What do people mean when they say a person is unreasonable, a person unwilling or incapable of thinking logically?  They accuse a man of being emotional and unthinking.  But isn’t their own logic and thinking founded upon strong emotions, too?  In a sense, aren’t people more concerned, thus possesing emotions, about their security and welfare?  If someone wants to steal, they would call him unreasonable.  But this thinking is founded on emotions as well.

When we say someone is unreasonable or who is not willing to think things through, we say that such a person is gripped and ruled by emotions and stubborness.  But aren’t we who are reasonable simply gripped with another kind of feeling, another kind of emotion, and that it is the conflict of our deep feelings with those of whom we disagree with that activates thinking.  For example, when somebody wrongs us and we appeal to that person’s reason/intellect to see the error of his ways and make amends, we are simply attempting to protect ourselves or assert our will on him.  It is our need for security or pride that through the emotions and feelings makes thinking work for us.  When we say we are reasonable, we attempt to make others see that we have got a right over whatever we are in dispute with them.  But that right is simply a result of a complex weave of emotions and needs.  Articulating those needs is what we call reason.  Thus reason itself is intimately weaved with emotions and feelings, but emotions that we accord more respect to than other emotions and other feelings because they allow us to preserve ourselves or to asset our sense of dignity.  We are a bubble that wants other bubbles to recognize our personal space because of our bubbleness.  We accord more respect for a feeling of reverence for other people’s property than for a feeling of taking from some one that which is not ours.  And why do we do this?  Well, if we value the notion of a community and civilization, then we have to abide some forms of conduct, which we then call founded on reason, but which is in actuality a sorting of needs, emotions, and feelings: emotions that keep people together and those that can keep them apart and lead to disharmony.  If I have property that I have got by following the rules of earning that property (if I have invested my own time and effort and resources to acquiring it), I want to hold onto that property and feel safe to do so or fight, even to the death, of securing property.  And if I don’t own property, but would someday think I might own property, then I might usually go along with abiding by that rule of property rights.  Besides the in-itself, the fact that I invested effort (power, money, some currency) to acquire land, will make me hate him who hasn’t invested any effort to be given my property just like that.  Even if he takes it by force, I will still hate, as many believe that raw power or might does not make right, though initially it was solely through raw power might that people were able to claim any land as their own.  Land belongs to no one except to the strongest, at least initially.  All our notions of ethics have arisen through a history of unethical actions.  And I don’t see how that can be undone or if it could ever have been avoided.  Consider the example that if a long time ago, a group of people came to find land, and they are trying to decide how to distribute the best land, they could draw straws or they could fight over it and the victor claims the best land or they could arrange a tournament where the strongest attains the lands.  He then can call that land his own.  Just as he would his wife.  And then others he would subjugate to this rule.   Nepotism would also creep in.  This is unavoidable.  While today we don’t go around taking people’s land away from them because we are stronger, at the beginning it must have been so, at least in a few of the cases.  Russeau had said that a man who first said this land was mine should have been shot.  I wonder what take I should take on this.  Today instead of raw power we resort to money to distribute land.  Whoever can afford the best land gets it.   In the past strength was the sole discriminating factor in the allocation of goods in society; today, it is money.  A form of tyranny, if we have a right to call it that, will always exist.  Even meritocracy is simply a different kind of tyranny than aristocracy.