NEWTON’S FIRST LAW OF EMOTIONFor Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional
Reaction
Imagine that I punch you in the face. No reason. No justification. Just pure
violence.
Your instinctual reaction might be to retaliate in some way. Maybe it’d be
physical: you’d punch me back. Maybe it’d be verbal: you’d call me a bunch
of four-letter words. Or maybe your retaliation would be social: you’d call the
police or some other authority and have me punished for assaulting you.
Regardless of your response, you would feel a rush of negative emotion
directed toward me. And rightly so—clearly, I’m an awful person. After all,
the idea that I get to cause you pain with no justification, without your
deserving pain, generates a sense of injustice between us. A kind of moral gap
opens between us: the sense that one of us is inherently righteous, and the
other is an inferior piece of shit.^6
Pain causes moral gaps. And it’s not just between people. If a dog bites
you, your instinct is to punish it. If you stub your toe on a coffee table, what
do you do? You yell at the damn coffee table. If your home is washed away in
a flood, you are overcome with grief and become furious at God, the universe,
life itself.
These are moral gaps. They are a sense that something wrong has just
happened and you (or someone else) deserve to be made whole again.
Wherever there is pain, there is always an inherent sense of
superiority/inferiority. And there’s always pain.
When confronted with moral gaps, we develop overwhelming emotions
toward equalization, or a return to moral equality. These desires for
equalization take the form of a sense of deserving. Because I punched you,
you feel I deserve to be punched back or punished in some way. This feeling
(of my deserving pain) will cause you to have strong emotions about me
(most likely anger). You will also have strong emotions around the feeling
that you didn’t deserve to be punched, that you did no wrong, and that you
deserve better treatment from me and everyone else around you. These
feelings might take the form of sadness, self-pity, or confusion.
This whole sense of “deserving” something is a value judgment we make