way things really are.

Consider the mother of a bully who cannot accept that her darling is a little shit. So she makes excuses for him or denies the facts. She is blinded by her sentimentality. Or how about the hippies who think life should be a Coca-cola commercial or that animals all gather round in the Circle of Life and sing songs. They may not believe it literally, but they definitely do on an emotional level.

I was watching a documentary in which hippies at a peace rally were asked to define peace. The answers all revolved around everyone being happy and loving each other. No. Peace is defined as not fighting. Love and happiness have nothing to do with it.

Now let's flip the coin. There is a darker side to sentimentality, as if that side was not dark enough. Sentimentality is the over-evaluation of a value that does not exist, or at least on a level to elicit that degree of feeling. What about under-evaluation? I suppose that would be cynicism.

Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windermere's Fan, "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". I tend to think of the fox in the Aesop's Fable. He tried and tried to snatch the high grapes and finally gave up saying that the grapes were probably sour anyway. The sentimentalist over-estimates value and the cynic under-estimates it, one feels too much and the other too little. The truth is that both are fake. Both are in denial of reality. Remember that the fox really did want the grapes. Devaluing them is just an excuse for not trying to achieve.

In writing this, I keep thinking of California girls and Glasgow Boys. You are no doubt familiar with that stereotype made flesh of the girls squealing at the sight of a kitten, shoes, each other, or whatever. In Scotland there is the common expression, "That's shite, by the way". To this stereotype, everything is rubbish and they find fault and mock everything. Both groups personify the extremes of sentimentality and cynicism respectively.

For the Romantics, we have the value of Truth and the virtue of Wisdom. Both demand dealing with and accepting reality as it is. Therefore there is no room for either sentimentality or cynicism. They are sins.

The Subjective Reality of your mind is composed of nothing but your thoughts. These thoughts may be rooted in Objective Reality, or pure fantasy, or most likely a mixture of both. Therefore we must be on our guard against the twin vices of sentimentality and cynicism. Both faults involve reacting to the inner fantasy world a person would prefer rather than to the way that it is.

Here's is another Oscar Wilde quote for you. He defined a sentimental person as one 'who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.' As emotions go, the real ones are the ones that cost. This includes the cost of time, energy, and skill to acquire real values or the emotional cost of suffering real loss. 

We live in a world where fake emotions are running more and more rampant with each successive generation and we are all too polite to tell others that the emotions that they are truly feeling are bullshit. The Victorians had no problem with this, but alas we do. And yet, though we may see the motes in the eyes of others, it is much more difficult to see the log in our own, especially when it is part of our social programming.

The sad fact is that we do live in The Age of Feeling – an age of Platonic Idealism in which how you feel about something is more important that the reality of the thing regardless of Truth. After all, apparently truth is "subjective" these days.

I often make mention of the Age of Feeling. It has its philosophical roots with Platonic Idealism and of course Christianity, which made use of aspects of Plato's works, and we see its resurgence in the later half of the Nineteenth Century in Transcendentalism and Evangelical Christianity, but the real momentum begins with Edward Bernays in the 1920's.

Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the "father of public relations". He was the first to make use of psychological theories from his uncle and behaviourists like Ivan Pavlov to sell products ranging from cigarettes to baking mix to politicians to political ideologies. He called his scientific method of moulding public opinion the "engineering of consent" in his 1928 book Propaganda. Bernays was very much aware that the heart-strings control the puppet and this is done by altering the perception of reality that triggers the emotions and then the actions.

According to Bernays' daughter, Anne, her father did not believe that the public could be relied upon to vote for the right people, therefore "they had to be guided from above". Anne interpreted this as a sort of "enlightened despotism" ideology.

Today, every corporate or political salesman uses Bernays' techniques to generate fake emotions derived from a manipulated distortion of reality thus promoting the sentimentality and cynicism rampant in Western civilization during this Age of Feeling. Look here for more on Edward Bernays.

Here's an interesting experiment that I saw just today. Start with two wine bottles and fill them with the exact same wine and then invite someone to do a taste test between wines X and Y. In the experiment, the subjects were wired to record their pleasure centres. One wine was talked-up and the other talked down. The subjects said that the praised wine tasted superior and the machine said that more pleasure was derived from drinking it. Even though the wines were identical the subjects were absolutely convinced that one was far superior to the other simply based on the manipulation of a person's perception of reality.

Now imagine this experiment done to you during every waking hour since you were born. This is the Age of Feeling. How you feel about a thing is deemed more real that the thing itself. The result is a population conditioned to sin. 

Over the past four years I have swung from sin of sentimentality to the sin cynicism, and much of my current spiritual work these days involves undoing the programming I have as a product of this age and thus freeing me of these vices. My sins may be understood, excused, and I can blame society, but alas Athena is not merciful. Any breach of Natural Law must be paid for and I assure you that I have paid and continue to pay for my sins born of denying reality in favour of sentimentality and cynicism.