Yeah yeah, very stoic. I take 2 broad approaches regarding it.
1: What if someone is opting into the emotion anyway as it aligns with their stance regarding the event?
Why do you assume everyone else is uncontrollably driven by emotion and that all internal sensation is maladaptive?
Not everyone. Just a significant subset of people..
As to why I believe this to be so that is because it is plainly obvious. People, but especially young people act on their emotions all the time without thinking. And it usually ends badly as it obviously will. And how bad depends on the case ranging from wasted time and energy to personal self destruction to ruining the world for all of us.
For example now a bunch of these students are going to get expelled from the ultra expensive once in a lifetime opportunity they have to get a carrier.
Or how many very bad people throughout history have gotten into power thanks you being able to appeal to foolish people who think with their emotions using lies of ideals and a better world.
And who can forget that one idealist kid who thought it would be a good idea to shoot an Austrian noble because he felt that would somehow make the world a better place? How'd that one turn out for him?
These aren't really things that are in question. The question is simply WHY?
I can understand a small child acting that way. Small children don't know any better as their parents and life both have simply not had the time to teach them the basic skills of survival such as impulse control and not sticking everything you find on the ground in your mouth.
But by the time you reach adulthood you should have enough of a brain and basic impulse control to not blindly follow your heart by jumping into a fire just because it feels nice and warm. And people in university should by all counts be the smartest and most capable of their generation (emphasis on the should, sadly). So why is a substantial portion of them throughout the ages acting like someone a decade or two their junior?
2: Your version of it has a mind/body duality style assumption that would not be borne out with sufficient chemical or direct electrical stimulus to your neural tissue.
It's not really a duality as much as just basic human nature and behavior. I am just probably being way too analytical in explaining it. And that might be confounding the conversation.
We humans are constantly exposed to all sorts of stimuli in life that inevitably conjure all sorts of chemical responses that we might call emotions. We get annoyed at a tantrum child, angry at someone being slow in traffic, cheerful over something good happening, upset over something we see on TV, horny because we see a good looking coworker etc. That's normal.
But you wouldn't just go and punch out a child throwing a tantrum in public because it's annoying. You know that this would not solve your problem. All it would do is make your problems even worse. So you take control of your emotions and decide to just grit your teeth and adapt to the world around you.
You learn to tolerate screaming children. And you do so not because children throwing tantrums in public is a good thing that should exist in this world. It is plainly NOT. It's an evil that in a perfect world would not exist. But it is an objective fact that children will scream and throw tantrums for as long as bad parents who can't control them exist. So your choices are either to suffer for the rest of the life every time a child misbehaves or to toughen up and learn to live with it.
It's just basic normal human behavior for anyone who wants to go through life and remain sane.
How is "saving the world" unproductive? Seems more productive than maximising shareholder value to me.
It's unproductive because it is not possible. Spending resources on a task that can not be achieved is the definition of pointless waste.
And more often than not unproductive is the best case scenario. These kids are going to get into a lot of trouble because of what they are doing. And history is full of examples of people suffering far worse than being expelled from an ultra expensive school that is a once in a lifetime opportunity for them. Stuff like death.
The graveyards of this world, both metaphorical and real are full of young revolutionaries who thought they were saving it. And yet somehow the world has not yet been saved. So call me cold if you like, but I don't really see any sense in adding to the pile.
Emotions don't work like that.
They really do. At least if you have any degree of emotional maturity and impulse control. You just don't think about these things in such an analytical way. But we do it every day when ever we adapt to our environment by changing our behavior.
But, okay, lol, if you can choose what emotions you have then why don't you choose to have empathy for the people of Palestine? I would recommend it.
Oh, I feel for them. I just refuse to do anything about those feelings because I know that there is nothing I can do about it and thus the only thing I would achieve is waste my time and get upset over stuff that is unchanging.
When it comes to the genocide in Palestine my options are to gorge my self on news about it thus making my self upset and achieve NOTHING, Make pointless political gesture that might get me into trouble and can achieve NOTHING anyway or change the channel and get on with my life trying not to think too hard about yet another horrible thing happening in the world.
Only one of those three leads to a net positive outcome.
And sure, in a perfect, or even just non terrible world we wouldn't be faced with such choices. But this is not such a world. It's reality. And in real life if in your travels you should meet with an unstoppable force and your options are to either try and change the laws of nature to make it stop or step out of the way the sensible person steps out of the way.