able or painful (although psychological factors are often involved). On the level of emotions, it is a man's values
that determine what gives him joy or suffering. His physiology is not open to his choice. His values are.
As I discussed above, it is through his values that man programs his emotional mechanism. Short-term, man can
pervert this mechanism by programming irrational values. Long-term, he cannot escape the logic implicit in its
biological function. The protector of the biological function of man's emotional mechanism is the law of
contradiction. A man whose values were consistently irrational (i.e., incompatible with his nature and needs) could
not continue to exist. Most men's values are a mixture of the rational and the irrational—which, necessarily, creates
an inner conflict. Such a conflict means that the satisfaction of one value entails the frustration of another.
The simplest example of the foregoing is the "pleasure" of getting drunk—followed by the misery of a hangover.
One of the cardinal characteristics of irrational values is that they always entail some form of "hangover"—whether
the loss of one's health, one's job, one's wife, one's intellectual competence, one's sexual capacity or one's self-
esteem. According to the values he selects, his emotions are a man's rewards—or his nemesis. Nature and reality
always have the last word.
Happiness or joy is the emotional state that proceeds from the achievement of one's values. Suffering is the
emotional state that proceeds from a negation or destruction of one's values. Since the activity of pursuing and
achieving values is the essence of the life-process—happiness or suffering may be regarded as an incentive system
built into man by nature, a system of reward and punishment, designed to further and protect man's life.
The biological utility, i.e., the survival value, of physical pain is generally recognized. Physical pain warns man of
danger to his body and thus enables him to take appropriate corrective action. It is not sufficiently recognized that
psychological pain—anxiety, guilt, depression—performs the same biological function in regard to man's
consciousness. It warns him that his mind is in an improper state and that he must act to correct it. He may, of
course, choose to ignore the warning—but not with impunity.
There is another aspect involved in the biological utility of emotions. Man can draw conclusions, can acquire many
values and