# Rationality and Emotionality Human beings are both rational and emotional beings. Most science concerns itself with human beings as rational beings, while most art concerns itself with human beings as emotional beings. Both are extremely important in understanding human behavior. Many scientists, however, view emotions as obstacles to rational thought and behavior. Religion, however, satisfies emotional needs, which is why art is so important in religion. Thus, unfortunately (or fortunately) art and emotions remain and are extremely important. Indeed, in spite of the success of science in explaining many of the phenomena that religion attributed to the invisible hand of God, religion remains an important political and economic force in worldwide society, because it satisfies such emotional needs. Everyone needs emotional security. However, emotional *in*-security can arise even in the womb if the mother is exposed to an abusive environment caused by poverty or a husband who abuses her verbally or physically, he himself often abused by an environment of poverty or by an abusive owner of the means of production who exploits him, as Karl Marx described. The mother’s breast is the first form of emotional security, supplying “food and shelter”, and therefore has great symbolic importance, especially for males. From there it is the family that could supply this security, and then the community, tribe and society. One’s place in society determines where she or he could seek this security. Most living things find this in cooperation, as seen below. But as society grows in size and complexity, it becomes more difficult to find this security. In early hunter and gathering societies cooperative communities satisfied this need. Conflicts among hunter and gatherers concerning the regions where they found their food could be resolved with movement to new regions. Not that war was not an option even at this time. When agriculture was discovered as a means to satisfy the needs for food, the ownership of property became important and this created the need for greater cooperation in the form of social laws to maintain this ownership. A farm, if privately owned, could supply “food, clothing and shelter”, and thus satisfy the need for emotional security. This is why Stalin’s confiscation of farmland property from the feudal lords and giving it to the peasants was so important emotionally to these peasants. They no longer faced the emotional uncertainty about where their “next meal was to come from”. They were then encouraged by the communist party to form cooperatives in order to share ownership of the new technologies that increased the productiveness of agriculture in the modern age. They would also, in this way, still retain collective ownership of their farmland, necessary to relieve any emotional insecurity about their material needs. As Richard Wolff (2025) and Yannis Varoufakis (2021) and others say, it is now time to apply this logic to urban workers, in both capitalist and socialist countries. These workers’ emotional *in*-security would be relieved if they were informed participants in the ownership and in decisions about how the enterprise should be organized, including how workers replaced by technology should be dealt with. Unfortunately, employees in large cities now have no such guarantee. Before this, some native Americans established agreement among tribes to lessen the need for armed conflict to maintain a peaceful environment where group cooperation could provide this security. The emotional *in*-security of urban would be relieved if they were participants in the ownership and in decisions about how the enterprise should be organized, including how workers replaced by technology should be dealt with Indeed, we now live in an enormously more complicated world society where science and technology have increased the size of human settlements and human societies. Humans have organized themselves into larger and larger societies where cooperation is maintained in a variety of ways. Poor people seek emotional security in governing systems which claim to provide this security as part of their welfare systems. As Marx discovered, clever and predatory people would amass property to guarantee their security by exploiting both nature and their fellow human beings. Their wealth could guarantee their power as a means of insurance against emotional insecurity, especially the fear of death, as Epicurus understood 2000 years ago. Thus, predatory individualism and the acquisition of wealth as a source of power has become the measure of security under the banner of capitalism. This power may also have been gained under socialism by achieving elevated membership in the ruling party. Stealing of wealth from the party apparently was as common in the Soviet experiment with socialism as in the capitalist system where it was made legal for some in the name of profit. Meanwhile, the indifference to emotion and morality by science and society has made it very difficult to formulate solutions to this abiding problem. Science presents its meanings largely in mathematical terms. Whereas art presents its meanings in visual and acoustic terms, e.g., images: drawings, paintings, sculptures, architecture, rhetoric and theatre, sounds (music), dance, clothing, hair styles, etc. People react emotionally to these elements and their behavior is often largely influenced by these artistic presentations. Of course, these may not be exclusively artistic presentations, and, as in architecture, often require rational calculations as well. But this does not dimmish the emotional influence on human behavior. It’s also true that for people who are unwilling to put forth the effort to truly understand how modern society is organized, they would be more easily influenced by propaganda aimed at their emotions. Marx first confronted the question of how prices were to be determined in a society that traded goods in a marketplace. The logical answer was to compare the labor that went into the production of different commodities. This led him to a detailed analysis of how labor was compensated for in the production of commodities for exchange. He then discovered that the owners of the means of production paid workers only a portion of the value of commodities sold in the market and kept the remainder of the values created by labor as profit. He was morally offended by this discovery. His was a highly researched explanation for the logical, but morally deficient workings of capitalism. Unfortunately, the emotional dimension of this process was only implied. Profit-seeking has been supposedly a rational but in fact an emotional characteristic of capitalism from the beginning, not only for the capitalist who exploited this in order to accumulate wealth and its associated power, but also for the consumer who experienced a sort of emotional satisfaction in shopping to compensate for the absence of true emotional security. This is to say nothing about the absence of the satisfaction of security needs in the society created by this predatory individualist mentality. The assumption made by social theorists was and is that if the material needs for food, clothing and shelter were satisfied the emotional need for pleasure and happiness would automatically be satisfied, which is of course to some extent true. Indeed, if these material needs are not met, their absence causes emotional as well as physical pain. This accounts in part for the abiding search for wealth and associated power in the world today. Beyond this, however, and once these material needs are satisfied, there are still important emotional needs for love and security which need to be attended to. This lack of attention to emotion also led to the highly authoritarian, centrally planned socialist regime under Stalin, directed as it was, to the satisfaction of working-class material needs. It also led to the sacrifice of thousands of lives among those who, for whatever reason, did not agree with Stalin. What the proponents of socialism ignored was the enormous emotional transformation that would be required in order for people to abandon the need for the security based on wealth and to place their trust in their fellow human beings, including to some extent a central authority that would control the economy, *especially when this process was not accomplished in a democratic way.* This is to say nothing about a similar emotional transformation that many of those in positions of authority would have to go through in order to develop a moral responsibility for their fellow human beings and not simply pursue their own personal interests that their position in the new bureaucracy would encourage. This does much to explain the failure of Soviet socialism to achieve its goals. Perhaps the Venezuelan move to communes might suggest a strategy for promoting this new form or morality (Gilbert 2023)). They have attempted to create democratically organized small-scale communes that explore the process of citizen participation in organizing their economic system at a local scale. As in Epicurean communities since ancient Greece, property is held collectively but all the members of the community are known to each other and trusted because they share the values of love and friendship in these small-scale communities. Perhaps a hierarchy to a larger scale can be built up from these small-scale communities to encompass a whole society created by these same values, if capitalist countries would allow this! The role of art in this process is not about the design feature of art and its history, as such, but about the history of the influence of art on human behavior by way of emotions. This is part of the ongoing dialectical relationship between human thought and human action, often ignored in scientific explanations of human society, especially by economists. Thus, unfortunately, art is not taken seriously by the advocates of science, and is discriminated against in the academic and larger society. As an example, the artistic inspiration of architectural design has changed over the years, recently moving from classical to modern to postmodernism. Classical architecture represented an artistic reference to the intellectual culture of the past and has been often common on university campuses for this reason. Corporate advertising images, along with installment buying and later credit cards to promote shopping as the emotionally defined “good life”, were used in the U.S. at the turn of the century in order to aid in the creation of the consumer society. This was necessary to save capitalism from the growing crisis of overexploitation of workers and the resulting overproduction of goods and services. Classical architecture as art was thus used for the same reason in Chicago for the department stores. Consumers, often foreign born at that time, were led to believe that they were entering palaces in Chicago when they went shopping at Marshall Fields or Carson Pirie and Scott (Duncan 1965). This classical architecture was at some point replaced by modern architecture which glorified technology by eliminating all ornamentation to show the beauty of the machine. More recently this was replaced by the artistry of postmodern architecture that sought to ridicule modernism, and technology in general, etc. # The Changing Role of Women in Recent Society In the 20^th century there have been many artistic changes that have had nothing to do with science or rational logic, but much to do with the emotional reality of the role of women in society. The First World War saw women entering the labor force and bringing home income to the family. The art of clothing changed when women were no longer imprisoned in the corset, and as a result they could wear looser clothing. Hair and a hat were no longer a huge weight on the woman’s head. The waltz, with men in charge, was replaced in the 1920s by the Charleston where the partners were equal in importance. Women were also given the vote in the UK and the USA during the 1920s. There was, of course, no scientific reason why they should not have the vote for the thousands of years before that. This may have been something related to the physical superiority of males, but also to their emotional insecurity in a predatory society. All of this changed even more after the Second World War. Indeed, in the 1960s there was a “cultural revolution”. Women could then enter the university in any scientific field they wished, and find employment in society, based upon their specialized knowledge. This did much to overcome the emotional reason for this exclusion in the past, based upon male insecurity. # Today’s Emotional Needs At each point in human history, human beings have had emotional responses to artistic images and thus began to change their attitudes and behavior as a result. In other words, these were not rational calculations that altered their behavior, any more than the increase in the present growing of beards by men has a scientific logic attached to it. Could there now be an emotional need for men to prove that they are males by growing a beard? Advertisers and politicians know well these artistic influences and include them in their propaganda and rhetoric as well. Epicurus also understood this very well 2000 years ago, when he advised his followers to enter his “garden”, based upon love and friendship (Gilbert 2023). They could do this, according to him, only if they stayed away from politicians and their need for power, but also if they confronted the existential problem of death related to this need for power. This pointed to the abiding need for some men, in particular, to seek wealth as a source of power, as a way to avoid the emotional problems associated with this awareness of death. Meanwhile, Epicurus’ word “Idoni” has been totally distorted in its translation as “Hedonism”. The latter meaning suggests that pleasure is to be sought through over-indulgence in the material world of alcohol, drugs, food, sex, etc., This is opposed to Epicurus’ actual meaning of this word, which for him meant that pleasure is to be sought in a very simple life style and in the love and friendship found primarily in a community of people with similar non-overly-materialistic values. Today emotional needs are not discussed by anyone politically left, center or right wing. Only material needs for food, clothing and shelter, etc. are discussed. This is surprising, given that Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus (and Democritus). Art can promote these values with images that illustrate this different life style, as the people in the 10,000 (Epicurean) small scale eco-villages around the world today would claim. The usual assumption is that if, as mentioned above, your material needs for food, clothing and shelter, are met, your higher emotional needs will automatically also be satisfied, as they are to some extent, of course. For example, Kenneth Neill Cameron (1973) has written an excellent book, *“World History 0f Humanity and Society*”, but the words art and emotion do not appear anywhere in the book, even though many of the actions of human beings throughout history are motivated by these factors. He has 3 brief mentions of emotions on pages 125, 389, and 433, but no discussion of the importance of art and emotions in the evolution of human history. He is not to blame for this. He was taught this in a society where both women and men are exploited and dominated by insecure power-hungry men. This is, in part, what Marx uncovered in his detailed analysis of how this exploitation takes place. The need for men to feel powerful in the home may be compensation for his powerlessness in the workplace. # Socialism If all of this reminds one of socialism, it is perhaps necessary to discuss what this term means. Socialism insists that that communities (communism) and societies (socialism) are something more than just the individuals, pursuing their own selfish interests, who compose it. There are rules and structures that characterize them. There is an important variation in the degree to which individuals actually participate in forming these rules and structures. In small scale communities most people are aware of the environmental conditions that necessitate these rules, and often participate in forming them. Democracy is the Greek term used to describe this process of collective participation. In larger scale communities and societies there is often a ruling class that formulates these rules and creates the structures. The mass of people constituting these societies must then be persuaded emotionally that the rules and structures are in their best interest. In modern societies whole educational systems are designed to accomplish this task. Students who graduate from high school and college in modern industrial society may often have very little practical knowledge of how the complex society that they inhabit actually works. This is a product of the educational system and the mass media that often (un)informs these students, but also is a product of the difficulty and effort required to comprehend this complexity. People often then arrive at the conclusion that they as individuals can do little to change the society, in any case. We may think of Moses as an early socialist, over a thousand years before the birth of Christ. He helped free the Jewish people from their slave hood to the Egyptians, and led them to Sinai where they began to establish their own communities and society. He realized, however, that if they were to live as free society, and not slaves to someone else’s rules, they would need some moral rules of their own making to govern their behavior. To accomplish this he came up with the Ten Commandments, important to both the Jewish tribe and the Christian society that followed it. This was not everyone doing their own thing in a competitive “free market” system with an unseen hand to ensure that the best possible outcome would result. This is a phrase taken from Adam Smith’s work in the 19^th Century and used to legitimize capitalism, perhaps in ways that Smith himself would certainly not have agreed to, if he were alive today. This is true, especially if one reads his book on *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* (2010 \[1759\]). It is also not true when government actions are called “socialist” interferences by some devious commentators, even though these interferences are formulated by wealthy oligarchs in an actually non-democratic system. It is perhaps time to take seriously the message of phenomenology that human behavior is guided by human thoughts and beliefs, and cannot just be analyzed as systems that may include many contradictions and many lies about what leaders are really intending with their rhetoric and actions. Phenomenologists and other intellectuals, including especially anthropologists, have been promoting the idea of this dialectical relationship for many years now, as they try to understand the relationship between beliefs (culture) and behavior.

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