Disgust as a Guiding Emotion
When I first saw the Pixar movie ‘Inside Out,’ I didn’t quite understand the concept of disgust. I’ve never really consciously thought about it; instead, I just subliminally thought of disgust as more of a reaction than an emotion, like a reflex or something.
Disgust plays a vital role in the movie as a character and an emotion in our real lives. It’s what we feel when we smell something rotten and choose not to eat it or see something unnerving and stay away. We even feel this in our interactions with others and when we see or hear things that offend us. It’s a feeling that can protect us and even guide us as we make choices throughout the day and life. It holds the potential for irrational and dangerous behavior when felt by individuals who feel very strongly about something.
I understand this concept much more after looking back over the last five years. And I understand it better after 2020 and the last few months in particular.
As I prepared this article, I happened to come across a meme of an old Tweet from 2019, where the person (who was speaking on the topic of disability activism) said, “Anger at injustice is just a product of hope.”
That is exactly how I feel about my disgust; it comes from a place of empathy and compassion and unending love for others in this world. And it comes from a place of hope that I stubbornly refuse to give up on.
From Joy to Disgust
I always had an idea about how shitty the world and our country have been historically and continue to be; my mom’s like a walking history book, so we learned a lot of otherwise unsettling things. We were taught about colonization, slavery, segregation, the Holocaust, and the Civil Rights Movement at a relatively young age. But, looking back still, I wore rose-colored glasses growing up; I told myself that things were actively getting better, though a long road lay ahead. I tried to see the best in everything and be positive about the future. Joy guided me mostly, much like Riley in the movie until she moved.
I think for much of my life, I considered myself an optimist. Today, I still have hope and see the good in the world, but I feel much more pessimistic. Once I graduated high school and entered the working world, the veil started lifting for me. It lifted considerably more once I started college and started expanding my worldview. But last year completely ripped the veil off and blew it away – laying everything bare and deadly clear.
As I’ve grown, observing and experiencing everything that’s happened, I find myself extremely and painfully aware of what seems like an unending list of societal problems; I see how intricately they’re all interconnected. And I feel increasingly frustrated at seeing viable solutions and meaningful responses to these issues but no action on them. A willingness to outright reject evidence relating to these problems plagues our country; some even deny the issue exists, and others either feign or maintain ignorance around these issues.
To me, these are nothing but excuses not to act on serious issues. They only work to gaslight the rest of us and allow these pervasive issues to worsen. The increasingly blatant disregard for human life, human dignity, objectivity, facts, and democracy I’ve seen worsen over time disgusts me to my very core.
What Disgusts Me
There are so many things that disgust me about how the world is or what I see happening to others. This is by no means a comprehensive list but a sum of what upsets me the most.
The Lack of Humanity
Knowing that there are people out who refuse to acknowledge the societal problems that plague our society and only wish to blame the people suffering is frustrating to me. This idea that everyone is entirely responsible for their situations and that no outside factors are to blame is just disingenuous. It comes from a place of privilege to say that. It’s the same idea that poor people are just lazy, failing to see multiple corrupt systems intertwined with forcing poverty on people. Who, arguably, work harder than those with massive amounts of wealth.
Yet, people who make relatively little more than those in poverty fail to realize how close they are in actuality to being in the same boat. One illness, injury, accident, or another traumatic event can cause a cascading effect on people. If you can’t go to work for some reason or have to miss a few days, you could lose your job, then your housing, and then you’re on the street.
You’d think there would be more empathy for the precariousness most of us face, or at least a will to say, “This is wrong, and we shouldn’t accept this treatment in our society.”
Instead, I see people who make barely above minimum wage or who are lucky enough to fall under the middle-class category, making the arguments for why the rich can continue to exploit people, hoard wealth, and not contribute fairly to society. It’s inhumane to excuse the actions of billionaires, just because of some false notion that we all have an equal chance to become billionaires ourselves “iF yOu JuSt WoRk HaRd EnOuGh.”
It disgusts me to hear people call others ‘lazy’, even if they work two or three jobs and still barely afford a roof over their head.
To know that people are suffering and dying due to our corrupted, for-profit healthcare system boils my blood.
The destruction of the environment and the imbalance of global climate occur at the hands of a few obscenely wealthy corporations. Yet consumers are blamed for not minding their carbon footprint, while the perpetrators do nothing to mitigate their own destruction. It’s maddening.
And it’s infuriating to know that people with more money than they can ever possibly spend in a lifetime control every aspect of our lives; controlling our government, our economy, and our standard of living and growth as a country and society.
At every level I see in our society, the inhumanity from the top-down is a constant pain in my soul. It’s a lack of not only humanity but solidarity as well.
The Individualistic Mindset
Particularly in America, they raised us on the idea of exceptionalism and individualism for generations. It’s very much “eat or be eaten” and “all for one, and none for all.”
This isn’t how society is meant to be. We evolved because of our ability to work together and feel compassion. We are stronger together, whether it’s a community or a country. A balance of individualism and collectivism is ideal. Our society grows and thrives when we help one another and provide equitability to people. But, when we forsake one another in a “sink or swim” mindset, we all suffer in the end.
I see those who’ve never known true struggle blame others for deep-rooted societal problems with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.
Those sick with wealth and power create endless suffering by using poverty to force people’s compliance with their labor exploitation. The redundancy astounds me to think that we spend more money on our societal issues than it costs to eradicate the issues at their source.
It would cost less to provide healthcare to everyone, provide housing to the homeless, and feed the hungry than it currently does to keep our current systems in place. Instead, people go into debt or die because of healthcare costs; people sleep outside, unsheltered in the elements; kids go to bed hungry in one of the wealthiest nations. How we can consider ourselves a “great” country is a cruel joke.
The fact that these issues wouldn’t cost much to address and could be easily eradicated is truly criminal. It’s unbelievable yet unsurprising at this point.
Violence
Violence pervades our country and not always in the most obvious ways. I’ve already mentioned a few – our health care system, homelessness, hunger, and poverty; all acts of systemic violence. All for profit.
On top of that, violence enters every facet of our society. It manifests in things like racism, sexism, classism, ableism, nationalism, extremism, etc. It appears as exploitation, extortion, colonization, and all-out destruction. It’s an extension of power and control, and those with both commit the most violence.
We are a violent country and have always been violent. From slavery, segregation, and Native-American genocide, to internment camps, now concentration camps, and everything in between and beyond. It’s not just at home, but abroad, as we bomb and destroy other countries, dismantle once democratic governments, steal resources, and pursue imperialism. To overcome violence, we must stare at ourselves as a country HARD in the mirror. And most refuse to experience that discomfort, allowing everything to continue.
It disgusts me to see people make excuses for unforgivable human rights violations happening now and throughout our history, actions that we never atoned for, let alone formally and honestly acknowledged. It wasn’t even objectively taught to us. That alone upsets me; a pervasive lie told to all of us in an attempt to make us forget. As a country, we have no humility; we feel no shame. As an American, I am embarrassed by this.
Part of the problem now is that for much of our history, few people saw either of these; they didn’t see (or didn’t care) what we did to other countries and ignored what they saw in front of them. More recently, I feel that people are finally waking up to the violence all around us. But the problem with violence and oppression, especially systemic, it doesn’t relinquish its power easily. It gets more violent when challenged.
And a violent system employs all measures of control. We see this in the form of police brutality. The brutality that’s ever-present in America but now appears more visibly thanks to technological advances; everyone holds a camera in their back pocket.
In the last year alone, we saw incredible amounts of violence at the hands of police against people of color and people in poverty. Police continually murder people, and little is ever done to uphold accountability and justice. During the protests, we saw police using violent force against people exercising First Amendment rights and demanding a stop to all the violence.
In a nutshell, our prison system profits off of incarceration, allows for legal slavery, strips people of their voting rights, and continues to incarcerate Black people and people of color disproportionately. Altogether it upholds a racist, classist system.
We separate children from their families, locked them in cages, and actively subject them to ongoing mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. All because they journey here to seek a better life.
The events at the capitol just a few weeks ago, the fallout afterward, and all the factors leading up to it – most notably the growing, unrestrained fascism in this country – sickens me to my core.
Our entire society is plagued by violence everywhere you look. The more I’ve learned about the realities of our world, our country, and our history, the more it disgusts me.
Responses to Multiple Crises
I’ve watched our government essentially abandon us during a global pandemic. They’re actively allowing people to struggle and die in a willfully and intentionally cruel manner and making us beg for scraps. At the same time, we’re being bled dry of our money, security, health, and sanity. Even under a new administration that received a running start, they’ve failed us miserably in so short a time with no real hope on the horizon. It’s March, and we’re barely getting a stimulus check (less than promised) and couldn’t even increase our minimum wage. It’s a dismal sign of what’s to come.
The crisis in Texas nearly broke me down. A mix of climate catastrophe and a perfect storm of greed, disdain, and ignorance as we learned how the state and its representatives rejected regulations and upkeep to save money. They also blamed the Green New Deal, talked down on people for needing help, abandoned them, and allowed people to freeze to death and starve.
In general, our country refuses to respond to all of the issues we face—climate change, poverty, homelessness, COVID, everything. We turn a blind eye and fail to see the avalanche of consequences collapsing on us in real time. Soon, we’ll find ourselves buried.
(Article continues after the ad)
Please follow our fantastic site sponsors! They make content like this possible! 🙂
Converting a Negative Emotion into a Positive Action
This is by no means a comprehensive list. I could fill several pages with all the things that disgust me. I see so much systemic violence in this world, and I feel unendingly outraged and critically aware of just how bad things are, how bad they’ve always been, and how much worse they’re becoming. It exhausts me.
Yet somehow, I manage to bear all this disgust and compartmentalize everything in a way that allows me to avoid feeling overwhelmed with the emotion to the point of breaking down from compassion fatigue.
I feel so much disgust about so many things. Now that I think about, it there’s a fair mix of anger there too. At the core of my disgust and anger, though, lies compassion and empathy – a desire to fight for something better.
To process these strong emotions, I try my best to convert them into passion and action. It fuels me into actively rejecting the idea that this is “just how things are” or that there’s nothing I can do to change the world. I refuse to accept that all these things causing this disgust I feel are normal. I refuse to accept that the world can’t be changed for the better.
I’m dissatisfied by all the darkness and ugliness I see in the world, so I try to find ways to make it brighter and beautiful. I can’t control what causes me this disgust, but I can control how I respond to it and what I do with that feeling.
Recognizing the Importance of Disgust
Just like how Joy realized the importance of Sadness in Inside Out, I realize the importance of Disgust and how I’m motivated by this emotion, especially right now in my life.
I’m working out how to let this emotion guide me in a healthy, productive manner. I don’t see the degree that I feel this emotion decreasing anytime soon; in fact, I expect it to increase. This means I must continually prepare myself for the worst while hoping for the best. I never give up hope, for I fear for what hopelessness would do to me.
Maybe one day, I’ll be guided by joy again, and the world will turn around drastically before we pass a “point of no return.” Until then, I will respond to the world’s bleakness and our future with disgust instead of fear. I will not be complacent, apathetic, or hopeless.
I will let my disgust and anger at injustice continue to be a product of hope that things will get better, so long as we don’t give up on the world or each other.
Thank you to our supporters and sponsors!
As always, we want to thank our Patreon’ Cultivator’ supporters and sponsors who help make content like this possible.
The following Patron(s) supported the production of this article:
Crystal Gropp
The following sponsors supported the production of this article:
Viva La Compost & LunaKai Lash
