The+Deterioration+of+Humanity+Essay

The Deterioration of Humanity: It All Began With Parting Lips

I feel nothing right now. I feel no sadness clutching my heart nor do I feel happiness pulling the muscles in my cheek to form a smile. These emotions do not exist in me now and they never will unless I bestow a name upon them myself. So why don’t people realize this? I look into the faces of those around me and know that they could scream, cry, and smile while not knowing how they feel consciously. Why? Why do humans act irrationally? How can someone ruin their life by being driven by their emotions? Emotions are just conscious reactions that are empty of this ‘possession’ people blame their actions on frequently. I know that I am not emotionless. Yet, I also know that emotions are a human invention that can be harnessed and controlled. Scientists have said it takes ten minutes for an individual to overcome anger because the pump of hormones to their brain that initiates the fight or flight response ceases. Psychologists found that people remain angry, and even make a situation worse, by walking away to ‘cool off’. The stubborn personality that people hold when they need to be right controls the reaction because the hormones for anger ceased after ten minutes. Individuals who have been declared in a Persistent Vegetative State are capable of the following: sneezing, cough, scratch, cry, and smile. In this state the patients are able to awake, but are completely unaware of themselves and their surroundings. The patients can no longer think, reason, relate to their environment, recognize their loved ones, or arouse emotions. The patients can look into the face of one they loved and not feel a thing. The conscious label of the emotion that triggers the biological response has disappeared. Yet, they can still undergo the response. The physical mechanisms for crying and smiling are still within these individuals, these patients labeled as “vegetables” even though they can’t feel.

So which makes a person human; the physical mechanism or the emotional conscious? The Declaration of Human Rights states that humanity is different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we possess a conscience that allows us to choose between right and wrong. Why don’t we act on our conscious emotions instead of our subconscious emotions more often? These emotions that humans hold in their possession do not separate them from the rest of the animal kingdom because they do act on instinct, on their ‘subconscious’ minds if you will, more often than their teachings and thoughts. An example would be the Nazi soldiers in World War II. The slow deterioration of their mental stability started with the first human they shot, then the second, then the third, and so on. Inside their subconscious minds the soldiers knew that these people were human, not monsters, and the regret built until they couldn’t even look at themselves in a mirror without seeing monsters looking back at them. As a result, the Nazis created the gas chamber so that they could kill more people at once without having to look them in the eyes. If they had truly believed in killing the Jewish people then their minds would not have deteriorated after killing them. The biological and mental action was followed by the conscious thought of “What have I done?”.

This theory of a conscious label of emotion before a physical reaction was produced by the psychologist Richard Lazarus. He thought that if someone was put into an arousing situation they would give a conscious thought to label the situation before reacting with a physical action. In one instance I could tell myself I am happy and my lips would part to form a smile. As studies have shown, this will result in chemicals beings sent to my brain that signal for this “emotion of happiness” to settle. Physical responses cannot be simultaneous, nor a cause, of emotions because they vary depending on the situation of the person. Men who grow up in strict environments are told not to cry because it will be seen as a weakness or feminine. When men in those societies are sad, they will not cry because that is not what they associate culturally with sadness. The physical response and emotion was invented by the man’s environment, but it could change with one unspoken thought from his mind. Those who cannot witness someone’s physical response, such as a blind child, still show the universal mark of an emotion. Blind children can smile and they can cry, but they need their conscience to tell them when all the more. They cannot see what is around them, so in order to get the biological response that triggers the emotion they need to consciously label it.

