[BeetleB]

> What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.

What is sad is that you label this with cynicism, whereas everyone else considers this fundamental to life.

[kibwen]

Again without trying to make an overall value judgment on emotion vs. reason, one of the things that is attractive about reason is that it has built-in capacity for self-correction, i.e. we can use logic to prove that our own logic is faulty, and this is an ordinary and non-traumatic event. In contrast, self-correcting an emotional process is something an individual might spend a lifetime struggling with, if they can even identify a problem in the first place. To suggest that people are fundamentally emotional animals is to suggest that individuals cannot be expected to improve themselves.