If freedom is emotional, and emotions are social, it must thus be apparent that freedom is a “collective good” in the sense that economists use the term. Because emotions are social, and freedom depends upon emotions, freedom is social, and thus collective. The degree to which I can enjoy freedom largely depends on a long chain of interactions in everyday life, on how you and everyone else act, think and feel. If you feel judgmental, disdainful, hateful or envious towards me, and I am not in a position to ignore your reactions, it limits my freedom. It curtails my very thoughts and motivations in a thousand ways. It stunts me in my becoming of myself.
If most people around me feel negative emotions towards me, I lose almost all freedom and I am reduced to an impoverished existence where all my choices are about avoiding these negative emotions targeting me.
There is, in this sense, an economy of emotions , where my feelings are profoundly interconnected with yours. Such an economy can be rich or poor; it can generate many lifetimes’ worth of shame and fear or relative comfort and joy. This economy can be productive, or corrupted, have great ecological fallout (the joy of one being the misery of another); it can be lean or heavy-going, fair or unequal, effective or ineffective—just like the conventional economy of goods and services.
In this sense, our emotions have an inescapably transactional side. Negative emotions targeting me often cost me something. And which negative emotions you have towards me also make a great difference: If you disdain and shame me, it’s after all more manageable than if you’re in a hateful frenzy against me and threaten my physical safety. Hence the collective emotional reactions of my surroundings largely determine the severity of my shackles—or conversely, the heights of my freedom.
Since we avoid the negative emotions, since we avoid different forms of judgment by self and others, we are always being steered by an emotional regime, a regime present in every interaction—hidden in plain sight.
The Spectrum of Judgment
So we have mentioned a few different emotions that control and limit our everyday lives with different avoiding-mechanisms—a somewhat different set than Ekman’s basic emotions, these being:
1. Fear
2. Guilt
3. Shame
and…
4. Sklavenmoral ; the “internalized envy of others” (which relates closely to what Nietzsche called “slave morality” in German; with the risk of bending the Nietzschean term, I will use this word).
These four emotions target our self , or “ego”: “I could die!” or “I am a loser!” Each of the four has a corresponding emotion when they target someone else, the other , when they target “you” or “alter”—as you will soon see. In any society you are likely to have these emotions lying dormant as control mechanisms of different sorts—whether it is Mamluk Egypt in the 13th century or present day Denmark.
At the basic level, then, beyond all measures and constitutional differences and changes of social norms, the reason we can say contemporary Denmark is “more free”, is that people are avoiding different sets of emotions in their everyday lives than in 13th century Mamluk Egypt. If you screw up in today’s Denmark, you get shamed on an internet meme and people call you names. It’s nasty, yes, but you don’t get tortured and stoned to death. If you have strange opinions and habits in Denmark today, people think you’re a weirdo and you might have trouble getting a job. In 13th century Egypt, however, you may have to deal with the prospect of going to hell—before being ostracized and/or stoned at the town square.
Emotions are always there, and they always play a part in every political and social reality. After all: it’s one thing women get stoned in Saudi Arabia because of sharia laws—but who exactly does the stoning? People with strong emotions of anger and judgment cast the stones, not holy scriptures. If people didn’t have these feelings, would they remain just as eager about physically punishing women for violating dated chastity codices? Probably not.
Is it a coincidence that homosexuals enjoy greater freedom to express themselves and on average have more freedom from verbal and physical abuse in the “happier” Nordic countries than in the troubled, post-communist societies of Eastern Europe? No it’s not.
The relatively higher freedom in the Nordic countries is closely related to a more tolerant and acceptant emotional regime than in e.g. Russia or Pakistan. For instance, beating up gay people or throwing acid in the face of young sexually active women is as illegal in the former countries as in the latter, but somehow the emotional regime in the latter is more prone to generate negative emotions leading to such actions. Our personal freedom even often depends more on the prevailing emotional regime than on our legal rights. And the two develop together, or not at all. The freedom to be gay, but without the freedom from shame, fear and physical abuse, is, after all, no freedom at all.
Luckily, history has taught us that we can develop and change the emotional regimes that govern our lives, and that there is a progression in which we have managed to liberate ourselves from the extent to which negative emotions control us.
As seen in the following table, there are four different sets of negative social emotions, each being some form of “judgment” of the self or other:
“THE SPECTRUM OF JUDGMENT”
Or: The Progression of Emotional Regimes
EGO (self) aspect
ALTER (other) aspect
4. Sklavenmoral , internalized envy
4. Envy, jealousy, schadenfreude
3. Shame, embarrassment
3. Disdain, contempt, ridicule
2. Guilt, feeling impure
2. Judgment, moral outrage
1. Fear, terror
1. Hatred, rage, aggression
Hence, you can think of these emotions as the spectrum of judgment . It should be clear that the emotional development of a population plays a major part in determining how free life de facto is: We can, collectively and (in)dividually, climb or descend this spectrum of judgment.
These emotional regimes regulate our behavior by making us avoid repercussions from others: 1) fear impels us to avoid hatred and violent aggression, 2) guilt to avoid moral judgment, 3) shame to avoid contempt, and 4) Sklavenmoral impels us to avoid that others feel envious of us.
We normally don’t walk around actually feeling these emotions; yet we are, to differing degrees, controlled by them: Because we avoid them, we don’t usually feel them, but because we do avoid them, we remain in their grip.
They constitute the invisible machinery that lets everyday life in any society run smoothly; indeed, that makes any society functional at all. Again: The avoided negative emotions are, as it were, hidden in plain sight .
Subtler and less grossly oppressive emotions are of course the most difficult to detect and to understand. In the field of emotional psychology, there is relatively little work on envy, an emotion which is almost always hidden away, even to the person who feels it. Sklavenmoral (literally “slave morality”) is the internalized envy of others; when we feel subtle shame, not for our shortcomings, but for our strengths, talents and aspirations. Sklavenmoral has, to my knowledge, only been theorized in Jungian terms—often in “integral” and New Age circles—as the “golden shadow”. The golden shadow is an expression of disowned greater potentials within ourselves which can lead us to idealize others, or to envy their talents.
Scholars in this field sometimes make the distinction between “feelings” and “emotions”. Feelings are more a day-to-day business; they fluctuate throughout the day, as we feel happy or sad, frustrated or calm and so on. The “emotions” I’m talking about here are more deeply layered processes within ourselves: we love our families, are ashamed of our positions in society, are embittered by perceived injustices or disappointments and so forth. When we talk of emotional regimes, we mainly mean these more durable
“emotions”, even if “feelings” may also play a part.
An important side to this is that the ego-emotions (fear, guilt, shame and Sklavenmoral ) all partly depend on their “alter” counterparts (hatred, judgment, contempt and envy). If my mind is full of contempt towards fat and poor people, then I’m more likely to target myself with these emotions, feeling shame if I should become fat and poor myself. If I am judgmental towards the perceived moral flaws of others (justifiably or not), then I’m also likely to judge myself more harshly, feeling like an unworthy piece of dirt. And the reason I feel such contempt and judgment is that I have internalized a shame- and guilt-regime and begun to avoid certain behaviors. As you can see, the “ego” and “alter” versions of the emotions are intimately connected. [41]
All of this lands us in what might look like a paradox: On the one hand, all societies rely upon these negative emotions—and our elaborate, learned, often subtle behaviors to avoid them—on the other hand, they limit the freedom of each and every person and the expressions of our relationships in all aspects of life.
Yet everyday life doesn’t work without sanctions. Sometimes we do need to condemn people for their actions. The question, then, is not how to get rid of these negative emotions altogether, but how to develop them. The answer to the dilemma is, again, a developmental-sociological perspective; the insight that freedom is a collective good—that we are freed together, or not at all, and that this is a matter of collective, or rather “transpersonal”, development.
So once the highest Freedom House rating has been achieved, we are left with the momentous task of increasing freedom by developing how people truly feel, and specifically how we feel about and relate to one another.
Look again at the many citizens frolicking about in Stockholm. Each of them goes about their business, saying hello to friends, getting a coffee on the go, hurrying to their next appointment. On the surface they look as if they are making autonomous, individual choices. But then look at the streets of Pyongyang in North Korea—can you really tell the difference? Here people are also, by the look of it, moving around freely doing their thing. And still, we know that the people in downtown Stockholm enjoy much greater freedoms than citizens of Pyongyang. The invisible shackles are heavier in Pyongyang than in Stockholm, but they are present in both places, just to different degrees.
Look at it this way: What about all the things these people aren’t doing or expressing, all the hopes and inclinations that are suppressed and never talked about? How many are driven to work to make money to buy expensive clothes in order to feel more adequate and less ashamed of themselves? How many are stuck in peer groups in which they are not respected? How many are pressured to do things at work that don’t rhyme with their values and convictions? How many simply feel they aren’t good enough? If all of these people were free in a deeper sense of the word, wouldn’t they use this freedom to address these issues?
The lack of freedom is, in this sense, largely invisible. And yet it is there. Our shackles insert themselves even prior to our conscious thoughts, prior to our choices made, our values formed, prior to the formation of our personality and sense of self.
Freedom is a collective concern, yes, but it is also intimate and relational. Hence: transpersonal.
Yet this is no reason to despair; rather, it impels us to ask for higher freedom, for another kind of freedom . It’s good news, in a way, because it means that the great game for human emancipation is still on.
The Hierarchy of Negative Social Emotions
Before we go on to analyze the emotional constraints to freedom, we must recognize the hierarchy of negative social emotions of control. The spectrum of judgment follows a certain logic or order.
fear trumps guilt,
guilt trumps shame, and
shame trumps Sklavenmoral (the internalized envy of others).
This hierarchy is far from obvious; many of us have known severe feelings of shame and know how exceedingly painful and paralyzing they can be. But stop for a moment to think about it. If you had the choice of being shamed by everyone as an ugly, bizarre, stupid and smelly loser, or , living with the guilt of having pushed a toddler out the window from the tenth floor, which would you choose? Despite the intense pain of strong shame, most normally functional people would prefer shame over guilt.
But can fear really trump guilt? I offer you another gruesome example: the civil war in Yugoslavia of the 1990s. You had people torturing one another, slaughtering innocent civilians with knives and degrading them in death camps. When lives and physical safety were at stake, people circumvented their feelings of guilt and apparently acted without conscience—not to mention that any trace of a sense of shame and propriety was suddenly gone with the wind. Fear and hatred could easily overturn any moral order and turn society into a nightmarish slugfest of abuses. When intense fear was activated under an intermittent reign of terror, notions of guilt went out the window.
These grim realities speak volumes about the dark side of the human soul: that our notions of guilt can be expelled if we are put under sufficient pressure of fear and if the normal order of everyday life breaks down. To this day, people in Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo are still grappling with the trauma that people they knew and cared about could commit such atrocities, inform on each other, refuse to help, or simply become passive onlookers to murders and crimes.
And shame certainly trumps Sklavenmoral ; shame relates to feeling bad because of your perceived negative sides, lacks and weaknesses—Sklavenmoral relates to a subtler form of shame, one that targets your strengths, hopes and aspirations. Sklavenmoral is when you are ashamed of your own strengths and positive traits. Even if Sklavenmoral (and its corresponding “alter”-emotion, envy) can be incredibly corrosive, it is hardly as painful as feeling inferior or unworthy.
Another way of recognizing the hierarchy between the four families of negative emotions is by comparing it to Abraham Maslow’s classical hierarchy of needs. As you may know, Maslow argued there is a complex (not entirely straightforward) hierarchy in which people first seek out physical safety and survival, then seek to establish membership and inclusion into a community, then to gain esteem, recognition and self-confidence within that community, and then move on to higher needs such as self-actualization, self-expression and even self-transcendence. [42]
If you compare this to the four families of negative emotions, a clear pattern presents itself:
Fear relates to maintaining physical safety by avoiding rage, hatred and aggression, i.e. to the first, basic needs according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Guilt relates to being a worthy member of a community, to showing one’s moral worth and value, that one is qualified to participate in society in the first place—so it has to do with belonging.
Shame relates to being an esteemed and recognized member of our in-group; we feel ashamed when we do not consider ourselves worthy of respect, the opposite of which is pride and self-esteem.
And Sklavenmoral relates to our higher aspirations and longings, holding us back from self-actualization , productive self-expression and ultimately from self-transcendence.
This is the hierarchy of negative emotions: fear, then guilt, then shame, then Sklavenmoral . By collectively climbing this hierarchy, we reach higher freedom.
Freedom as Societal Development
I have suggested that the different emotional regimes correspond to different stages of societal development, and that they follow the hierarchical logic described by Maslow: During early civilization, security remained the main concern in most people’s everyday lives; hence the fear-regime was the most dominant. Then, as states grew stronger and increasingly managed to protect the life and property of citizens, the need for belonging became a more prominent issue, in turn making the guilt-regime the dominant one. And in mo
dern societies, where the majority enjoy the privilege of being considered good citizens and no longer worry whether they’re seen as sinners or heathens, self-esteem has become a greater concern in many people’s lives, which has opened the door for the shame-regime to take over.
And today, in the most developed parts of the world, a new trend towards greater acceptance of people’s differences and perceived flaws is increasingly making the shame-regime less prominent. As a result, a growing number of people tend to be more concerned with the higher emotional need for self-actualization.
This is a development of increased freedom: first we liberate ourselves from fear of violence, then we liberate ourselves from the guilt of not being deserving members of society, and finally, as we’re seeing today, we’re liberating ourselves from the shame of not being perceived as good enough.
This doesn’t mean everyone in modern societies today never worry about violence or becoming moral outcasts. But most of us, most of the time, do enjoy the freedom to do and say what we damn please without risking physical abuse or social ostracism. And in a future, more listening society, most people will be free to be who they are without being ridiculed or looked down upon.
However, at each stage, as we liberate ourselves from the constraints of the previous emotional regime, there will always be another kind of “unfreedom” as well.
Allow me to put this into a historical context.
Nordic Ideology Page 12
