By Selwyn Duke

Although I’m not fond of psycho-babble terminology, if we can speak of emotional IQ, I can say it’s not very high in general.  We live in the age of Oprah — who has an encounter group masquerading as a TV talk show — the age of "I feel your pain."  Thus, it’s not surprising that people are taken in by emotional contrivances, such as a candidate who sheds opportune tears.

No, I won’t devote this whole piece to Hillary Rodham; she’s not that interesting.  The banality of evil, you know.  But human nature is most interesting. 

And it is human nature to not understand human nature.  What does it tell you when a person sees tears and says, "Wow, Rodham is a real human being; I just may vote for her"?  Did anyone think she was a Vulcan?  Do you suppose there’s a person alive who has never cried?  Why, we might as well be impressed that a candidate breathes as we do.

Supporting a politician because of an emotional display is much the same as doing so because he mouths platitudes about change.  Change isn’t by definition good or bad; it’s just change.  Emotion isn’t by definition good or bad; it’s just emotion.  We have to ask, respectively, what the change is and why the person is getting emotional.  After all, Adolf Hitler cried when his canary died. 

Crying doesn’t make you a good human.

It just makes you a human.

For sure, you could cry for yourself or for others, or because you couldn’t do evil or because others did. 

Likewise, laughter can be a beautiful reaction, but it isn’t always.  It’s not uncommon, for instance, for people in the Third World and Asia to laugh at the handicapped in the streets.  Again, the question is, why do you laugh?

Unfortunately, reason plays far less of a role in determining people’s decisions than we may like to think.  This is especially true in our age, with how children are conditioned in school to "follow their feelings" and subordinate the intellect to them.  Forgotten is that the role of emotion is only to give us the impetus to act once the intellect has determined what that action should be. 

Jeremiah 17:9 — "The heart is deceitful above all things."