control the natural world, the shapes and configurations of the sun and moon
and stars, then it should also be able to predict and control the internal,
emotional world.
And through his observations, Emo Newton realized something painful
that we all kind of know, but that few of us ever want to admit: that people are
liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually.^3 We lie about important
things and trifling things. And we usually don’t lie out of malice—rather, we
lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.^4
Isaac noted that light refracted through people’s hearts in ways that they
themselves did not seem to see; that people said they loved those whom they
appeared to hate; professed to believe one thing while doing another;
imagined themselves righteous while committing acts of the grandest
dishonesty and cruelty. Yet, in their own minds, they somehow believed their
actions to be consistent and true.
Isaac decided that no one could be trusted. Ever. He calculated that his
pain was inversely proportional to the distance squared he put between
himself and the world. Therefore, he kept to himself, staying in no one’s orbit,
spinning out and away from the gravitational tug of any other human heart.
He had no friends; nor, he decided, did he want any. He concluded that the
world was a bleak, wretched place and that the only value to his pathetic life
was his ability to document and calculate that wretchedness.
For all his surliness, Isaac certainly didn’t lack ambition. He wanted to
know the trajectory of men’s hearts, the velocity of their pain. He wished to
know the force of their values and the mass of their hopes. And most
important, he wanted to understand the relationships among all these
elements.
He decided to write Newton’s Three Laws of Emotion.^5