Feeling People And Thinking People

There are many people who think that feelings are for the stupid and for the weak. This justifies these people in severe emotional and often physical and interpersonal violence. For such people, their worst nightmare is a feeling-oriented person with a brain. Such a person is dangerous to them for two main reasons. One is that he cannot be credibly labeled as stupid. And the other is that he has the intelligence to be of help to other feeling-oriented people, whom they want to trample down and treat like dirt.

A common claim about such people is that they are manipulative. That term is manipulative in and of itself. A combination that is actually positive is being portrayed as something destructive.The actual outcome is competence at understanding feelings. This can be used for wrong, but it also can very well be used for right. 

Now a man who has such an inclination is deemed in some cases a potential Hitler. I consider it completely wrong to compare someone who does not want to kill anyone to someone who started a world war. Hitler may have had such inclinations; but so have many much better people, including Clinton, Dostoyevsky, Einstein, Tesla, Lennon and Blake. By that standard any gray “bureaucrat” is a potential Eichmann; but I do not see people working for USDA being labeled that way.

Both feelings and thinking can be paths to both wisdom and stupidity. When the two work together in one head, one of the many things that happen is that they challenge one another and correct one another's errors. A purely thinking person will be prone to the error of coldness and cruelty, and a purely feeling person will be prone to the error of mindlessness and self-absorption. Two modalities can challenge, check-and-balance and also feed into one another. One thing that happens in someone who has use of both modalities, once again, is that they check one another's capacity for error. And another thing that happens is that they inform one another with what one another lacks in itself thus come up frequently with greater wisdom than either acting alone.

So that someone who has competence in both feeling and thinking is likely to come up with quite valuable observations. This, once again, is because he has competence in two modalities rather than one. Ayn Rand was both very passionate and excelled at reasoning, and she came up with brilliant writing. We see the same, once again, in Dostoyevsky and Blake. They were brilliant people who were also passionate people. And this combination creates insight that cannot be as easily found in people who are either merely brilliant or merely passionate.

It should therefore be encouraged for people to be good both at thinking and at feeling. This will create people who have a use of two modalities rather than one. And that will allow them to both check each side's potential for error and work with one another to achieve fuller insight. The result will be wiser people and better decisions made all across the board.