Good morning everyone! Today I have a special treat for all of you. I’d like to introduce you to my friend, the talented Shay Fabbro, author of The Chosen and Alexis Davenport Adventures.
Delving Into Emotions
This topic has been explored in one of my very favorite shows of all time: Star Trek. It started with that green-blooded hobgoblin, Mr. Spock. He was the product of a Vulcan father and a human mother. Vulcans forgo emotion and instead choose to live life through reason and logic.
They choose to live this way.
That’s a pretty key word. Vulcans in fact are a deeply emotional race. They suppress their emotions through a lifetime of training and meditative techniques.
Now, in the Next Generation, we get to see what living without emotions must really be like.
Data is an android and though he looks human (a pale one at that), he does not possess emotions. Some of my favorite episodes are him trying to come to understand his human crew mates.
When I started designing the worlds in the Portals of destiny, I thought it would be interesting to explore this concept of emotions.
Meet the telepaths from the planet Kromin
This race was perhaps the most challenging, and yet intriguing to create. I thought it would be fun to delve into a race of beings that many people may already find familiar 
Since we don’t know anything about the mysterious visitors that some claim have been coming to our little planet, I took some liberties to give them a history all their own.
The Kromins are telepaths, clones, and androgynous. Their world is unlike anything you could possibly imagine. Rather than a nice solid planet to build houses on, theirs is a semisolid, gaseous whirlwind of hell. Their buildings float in the dense atmosphere (think Cloud City from Star Wars).
The clones have no emotion (to find out why, you’ll have to read the first book of the Portals of Destiny series). Which can be sort of problematic when trying to convey the seriousness of a situation. Often times, humans resort to the use of emotions to get the response we want, whether it’s trying to get our way with our parents, spouses, co-workers, or Guardians trying to explain the consequences of the Mekan Fleet strip-mining a world and destroying it. Kind of hard to get the point across as to how devastating these colossal machines can be to life forms if you don’t have the emotional capacity to imagine your loved ones being crushed beneath them, or watching an entire civilization destroyed in as little as ten years.
But even with all of that, wouldn’t we be better off without emotions? I don’t think anyone would argue that the most devastating acts of cruelty happen because of emotion: anger, rage, jealousy, greed, lust. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could just get rid of all emotion and not have to worry about such things anymore?
Then again, that would mean giving up on all of the wonderful things as well. And how else would we measure the heights of joy before first experiencing the depths of sorrow? Would the “good” emotions even mean anything? And then there’s the whole argument that emotions are themselves not good or bad; it’s what we choose to do with them that is good or evil.
So what do you think? Emotional or emotionless? Keep the “good” emotions and do away with the “bad”? Or keep our species just the way it is? Comment in this post for your chance to win a FREE Kindle FIRE!!!!!!
Now who doesn’t want one of these, eh?
Contest Rules:
~~Contest ENDS September 7th!
~~Comment in the thread and answer the question(s) at the end of the post
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Thanks for having me on your site!!!!
You’re welcome.
Looks like we’ve drawn a crowd. lol
Get rid or suppress emotions? Interesting notions, emotions, but the notion of using potions or lotions to suppress or cancel emotions gives rise to oceans of commotion. Humans have emotion, it is no mere notion can remove portions of emotions, and their removal could cause internal tensions and contortions. Is this not something I want to set into motion.
This post was brought to you by Dr. Seuss
HAHAHA! *snort*
HAHA! I’d pay real money to see your mind at work, dude.
Thanks for stopping by.
Great blog
. As for the idea of emotions, I remember sitting in my college days in a dingy dive in Bowling Green, Ohio with my best friend at the time discussing this very question over *very* late night pancakes and bacon. What we decided was that while it would certainly be *easier* to eliminate emotions, we’d be eliminating the very thing that gave life pleasure. Today I liken it to being overly drugged on ‘ADHD’ medicine. When you flatline emotion, all the bumps and dips in the road – those very bumps and dips that teach us the hardest and most profound lessons – become flat and uneventful. We end up missing the very experiences that push us to grow and evolve. So while a lack of emotions would certainly make life easier, I do not think it would make life more enjoyable.
Amen sista!
I think we should probably leave things they way they are. Since we really don’t know exactly how the human mind works, if we took away the “bad” emotions, we might damage the “good” ones too. The Law of Unintended Consequences tends to rear its ugly head when you mess around like this. When Alex is stripped of his violent impulses in Clockwork Orange, it takes a away a large part of what makes him Alex.
Very good point!!!
I would keep the emotions, the chanllenge of the “bad” emotions allow us to become stronger as a people, but are also needed for survival. While the “good” emotions allow us to reach outside of ourselves and become better as a people.
That’s very true!
Interesting article, Shay. This kind of question can really delve deeply into a writer’s core character. I’d say that it’s an interesting and (if done correctly) instructive experiment to remove certain emotions from humans (we’re talking fiction, of course). Where would we be without pride or greed? But for those who believe in the notion of free will, emotions are too closely wound up with how we operate. Can you say a human chose freely to do something if there isn’t at least a faint counter emotion to call attention to another option? I think it’s when we can set aside those negative emotions and make good choices that humans are the most noble. So, leave it be, as ugly as it is…
Well said!!
Maybe we have this whole emotion thing all backwards anyways? We tend to think that our emotions are just for us. Because of that we sometimes desire to get rid of the emotions that make us feel uncomfortable such as sadness, grief, hurt, betrayal etc. I know in one of my darkest hours, I was deep in prayer and crying out for the emotional hurt to just stop. I was tired of having my heart broke and being betrayed by the people I trusted the most. In that moment I heard in almost an audible voice, “This is not about you, I did not give you, your emotions for you to allow them to lead you and to overcome you. I gave you the blessing of emotions and allowed you to feel them so you will understand them. So when you see a person in pain, it will motivate you to get them help because you understand pain. When you see a person grieving, it will motivate you to comfort them because you understand grief. When you see a person in love and full of joy, that you can smile and have hope that there are better days ahead because you to at one time have felt those same emotions. I would dare to say that more and more people are learning to turn their emotions off and that is one reason why we have so many crimes in this world, so many serial killers and rapist. We are learning to become numb and it doesn’t convict us when we see tears, when we hear screams, when we see someone homeless and hungry. In my opinion our emotions are a healthy part of this world and we need them all, they problem comes in when we are ruled by our emotions and don’t allow logic to play a role. We need the balance of both to correctly respond to situations in life so I say keep the emotions cause as one artist said “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all”
Exactly! How can we know joy if we don’t first know what pain feels like?? And I really like what you said about using our hurt to help others
Excellent article Shay! I used to wonder what it’d be like to be a Vulcan and even tried my hand at it at one time. It didn’t register to me until years later that there’s a balance to be maintained between our emotions and while it’s easy to say eliminating them would solve a great many problems, what would we miss in the world around us? There’s so much beauty it would seem a crime to risk not seeing it simply to avoid the potential pain.
It would be difficult to live without emotions, especially for me! I wear mine on my sleeve
The suppression or extraction of emotions of the human race would be a difficult thing. We are a people built on emotion be they positive or negative, there are no good or bad emotions it is what these feelings cause us to do that makes us see them as good or bad. Emotions allow us aas a species to develop and interact in a way we all know and are comfortable with. If we removed them mankind might be better off as a whole as it could possibly cut Down on crime and war if we got rid of greed hate and anger. But to be truly emotionless we would have to evolve a system with dealing with things that we are not capable of at this point in human evolution. in a true emotionless society a problem would be solved easily but punishment may be severe and the need to conform could possibly be absolute for without emotions to define us where would the want to be different come from. there is also the musical and artistic things that would go by the wayside how dull would music be if no emotion was evoked or put into it and would there be any?
SO though I believe a society in complete control over there emotions like the Vulcan can work we as a species are currently unable to properly attempt this. and the eradication of emotions would make us more like machines and remove all pleasure form life.
I know, right? We’d be like a bunch of Data’s (without the emotion chip of course) running amok
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Thanks for all the AMAZING comments you guys! I used a random numbers generator to choose the winner (myself and Cp excluded) and the winner is………….
Tim Queeney!!! Congrats Tim! I’ll be in touch to get your address so I can drop-ship your shiny new Kindle!
http://www.shayfabbro.com
Better off? No. Get rid of all emotion? No. The stoic movement attempted this, such a failure the movement has never seen the light of day again. Would only good emotions be joyless? No good emotions would still have meaning, perhaps not the understood depth as we know now, but experiencing good without bad does not diminish good. No I wouldn’t change a thing it is our human condition which we must all struggle with and strive to improve.