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I'm not sure where you got the idea that "control over emotions" equals "not displaying emotions". I'd say it rather equals "not acting on emotions". Situation
by scbrg 9y ago
I'm not sure where you got the idea that "control over emotions" equals "not displaying emotions". I'd say it rather equals "not acting on emotions".
Situation: You are angry at a person.
- Control over emotion: You tell them you're angry and why.
- Lack of control: You punch them in the face.
Situation: You see a person in need of help.
- Control over emotion: You allocate reasonable amounts of resources to help them.
- Lack of control: You drop everything and spend all resources availabel to help them.
Anecdata time. The later situation was comically obvious a month or so ago in Sweden. We have a group of people (supposedly) from Afghanistan that may or may not get deported. They are protesting in our capital, and the protest had been going on for some time. A high profile lawyer raises some money (amounting to a couple of thousand dollars) in order to support these people. He goes to where the protesters are assembled. The first person he speaks to, he feels so sorry for that he decides just to give her the entire sum of money he has raised, and be done with it.
I'd argue that (apart from committing borderline fraud), this person displayed an unreasonable lack of control over his "love and tenderness". He spent a fairly large amount of money that could have been used to help a large group of people on a single individual on the spur of the moment.
Having emotions is not wrong. Showing them is not wrong either. Letting them get the best of you (i.e. lacking control over them) often is.
- olfox 9y agoI didn't find anything about the story of the lawyer when searching. Could you tell me where to look? The story fits my preconceived notions too well to not question it...
- scbrg 9y agoThank you for forcing me to look for reference. It turns out that I got the story a wrong in pretty much all the details, but - I'd argue - correct in the conclusion. The event did not happen a month or two ago, that was apparently the point at which I heard about it. And it didn't involve Afghani refuges. It involved Syrian refuges, and it happened in 2015. The lawyer, Viktor Banke, raised around 15,000 SEK (slightly less than $2000) to help Syrian refugees who were living temporarily in the Mosque at Medborgarplatsen in central Stockholm. He had raised this money with the promise that they'd be given to the people who were running the shelters, to help them finance the operation. When he arrives, he meets a Syrian woman with children who, while travelling from Syria through Europe, had been registered as a refugee in Hungary. Since EU policy at the time was (and maybe still is?) that refugees should be handled by the first country they register in, it looked very likely that she and her children would be sent back to Hungary. Notably in this story is that at the time Hungary was considered a "less attractive" country for refugees than Sweden. Viktor then decides to hand the raised money (not a huge sum of money, but still) to this woman, rather than to the people operating the shelter. I don't have any international references for this at all - apparently Viktor wrote about it in his new book Andrum, in which he discusses Swedish politics w/r to the refugee situation in Europe (I have not read the book). Brief source in Swedish: https://bjornostbring.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/recension-av-viktor-bankes-andrum/ https://bjornostbring.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/recension-av-... My apologies for my misleading previous post. That's what happens when you tell a story from memory. Anecdotes indeed.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoIt's a conversation, not research papers ;-)