Yes, there is. I've said this before. Emotions do not convey the situation correctly. Emotions are the worst indicator of reality. To use and justify emotions as source of action when our lives are not near danger, is wrong. If followers want to be blindly led to a goal without knowing the result of the goal and how to attain the goal, then by all means, we should use emotional appeal to ensure the success of that goal. However, every individual has to look beyond their emotions and understand if that goal or any parts of that goal is feasible, reasonable, logical, rational, moral, ethical, and so on.
Emotions are what conveys our humanity, and can also be the best indicator of reality too. Depends on the situation.
Alright, I find this statement hard to argue against. A politician's main tool is emotion appeal. In the context of political communication, I can't disagree with you. If I were to become a politician in today's political climate, I have to use emotional appeal. Have we settled here because we assume the human species can't further evolve from emotions? I feel that is what you and others are declaring, that we as human beings are somewhat at the mercy of our emotions.
To some extent we are, not completely but to some extent. We have evolved to experience emotions for a reason, fear, anger, love, happiness, etc.
Emotions are what humans do, they might cause you to er or they might motivate you to pursue what is just. We live through emotions though.
To use a silly example, let's say
is cooking babies in cauldrons to make a meaty broth and
wants to encourage people to stop this taking place. How does this happen without emotions coming into play? Would emotions in this sense be wrong?
Why would it be necessary or desirable to evolve beyond the natural feeling of anger?
How can a charity encourage you to donate money to save help people in a far off land with whom you have no connection without playing on your emotions?
Even thanking someone for helping you out is appealing to their emotions.
The closest you get to emotion free communication is a scientific paper and I'm pretty happy most communication does not take that form (all the best scientific writing contains some humanity in it anyway).
As a society and civilization, one that is still trying to mature, we as individuals have to be able to filter out the emotions. We have to rationally and logically understand what is being presented to us. We act on the knowledge and information conveyed, not the emotions alone. Just because it makes us happy doesn't mean it is the right thing to do.
Seems like we are saying pretty much the same thing. The only difference is you seem to put a higher stock on how much logic alone can achieve. For me, it is almost nothing.
The most basic aspect of professional persuasive communication is WIIFM (what's in it for me). If there is no focus on WIIFM then you're wasting your time.
The thing is that WIIFM based on pure logic is really limited to narrow material self-interest, there is nothing in it for me to donate money to charity
unless you appeal to my emotions. Often the only reward we get for doing things against our narrow material self-interest are of the emotional kind.
Before the Super Bowl there was a lot of talk about what Lady Gaga would do, was she going to bash Trump?
Had she done so, lots of Dems would have cheered and said 'wow she was great, she really socked it to Trump'. Pubs would have just dismissed her as just another liberal entertainer and she would have had zero effect on them.
Instead she opened with a patriotic song (think it was God bless America) with stars and stripes lighting up the sky, but at the end stopped singing and spoke the line 'with liberty and justice for
all' and left that hanging.
For a liberal entertainer trying to influence those who strongly disagree with her during a live performance (rather than preaching to the choir), that is about the best you can do. Associating your message with their positive emotions.
[Edited] I've reread your statement and the confusion, more so on my part, is the use of the word intrinsically. If we use the context of what is defined today as being natural, then yes, I can't disagree with that statement. But like my point about accepting too much of human nature, we simply need to further evolve ourselves. I truly believe this is a choice that we can further evolve.
An appeal to emotion can be moral, neutral or unethical, it just depends on how it is used.
In terms of biologically evolving, this is obviously not possible short term. So we are stuck with our genetic make up, and it makes no sense to pretend we are a blank slate.
If we do acknowledge how we are hardwired though, then we can take steps to mitigate (never eliminate) the negative effects. Really though, this is something that can only be done on a personal level, and is unlikely to become a society wide mission.
Overall, it isn't desirable to eliminate appeals to emotion, in an ideal world appeals to emotion would be grounded in honesty, good intentions and a solid factual/logical base.
