Emotion and Reason are not exclusive

Too often I see people try to be rational, logical, use reason; they use all sorts of terms for it, by removing emotion. I understand the attempt; too often it appears that emotion ruins logic and leads to terrible decisions. But removing logic is not going to work.

The attempt to remove emotion from argument is itself emotional, or at least irrational; a backlash against a variable which is difficult to manage. It is the result of giving up, of surrendering to complexity and accepting partial solutions. It is deceiving oneself into thinking that a solution based on half the variables is correct when it cannot possibly correct since it is based on well, half the variables.

I must clarify: emotion should not dominate. It should only play it's proper role. That role is to assign values. Without emotion, what value is there in anything? At best we're left with base instinct for creating values. By pure, emotionless logic, there is no objective value in anything, there is only that which we assign to it and the value which we assign was at some point emotional.

Emotion should not be used as a substitute for logic or reason. To use a mathematical analogy; emotion is a value but it is not an equation or a solution.

Rational emotion is not an oxymoron.