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The Strange Twins
How grief and anger are often intimately conjoined
Like all animals with a relatively complex central nervous system, we humans are primarily driven by emotions. Evolution, via millions of years of selection pressures, has fashioned a complex system of behaviors that are almost entirely triggered by how we feel. Although we like to imagine ourselves as having some capacity for reason, in reality conscious thought has little purchase in our daily lives. Study after study has shown that we generally act first, rationalize later. We are to a very significant degree incapable of managing our actions by means of conscious intentions.
This is because, for almost the entirety of our evolutionary history, the environmental challenges we faced were relatively constant, and primarily centered around the fact of us being a group species. Interactions with other group members, therefore, are of enormous importance and it’s not surprising that most of our emotional repertoire is triggered by our interactions with other humans. Only a very small percentage of our emotion-driven behavior is triggered by things like predators, fire, and other non-human factors. All such emotion-driven behaviors have the enormous advantage of being capable of responding quickly to external events. As they say in the military, an adequate plan executed forcefully is much better than a…
