Emotional Detachment
“But how do you feel?”
Dr. Tayes Carmichael found the question irrelevant but not surprising.
“Feel?” He asked mildly, “This has nothing to do with feelings. The Council is choosing to cut my funding into electrochemical brain research and it is a bad idea. I’m close to a breakthrough, possibly one that will save millions of lives. Your ignorance could harm people across the globe.” There was no anger in his voice, no malice. These were simply facts, easily identifiable with even the barest of consideration, but it was as though he were speaking to five foam mattresses – his words made an impact but the Council members simply formed their own wrong-headed opinions – feelings – around them.
“So what we hear you saying,” Councilman Maas Liener steepled thin hands on the large board room table, “is that you care for the good of world.”
It took everything Tayes had to keep his eyes forward and not roll them in an exaggerated move to the side. They were getting to him, he knew, despite his best efforts to remain calm and unaffected. The shift had come gradually; the movement from intelligence-based decision making to that of “right-brained” thinking. “Emotional consideration”, they called it, or more accurately, “going with the gut.” What it really meant was a bunch of wishy-washy council members who would rather talk about feelings than solve problems, and that made foolish decisions like the one they’d just handed down.
“No,” his tone was firm but distant; no sense in giving them more to work with, “I’m saying that this decision is a mistake. That human lives would be saved by further research is a potential consequence of the action; my care for humanity is implied in that work.” He glanced around the table, making sure to meet each set of warm and sympathetic eyes in turn. “This has nothing to do with feelings. This is about what is sensible, rational.”
A moment of perfect silence gave the fleeting impression he might have made a real impact, might have found the notch in their spongy emotional armor.
“We appreciate your tireless efforts, Dr. Taves.” It was Tenaj speaking this time – she was the undisputed leader of their group, owing to her deep appreciation for emotional undertones in traditional decision making and an unnatural friendliness bordering on the aggressive. From what he knew, she was regarded by those outside of the Council as being completely unreliable; reasonable one moment and a raving lunatic the next. Such were the pitfalls of obsessive emotionality.
“The bulk of your work was done under the auspices of our predecessors,” she continued, “good men and women but with a narrow world view. We know it will take you time to adjust and are committed to providing whatever counseling or assistance you may need.”
He hung his head, defeated. They hadn’t heard; hadn’t really listened to a word he said. Without bothering to wait for a dismissal or giving them another spoken fragment to analyze, he stalked out the room. Fools!
***
Waiting for the second sequence printout he threw another plauqed accolade into the cardboard moving box and let himself enjoy a moment of blissful nostalgia.
They’d be closing down the lab soon enough, but in the meantime he was committed to finishing as much work as he could, to completing the project he’d started over a decade ago.
He still found it hard to believe the Emotocracy had risen to power, but he wasn’t one to follow social media or pay attention to trends. Apparently it had been a long time in coming, with thousands of books written and blogs posted on the new superiority of the right brain, of the inestimable impact of emotional thinking in the dreary world of left-brainers, those left out in the cold by their own limbic system – at least according to the hype.
A populous tired of empty promises and full of workers unwilling to perform the “menial” tasks that had fueled the country’s rise were easily swayed by a right-brained campaign, one that played on their sense of fear, anger and remorse at the country’s loss of clout on a world scale. Right and left, words once reserved for ends of the political spectrum now described how one thought, how one processed information. Logical left-brainers weren’t hated; merely pitied for their lack of emotional activation.
The shrill wail of the printer broke his abstraction and he grabbed its printed product quickly, reading over the latest course of results. His work had been on general electrochemical interactions but the focus of the Council on forcing his department out of funding had refined his aims, and for the better part of the month he’d been specifically targeting those chemicals that were precursors and results of intensive emotional states over long periods of time.
Fortunately, students on campus had been more than willing experimental subjects, owing to their interest in the new government’s policies and their desire to act out against the system they’d always been bound to. For weeks weeping, laughing and raging young men and women had filled his office, each given a specific cocktail of medication to increase both their reception to emotion and its results.
He read the data three times before setting down the sheet on his desk, then waited five minutes and picked it up again. He had to be sure it wasn’t just him – wasn’t his own emotionally heightened state making him see things that weren’t there.
A laugh escaped his lips. The data was real, accurate – black and white.
They were destroying themselves; ruining their own capacity for thought by accessing nothing but their right brain tendencies all day, every day. He did a quick calculation; six months at best for those like Tenaj before their brains were nothing more than cranium-bound piles of emotional goo.
He paused with the number to the chancellor’s office half-dialed. They’d coddle him, tell him he’d done well and hold untold numbers committee sharing circles before they ever made a decision about his findings.
Or…
He set down the phone. He could be ready; prepared with backing when the padded walls of the Emotocracy came thudding down.
How would they feel about that?
- D
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