Emotional wisdom may is recognizing that no one possesses “emotional intelligence” as the perfected faculty our modern culture and pop psychology often imagines. The concept becomes misleading when ordinary emotional life is abstracted into an Idealized psychological achievement, as though empathy, self awareness, regulation, and relational understanding were some discrete, internal capacity to be possessed in measurable degrees like a technical skill. In everyday ordinary life, however, people already participate in shared emotional practices, like how they comfort the distressed, recognize grief, and navigate love, resentment, shame, reciprocity, loyalty, and conflict, often imperfectly, inconsistently, or under competing pressures. What is often described as a lack of emotional intelligence may instead reflect conflicting motives, different forms of life, ambitions, or alternative emotional priorities rather than an absence of emotional understanding and need for learning some skill.
The fantasy of the fully emotionally intelligent person, so highly self-aware, non-defensive, aspiring to Deanna Troi levels of empathy, and purified of inner conflict, mistakes ordinary, situated participation in emotional life for failure to reach an abstract ideal. Emotional life is not primarily a domain where people fail to apply a known rule correctly, but one in which people act from learned and evolving patterns of responsiveness that shape what feels natural, available, or even intelligible in the moment. These patterns are formed over time through one;s individual history, social environment, and broader cultural inheritance, and they constrain but do not eliminate variation in how people respond and even how much people can grow.
So, to describe a political opponent, a gendered group, or even a spouse, sibling, child, or parent as “emotionally unintelligent” is often less a neutral statement of fact than a move within broader practices of persuasion, blame, shame, coercion, and/or interpersonal negotiation. Unlike stable attributes such as height, weight, or date of birth, emotional intelligence is not directly measurable in a context-free way; it is inferred from behavior against shifting expectations of communication, care, and reciprocity. As such, the label frequently operates within attempts to reshape conduct, expressing frustration, assigning responsibility, or pressuring change, rather than reporting an independent psychological property. Even when sincerely intended, “emotional intelligence” functions less as a detached description of a fact about persons than as part of the shared range of experiences and desired outcomes through which people interpret, evaluate, and try to influence one another’s emotional behavior.
Tl;dr “Emotional intelligence” is best understood not as a measurable inner faculty that some possess and others lack, but as a loose abstraction drawn from ordinary, already existing forms of human emotional participation and then refined into a tool used to judge and shame others into behaving differently, for better or worse. Differences in empathy and regulation are real, but they reflect an inherited and learned, constrained patterns of responsiveness rather than simple deficits of effort or awareness correctable trough learning or adopting sociopolitical driven behaviors. As a social species, there are not tens of millions of antisocial people roaming the plains, emotionally crippled and/or immature. Calling someone “emotionally unintelligent” is usually less a neutral psychological diagnosis than a socially embedded way of interpreting, judging, and trying to shape how others behave within shared emotional life. The people saying others are emotionally unintelligent are usually as emotionally unintelligent compared to the Ideal standard as those they are blaming.
”Emotional intelligence” is an Ideal nobody truly attains, as such, the nearest approach to it is not possession, but the refusal to mistake one’s own emotional life for mastery or even competency of it. Where this Ideal is concerned, I am the most emotionally intelligent human alive, for I know one thing, and is of this emotionally ideal, I know nothing, while in practice, I am as emotionally competent as most people I have ever met, succeeding, failing, and practicing our shared emotional life.
Taken as an Idealized standard, “Emotional intelligence” is something no one truly attains. On that view, the closest approach is not possession but the refusal to mistake one’s own emotional life for mastery of it. In this sense, I am “most emotionally intelligent” person I have ever met as I am the only person I know to recognize that, with respect to the Ideal itself, I know nothing. Yet in ordinary life I am no different from most others, neither uniquely competent nor deficient, but simply participating in a shared and imperfect emotional world of successes, failures, and ongoing negotiation.
If God says to murder, rape, pillage, etc. would it be not sinful and what is sinful is a matter of divine order alone (God sets the rules of what is or is not sin)
Is murder, rape, etc. under specific situations always objectively sinful and God is showing us the truth of reality and not his given choices about what is and is not sinful?