On Emotion: The Manufactured Truth

Wed Aug 20 2025

Emotion Is Not Truth

There was a time when I believed emotion was the clearest signal of truth. That if I felt something strongly, it must be real, authentic, valid, a compass pointing toward something meaningful. That belief shaped most of my life. Until it broke.

What if I told you that most of your emotions are not truth signals? That they’re just output from a system designed to generate awareness? That emotion isn’t the voice of your soul, but the consequence of what you’ve paid attention to, how you’ve been conditioned, what you’ve internalized, and, most of all, what you’ve unconsciously authorized?

This is not soft or comforting. It’s not a healing mantra. It’s a detonation charge under the architecture of emotional obedience. If you’re not ready to own what you’re building with your emotional responses, stop reading.

Mostly, it’s chemical

Emotion feels like truth because it’s physical. It floods the body. It shakes the breath. It collapses thought. But most emotion begins not as revelation but reaction. A neurochemical event. Nothing sacred. Just fluid, signal and charge.

Take MDMA. Your serotonin levels spike into the stratosphere. Suddenly you love everyone. The room glows. You feel connected to strangers, to your own body, to the music, to the planet. It feels true, transcendent even.

But it’s chemical. When the serotonin fades, so does the feeling. Did the love exist? Yes, in sensation. Was it real? Arguably. Was it true? No. It was an induced state, not a truth signal.

Fear works the same way. Watch someone leap off a skyscraper on YouTube. Your amygdala doesn’t care that it’s video, your body still hits the panic switch. Adrenaline. Sweaty palms. Breath spike. You feel fear. But there’s no real danger.

The emotion is real. But the meaning is false.

This is the root trick of emotion: because it’s embodied, we trust it. We assume intensity equals truth. But the body is programmable. It reacts to suggestion, image, memory, and projection. You can simulate an emotional state with nothing more than imagination.

That’s not mystical. It’s biology. And it means this:

You can’t trust emotion just because it feels like truth. You have to ask: What caused it? What did I authorize?

More importantly perhaps, “Why did I authorize it?”

The Myth of Emotional Innocence

We’re taught to trust our feelings. To let them guide us. To see them as sacred. But most emotion is reactive, not revelatory. It’s regurgitated memory. Pattern recognition soaked in cortisol. Hormonal reruns. When someone says “I just feel this way,” what they’re often really saying is: “I don’t want to investigate where this comes from.”

And why would they? Digging into the roots of emotion isn’t encouraged. Because once you do, you discover something disturbing:

Emotion is the result of attention and authorization. Nothing more.

We all decide how we want to feel about things.

Most of the time it happens automatically, in a split second. We are not aware of this for the most part, our attention is mostly occupied elsewhere while these automatic systems keep firing their signals. We are, however, not slaves to our emotions, we actually control them, if we pay attention.

Attention: What You’re Feeding

If your attention is captured by threat narratives, shame loops, or the dopamine economy of social validation, your emotional palette will reflect that. You’ll feel angry, inadequate, anxious. Not because those states are true, but because you’re staring at sources that reward those emotions with a sense of identity. If you obsessively follow people who make you feel rage or inferiority, that’s not insight. That’s an addiction.

Most people are addicted to familiar emotions, even the destructive ones, because unfamiliar emotions feel like identity death.

Authorization: The Silent Decision

This is the part no one talks about and most will never admit to. You let yourself feel this way. You might not have done so consciously but you said yes to yourself, you gave yourself the permission to feel what you’re feeling. Somewhere in your system, you allowed that signal to pass through the gate. You reinforced it. Replayed it. Built a scaffold around it. And the more you repeated that pattern, the more it felt like truth. It wasn’t truth though. It was just a loop you never paid attention to or broke.

An example. You can run a fantasy in your head, a scenario or situation which is completely hypothetical. For instance, imagine you wake up one morning and you encounter all the people you love more than anything else in the world, your children and spouse, dead in their beds. Imagine the feeling that comes up in that moment. That emotion you feel is very, very real. You may even cry. But it’s a fictitious scenario and yet the feeling attached to it is real, tangible. Can you trust the emotion? Is that emotion indicative of truth?

Emotion as Compliance

Emotion is how the system trains you. Fear, shame, and guilt are the primary control mechanisms of civilization. They masquerade as morality, responsibility and maturity. But they’re usually just a tug on the leash, bringing you back in line, re-focussing your attention on what ‘matters’.

You post something. Someone reacts with disgust. You feel shame or anger. Was the shame warranted? Was the anger? Or was it a conditioned response to potential exile from the tribe, dissaproval of a fellow tribesman?

Most of what we call emotional intelligence is just high-resolution conformity within a much larger framework of compliance and self-induced coercion.

Reclaiming Sovereignty: The Authorization Layer

The real shift comes when you stop asking: “How do I feel?” and start asking: “Did I authorize this feeling?”

This question is brutal. It dissolves victimhood. It removes the safety of blame. But it’s also the only place real emotional agency begins.

Let me illustrate:

A woman survives violent assault. Her nervous system is wrecked. Hypervigilance. Nightmares. No safety anywhere. She has every right to hate the world, to distrust all men, to shut down. And she will feel all those things and that is not wrong, it is necessary even. But years later, she stands at a fork:

She authorizes those emotions again. Recommits to them. Reinforces the trauma by declaring the emotional response at the time as her eternal truth. Sexual dysfunction, degradation of trust and self-imposed isolation leads to depression, substance abuse, etc. Life is no longer worth living.

Or…

She audits them. She sees they were once protective, even necessary. But no longer required. She chooses discernment over rage. Vigilance over paranoia. She authorizes something new.

That decision is not easy and it is a process, not a singular ‘reset’ moment. It’s not even conscious at first. But it’s possible. And that possibility is where emotional sovereignty begins.

Too many people are more than happy to re-live their past traumas, generating those emotions anew each time, wallowing in the suffering they endured, for some sense of identity. This becomes depression. But there’s a choice we all make, somewhere in the mechanism before emotion is generated, created, felt we choose to feel what we want to feel.

Another illustration: Depression

This brings us to the most fraught emotional state of our time: depression. While the suffering is undeniably real and the neurochemistry is complex, the narrative our system builds around it demands investigation. It’s a narrative that conveniently benefits the existing economic structure.

It creates a perfect, self-perpetuating loop of problem and “solution” that benefits the economic structure.

This is a hot topic and will piss many people off, I admit. I believe depression is a choice. Well, not just one choice, you keep choosing it. Every day. Multipe moments during the day even.

Again, the agency of the ‘choice’ here is not yours to begin with. It’s part of the societal conditioning…this is why reclaiming your emotional agency is of such importance! Unless you’re aware that you’re making these decisions to ‘be depressed’, you are not in control of that decision.

The Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex

This is the most direct link. If depression is framed as a chronic chemical imbalance in an individual’s brain, it requires a long-term, purchasable product: medication. This model generates billions in recurring revenue.

The focus on a chemical “fix” conveniently steers the conversation away from addressing the environmental, social, or personal “authorization” patterns that might be the true root of the suffering. A pill manages the symptoms, making life tolerable, but it doesn’t dismantle the underlying mechanism. A sovereign individual who has reclaimed their “emotional authorship” is a lost customer. A medicated patient is a customer for life.

Maintaining a Compliant Workforce

Capitalism doesn’t need a happy or fulfilled workforce; it needs a functional and compliant one. Severe, untreated depression makes a person unproductive. Medication can often restore an individual’s ability to show up to work, perform their duties, and participate as a consumer.

The system is less concerned with true healing or sovereignty and more with restoring a person to a state of economic utility. This creates a population that is just well enough to work but often not well enough to have the energy to challenge the systems that may have contributed to their depression in the first place.

Pathologizing Systemic Problems

This is a crucial, more subtle point. A capitalist society often generates conditions that can lead to depression: precarity, alienation, intense competition, and a lack of meaning. A person’s feeling of despair can be a perfectly sane reaction to an insane environment.

However, by framing this despair as an individual medical disorder (clinical depression), the system shifts the blame from the structure to the individual’s synapses. The problem isn’t that your job is soul-crushing and your community is atomized; the problem is that your brain is deficient. The solution, therefore, is not societal change but individual treatment. This effectively neutralizes dissent and protects the status quo.

An entire academic discipline has been built around mental illness and apart from standard behavioural therapeutic approaches there is is always the pharmaceutical ‘assistance’ substances. We believe we don’t have a choice in how we feel…just take this pill, it will change how you feel, you’ll feel better. It’s rather twisted if you look at it from this angle, right?

Fueling Consumerism

A state of depression is often characterized by feelings of emptiness, inadequacy, and a lack of self-worth. This makes a person the ideal consumer. The market thrives by selling products as a solution to this internal void.

Feeling invisible? Buy this luxury brand. Feeling lonely? Subscribe to this platform. Feeling empty? This vacation, this car, this gadget will make you feel alive.

The unconscious “choice” to remain in an emotional state of “not enough” ensures a person is always seeking the next external purchase to temporarily fill that void.

In this view, capitalism isn’t just selling a cure for depression; it’s profiting from the conditions that create the illness and then selling a treatment that ensures continued, managed participation without ever threatening the core structure.

But Wait. Aren’t Some Emotions Real?

Yes. All emotions are real. But not all emotions are true. Truth is not determined by intensity. It’s determined by alignment. If your emotional response is out of sync with your reality, if it’s conditioned, hijacked, inherited, or outsourced, then it’s not truth. It’s compliance. It’s automatic existence, prescribed responses to the world outside.

Authenticity is not feeling whatever you feel. It’s taking full ownership of whether you said yes to that feeling.

If you didn’t authorize it, why are you carrying it?

Emotion as Capital

Today’s world, always chasing a healthier bottom-line, more profit, more consumption, is built on your emotional responses. Almost all purchasing power is based on emotional economics. Scarcity is the single most pervasive driving factor in today’s economy and it is mostly manufactured. Look at the tactics employed by advertising agencies, they speak directly to your emotional triggering frameworks, they know exactly what you ‘need to feel’ to ‘buy this thing’ and there is science and millions of dollars of research behind this. It’s not a novel idea, it’s a practical reality and it’s been going for decades.

If you are not deciding what you’re feeling and why and when, then who is? And why do we let that happen?

The World Doesn’t Want This

Make no mistake: this idea is radioactive. It threatens everything. The manipulation economy runs on emotional reactivity. Politics. Advertising. Religion. Relationships. Entire industries are built on triggering unexamined emotional loops.

If you stop reacting, you stop being predictable. And when you’re not predictable, you become powerful - and can no longer be monetised.

But also lonely. The world is designed for emotional compliance. Once you step out, you’ll be called cold. Arrogant. Disconnected. You’ll be accused of bypassing, of lacking empathy. But you’ll know you’re not avoiding feeling, you’re choosing which feelings you’re willing to host.

That’s not repression. That’s emotional authorship.

Closing The Loop

You are not your feelings. You are the one who authorizes them. Or doesn’t.

If that feels scary, good. That means you’re close to the door. If you’re honest enough with yourself you’ll know that you choose what to feel, there’s no getting around it really.

What will you choose to feel, now that you know you’re the one choosing?