Interest

Brian Lynch

You have your interest, and I have mine. Have you ever considered that "interest" is an emotional force? Why do you like your favorite color? Did you choose it? Of course, you didn't. You just like it. You have "interest" in it. Why do you like vanilla over chocolate? Did you choose that? So we can go down a very long list. We can talk about your job. I hope you "like" and "enjoy" it. Well, did you choose to do what you are doing?

It appears that our likes and dislikes, and what we are not interested in, start very early on in our life, and we have accumulated experiences that then guide us into new experiences and new interests. Of course, as we get older, that part that "reason" plays is much stronger.

But having said this, I am now very interested in what happens when you have your interest and I have mine, and they are different. What can happen? Well, there can be problems. The problems are made much worse because we have an unconscious belief that everything starts with "reason," and that reason is "logical" and, therefore, we are "right." If I am right, you must be "wrong."

Understanding that every desire, thought, plan, project, and moral dictum that has ever been devised by man has been based, in the end, on someone's or some group's emotional "interest" first, and remember this includes our own, just might help us.

We might start to realize that our desires, thoughts, yes, and beliefs are based on "logic" that is only constructed and applied to our interests after we have the interests. And again, interests are emotional formulations of our experiences, not logical formulations.

So is everything just "my opinion?" How can we solve disagreements if my "interest" is just as good as your "interest?"

In day-to-day life, this can be difficult, as we all know. Slowly we are starting to understand our emotions and to understand the power of teaching our children from an early age, for example, to be empathetic to others' feelings, i.e., interests. This is a basis to form not so many skills for argumentation and "winning" a point, but skills for discourse and conversation that lead to resolutions, contracts, and synthesis.

The other area where humans have made progress over the last several hundred years is that area called "science." Here scientists start with an "interest." For example, I am interested in finding a cure for cancer. Then they try to make rules to limit "emotional" input as much as possible once that first step is made. They do this mainly by having many people look at the procedures and agreeing on them and then having many people analyze the results so no one person or group" s "interests" dominates.

The point of all the words put in quotation marks is to suggest that particular interest and reason are never quite what they seem to be. They are never purely one or the other. Even without conscious thought emotion has its reason, its logic. And reason is motivated first by attention and interest. To paraphrase Silvan Tomkins emotion without reason is wild and reason without emotion is sterile.