Backwards Blog
Core Values in Western Capitalist Discourse Part 3/5
A Hidden Cause of Loneliness No One Talks About: Our Belief in Cognitive Primacy
What if everything you were taught about your emotions was a lie?
What if pain wasn’t a problem to be fixed?
What if feeling deeply wasn’t a weakness — but a form of truth the world desperately needs?
For decades, we’ve been sold a story: that the rational mind is king. That if we just think the right thoughts, we can rise above suffering, solve injustice, and become our best selves. But beneath that tidy promise lies a deeper harm — one that turns our emotions into enemies, and our struggles into personal failures.
This isn’t just outdated psychology. It’s a system of control.
In this post — part of a five-part series on the cultural values that shape loneliness — I explore the myth of cognitive primacy: the belief that thoughts come first, and that emotions must obey. It’s a belief that flatters us with the illusion of control while quietly stripping away our connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the wisdom our feelings carry.
As with previous episodes, we will be examining 3 aspects of cognitive primacy as a western capitalist value, beginning with what the hell it is. Yup, it’s not so obvious as the last few.
2nd. We deal with why it has appeal or some kind of payoff, and finally,
3. The shadow side of cognitive primacy – particularly in relation to loneliness and connection.
The Rock 'n' Roll Backstory of Cognitive Primacy
Brace yourself for a story littered with philosophical rock stars and very annoying psychologists.
Once upon a time, there was a philosopher who actually became a household name. He was kind of the Madonna of the philosophy world—famous, controversial, and with a sex appeal that was … eh, questionable. Debatable even. So think late Madonna, really, but with more thinking and less plastic surgery.
His best-selling lyric went like this:
“I think, therefore I am”
which he released under the name “Rene Descartes”.
This stunning one-liner set trends worldwide. For centuries rather than decades, too. With this single, twitter-able sentence, Descartes laid a pretty much unshakeable foundation for the primacy of rationality and mental mastery over the body and emotions. Despite what you might assume, Descartes idea set way more trends in terms of western capitalist values than nipple tassels and face transplants ever did.
But in all seriousness, when Descartes famously declared “I think, therefore I am,” he placed reason above everything else. He placed thoughts at the absolute center of being. In fact, he made thought that which resulted in being.
All that is to introduce today's core value – cognitive primacy – and what it is.
What Is Cognitive Primacy?
Cognitive primacy is the belief that our thoughts precede and determine our emotions and behaviours, positioning cognition as the primary driver of human experience. Psychology distinguishes between cognitive primacy, and it’s so-called opposite, “emotional primacy” or “affective primacy”.
In psych terms:
• Cognitive primacy = “Your thoughts cause your feelings.”
• Emotional primacy = “Your feelings come first and shape your thoughts.”
So where cognitive primacy is Descartes declaring, in a deliberate and precise fashion, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ emotional primacy is more like a baby howling — pre-thought, pre-language — ‘I feel, therefore something matters.’
Now, recalling that any value in western capitalism, is tied up with, and influenced by, all the other key values, cognitive primacy is also tied in with what we have mentioned before - _I_ think, therefore _I_ am makes the individualism here pretty clear. But even more than individualism, cognitive primacy is very tied up with our ideas about control. The control + cognitive-primacy combo forms the basis for CBT, for example. For those of you who are not familiar with it, CBT is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and it is not only the most widely applied, funded and known of modern therapies, it is also arguably THE most representative of western capitalist values. In CBT the individual is the locus of control and blame. They are deemed to have the power to change their world via changing their thoughts. Openly and clearly, CBT places the burden of responsibility on the client to “fix” what is assumed to be broken thinking.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this same control + cognitive-primacy combo is played on high rotate in self-help and spiritual-but-not-religious circles, where we're taught that controlling our thoughts is the first (and most important) step in controlling our lives. Yes. Both CBT and western spiritualism have the same underlying assumptions: they assume that you, by virtue of thinking crappy thoughts, are fucking up your own life. AND that there is a correct way to think. And, that doing that correct way of thinking will unfuck your life.
Both of these schools of thought put cognition – that is, our thoughts – at the center of our universe. I mean in a “big bang” kind of way too. Thoughts create our feelings and those feelings effect our behaviours which affect what we achieve. That is serious, causal primacy. This idea also makes it clear that, in order for your cognitions to have the desired kind of big-bang effect, they must be the RIGHT sort of cognitions.
So that is what cognitive primacy is – but it really begs a few more questions – what IS the right way to think? Who decides? It also glosses over any similar kind of cognitive causality outside of us (in true, Individualist fashion) such people in our environment. It very much ignores other causal factors like our biology, class, gender, race, physical ability or disability etc. We will deal with these massive oversights in the upcoming section on the shadow side of cognitive primacy. First though, let’s look at why western capitalist culture finds cognitive primacy so appealing.
Why We Like The Idea of Cognitive Primacy
Ah, that old familiar joy we have discussed so many times! The idea that you can control, shape, and change your life has so much appeal already. Imagine something promising that we can do exactly that just by thinking differently! Change your thoughts, change how you feel. Not happy? Just think something else. Amazing! Not only does that sound simple—it costs nothing! How incredibly seductive in a world that feels chaotic, expensive, and overwhelming.
The belief that you can master your internal world with the power of your mind sounds like a super simple recipe for self-efficacy, and a seemingly clear case of cause and effect. Of Order. Of tidiness. How empowering!
How especially comforting when our emotions are messy, unpredictable, or painful. Or, when you grow up in a culture (or a family) that teaches you only a few, or the “positive,” feelings are even OK to have, or actually that MOST feelings are a sign of weakness anyway.
And yes, I am looking at you, Germany, on that latter comment—but to be fair, it isn’t just a cultural quirk. It traces back to one of your national treasures. Immanuel Kant—a man so legendarily orderly that it’s claimed he tracked the size and shape of his bowel movements—was quite the fan of Descartes. Kant essentially took Descartes’ idea of the supremacy of reason and ran a philosophical marathon with it. He didn’t just celebrate rationality—he moralized it. For Kant, the “good will” operates rationally. Thanks to him, reason wasn’t just a tool—it became the highest human faculty. He helped enshrine cognition at the heart of ethics, duty, and the Enlightenment ideal of the rational individual.
Cognitive Primacy and the Moralizing Of Control
You saw this next part already. Alongside the Kants of this world moralising cognition, cognitive primacy is intricately bound to our old friends: control and individualism. As with most things in western capitalism, the locus of blame, I mean, control, is, again, the individual. If your problems are the result of “faulty thinking,” then it’s your job to fix them—and your fault if you don’t. This is now regardless of whether someone has just punched you in the face or stabbed you child – we are told we can choose our reactions, in a purely logical, calculated way, unsullied by the evil of emotions. CBT echoes this in a way that subtly masks the moral judgement (I mean, you cant have WRONG thinking if there is no judgement). It is a more honest Kant that openly states we are morally lesser if we fail at that controlling and choosing.
Why we Like Moralizing
Why is moralizing our cognitive control an advantage? Imagine NEVER having to listen to anyone complain about anything, ever again. That old woman who never shuts up about her bunions and her endless list of ailments? Seriously, you can tell her AND all your ailing friends that if they would just stop thinking such thoughts they could stop being so annoying. I mean, you can really put the boot in if you truly can’t be arsed to ever listen to any of the people you profess to care about. You can tell them that their thoughts are so wrong that it’s toxic to your own carefully constructed bubble of candyfloss beliefs and emoji-inspired self-gaslighting. You can be a real Kant… ian, and claim some moral high ground while you're at it.
Quite obviously, this kind of approach, whilst actually employed by a lot of western spiritualists slash people who are unaware that they are Kant..ians, contributes to alienation. If you start telling all your buddies they can only talk to you if their thinking is “correct” – as evidenced by their only feeling certain, allowed, emotions, you will be friendless pretty quickly. True connection is about accepting one another for who we are – not conditional on lopping off a large chunk of the human emotional spectrum. We will return to this issue soon, but for now lets summarise why, when Western Capitalism took over Descartes and Kants back catalogue, they were bound to monopolise the ideological market.
In exchange for buying into the “should” of controlling out emotions via controlling our thoughts, we are promised certain advantages. We wont just be happier people, we will also be superior people. And, we will have a great excuse to not listen to other people complaining. We will have an excuse to ignore real, systemic issues and brush them off as a belonging to some emotionally-driven group with a chip on their shoulder
And Who doesn’t want to feel happy – and, ah, better than everyone else… hmm. That old competition mentality – read “I am better than you” mentality, is coming up in the next episode. Suffice to say, cognitive primacy offers us the promise of control, of happiness, freedom from “negativity,” freedom from dissent, and a view of ourselves as morally superior. Yay.
To the Shadow Side: Good Vibes Only Perpetuated Oppression
The idea of the “right” kind of thinking goes hand in hand with displaying the “right” kind of emotions. We’re taught that certain feelings are a sign of faulty reasoning — as if anger, grief, or despair are just glitches in the system, indicators of irrationality. This leads to a version 2.0 of the human being: one who neatly categorizes emotions into good and bad, and avoids the bad ones like a virus.
But here’s the twist: this regulation of emotion isn’t just about managing personal discomfort — it’s part of the same machinery that regulates knowledge. When we’re told to suppress difficult feelings because they’re “irrational” or “unhelpful,” we’re also being told that the experiences producing those feelings don’t matter. Emotional expression becomes a disqualifier. And so the boundary between feeling and knowing gets artificially redrawn — with knowledge reframed as something clean, objective, and emotionless. This is the myth of cognitive primacy: that real knowledge is disembodied, detached, and sanitized.
So when we limit ourselves and others to a narrow band of permissible emotion, we’re not just soothing our way through a hard day. We’re feeding a cultural logic that says only a certain kind of mind — the kind that doesn’t cry, doesn’t rage, doesn’t tremble — is capable of knowing. It’s not just a matter of how irritating your cousin on Instagram has become, with her “good vibes only” mug and a closet full of unprocessed trauma. This is about more than personal avoidance. This is about power.
This way of thinking — where emotion is weakness and rationality is truth — props up entire institutions. It decides who gets listened to, who gets believed, and who gets erased. And that brings us to Sara Ahmed.
Ahmed tears down the illusion that institutions are neutral spaces. She shows us how they decide what counts as “real” knowledge — and what gets dismissed as too emotional, too messy, too subjective. Her work on affective economies and the cultural politics of emotion doesn’t just argue for feelings; it exposes how cognitive primacy is a structural weapon. It lets institutions say, “Only this kind of knowledge counts. The kind that looks rational. The kind that behaves.”
And who gets to define what “behaves”? Spoiler: not you, not me. The power to define “acceptable” knowledge rests with those already benefiting from the current order. People who need to express pain, rage, or grief in order to be heard — people seeking healing, justice, recognition — are told instead that their very way of knowing is disordered. That their knowledge is invalid. That their trauma is a personal problem, not a political one.
When the message becomes, “We’re only interested in clear, objective, dispassionate knowledge,” you can conveniently ignore the voices of those most impacted by violence and injustice. You can shut the door on knowledge that bleeds, cries, or shakes with rage. On knowledge that lives in the body, that comes from experience — from being black, being queer, being poor, being dispossessed. Instead, you can pathologize it. You can say, “They’re just angry. They’re irrational. They need to fix their mindset.”
So the obsession with rationality doesn’t just stop your aunt Karen from crying at work. It doesn’t just allow you to ghost people who aren’t smiling like a game show host. It upholds entire systems of exclusion. It protects business as usual. It protects oppression as usual — and hands you a smug little badge for achieving a kind of inner death.
Slavoj Žižek speaks directly to this dynamic. He calls it a form of self-exploitation, where individuals internalize the demand to be endlessly positive and “rational,” rather than demanding real structural change. We stop crying out and start policing ourselves. And in doing so, we become the very tools of our own repression.
From Enabling Group Disempowerment to Individual Isolation.
Now, we are far from done here, but it is likely already clear how all of this impacts our ability to connect. In a world that preaches that we must fix our thoughts, master our emotions, there’s no room for shared vulnerability. Instead of coming together to address collective grief, frustration, or anger, we’re left alone, thinking that the fact we are hurt at all is some kind of sickness. If we are unlucky enough to be surrounded by the kind of people who jump on the positivity train as an excuse to never have to be a friend to anyone, then we are even TOLD that our feeling bad at all is a sign of our deep failing.
We become lonely in our pain, isolated in our supposed “inability” to CONTROL what is often the MOST normal human response to bad shit happening. Really. If someone sees a kid get hit by a car and can stand there, saying calmly “everything happens for a reason” then that person is the non-human in this picture. They are, in that moment, indistinguishable from an AI. And that does seem to be what we aspire too. The more we internalize the idea that only rational knowledge matters, the more we become strangers to each other’s realities, and to our own realities. It’s exactly what keeps these systems of power intact. Not only does cognitive primacy uphold exclusionary structures, it deepens the loneliness of those who are forced to suffer in silence.
But – There Is A Major Issue Here!
In parallel to saying what it is, let me ask you this — are you sad to find out that cognitive primacy is bullshit?
Yes. Bullshit. I don’t just mean philosophically problematic — I mean empirically incorrect.
This is the mega shadow side of this particular value. For all its shiny packaging and institutional prestige, scientific research has demonstrated it to be false. So brace yourself — the next two minutes are dry, scientific fact. Don’t tune out. Decide it’s exciting.
Evidence for Emotional Primacy
Antonio Damasio put it bluntly: “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.” And science backs him up. Back in 1980, Robert Zajonc kicked things off by showing that emotions can occur independently of cognition — and often precede it (Zajonc, 1980, p.151). Paul Ekman and Joseph LeDoux added to this with evidence that “basic emotions” like fear can be activated through non-cognitive neural pathways (Ekman, 1992b, p.550; LeDoux, 1996, p.164). LeDoux’s neuroscience research revealed that emotional stimuli can bypass the higher cognitive regions of the brain altogether.When it comes to more complex emotions, things get more entangled. But that doesn’t mean cognitive primacy wins. It means thought and feeling are intertwined, dynamically. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work shows this clearly — cognition and emotion influence one another, continuously and inseparably (Barrett, 2006, p.30–32). So even if you’re just sitting around catastrophizing about whether your kid is going to fall off their bike and concuss themselves, your emotional state isn’t simply caused by bad thoughts. It’s part of a system — and not one where cognition gets the steering wheel.
And yet... we keep pretending otherwise.
Which leads to the obvious question: If science has moved on, why hasn’t our culture?
Because we don’t just hang onto beliefs because they’re true — we hang onto them because they’re useful. It is useful to believe that we can control our lives through thought. It is useful to institutions that we continue to believe this too.
Foucault’s Analysis of Power and Knowledge
To really answer that, we need to zoom out. Cognitive primacy isn’t just outdated — it’s disciplinary. This is where Michel Foucault comes in, stage left, to replace Descartes in the philosophical spotlight.
Foucault argued that knowledge is always tangled up with power. What counts as “truth” isn’t neutral — it’s produced by institutions that benefit from defining it. Just like pop stars are manufactured to sell records, knowledge is manufactured to serve systems. What’s seen as “real” knowledge reflects the norms that those systems want to uphold.
Institutions don’t just tell us what to think — they tell us how to think. Take healthcare, for instance. BMI is still widely used, despite being scientifically discredited as a measure of health. Why? Because it reinforces a certain norm. And norms, as Foucault reminds us, serve power.
Cognitive primacy works the same way. It’s not just a model — it’s a mechanism of control. If you believe that “your thoughts control your life,” then you also believe that any suffering you experience is your own fault. If you’re not okay, you must be thinking wrong. That message doesn’t just disempower. It disciplines by making you the problem for deviating from what is required of you.
CBT as the Institutional Enforcer of Loneliness and Self Blame
And this brings us neatly to CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy — the high priest of institutionalized cognitive primacy.
CBT is the most widely funded and deployed form of therapy in the Western world, largely because it’s cheap and short-term. But it also aligns beautifully with capitalist values. It says: “Your feelings are the result of faulty thoughts. Fix your thoughts, and the feelings will sort themselves out.”
Within a Foucauldian lens, CBT functions as a normalizing force. It doesn’t ask why someone might be grieving, or alienated, or furious at injustice. It asks how they can reframe those feelings into more socially acceptable ones.
Imagine you’ve got your hand on a hotplate, and it’s burning. The CBT approach isn’t to help you get your hand off the hotplate — it’s to help you think differently about being burned.
And this gets dangerous — fast. If you’re in a relationship with a narcissist, for instance, and you go to CBT for support, you’re likely to be told that the solution lies in re-framing your reaction, rather than recognising that someone is manipulating and gaslighting you. I’ve experienced this. My friends have experienced this. It’s not a fluke — it’s a feature of the model.
The implicit message is: if you’re hurting, it’s because you’ve failed to think properly. That is not just false. It is profoundly unsafe.
Phenomenology and Embodied Knowing
The blind spot in all this is staggering. Whole philosophical traditions — like phenomenology — have been telling us for over a century that knowing doesn’t start with thinking. It starts with feeling, sensing, being in the body. Maurice Merleau-Monty said that we know the world through lived, embodied experience. A baby doesn’t cry because it’s made a rational assessment. It cries because it feels something. Meaning arises through emotional encounter — not after it. In this view, emotions aren’t distractions from knowing — they’re how we know. Try getting that reimbursed by your insurance.
Deeper Links to Loneliness and Institutional Isolation
Here’s where it gets both personal and political. When emotions are dismissed or treated as symptoms of poor thinking, people get cut off — from themselves and from each other. The idea that you should “fix your feelings” alone, with a worksheet, instead of exploring what those feelings are pointing to, creates institutional loneliness. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, emotions are political. They shape how bodies move through the world, who gets heard, who gets erased. When institutions tell you what emotions are acceptable, they’re also telling you who gets to belong. So if you feel disconnected, isolated, like you're doing it wrong — it's not a personal failure. It’s a feature of a system designed to keep us alone with our pain, gaslit into thinking it’s a mindset problem.
Counteracting Cognitive Primacy: From Awareness to Resistance
Now we move from critique to resistance.
• Call Out the Lie
This isn’t just a bad idea. It’s a lie. The notion that thought is superior to feeling is not neutral. It’s cultural propaganda. It pathologizes pain. It individualizes responsibility. It obscures the system. So call it out. In therapy. In conversation. In your own mind.
• Embrace Emotional Necessity
Emotions aren’t bugs in the system — they’re core code. They’re how we form relationships, how we detect harm, how we register meaning. Stop treating them as obstacles to rationality. They are what make rationality matter.
• Empowerment Through Emotion
To feel deeply is not weakness. It’s resistance. In Foucault’s terms, refusing emotional discipline is an act of defiance. It’s saying: My emotional response is valid. The system that says otherwise? That’s what’s broken.
Summary
Cognitive primacy flatters us with a dream — that we can be clean, ordered, rational minds in full control of our messy, wild interiors. That our thoughts are the key to happiness, success, healing, and even moral worth. It tells us that if we just think the right thoughts, we can fix our feelings, our lives, and ourselves.
But that dream is a lie.
Cognitive primacy is not just outdated or scientifically shaky — it is a cultural weapon. A manufactured illusion. A deeply embedded lie that individualizes blame, neutralizes dissent, and erases emotion as a legitimate form of knowing.
It tells us that emotional pain is a thinking error. That systemic injustice is a mindset problem. That grief, rage, despair, and even joy must be filtered through the “right” kind of cognition in order to count. It sells us the illusion of control while quietly erasing the truth of our lived, embodied, emotional experience.
This lie doesn’t just confuse us — it isolates us.
It tells you that your pain is personal failure. That your feelings are inappropriate. That you’re the only one not “managing” correctly. So instead of reaching out, you retreat. You feel shame, not solidarity. You try to regulate your tears instead of asking why you’re alone in the first place. You try to fix yourself instead of questioning the system that made you feel broken.
That is the loneliness cognitive primacy creates.
A loneliness of self-surveillance. Of disconnection. Of feeling like no one else is struggling — because no one is allowed to show it.
And so, we become cut off not just from one another, but from ourselves. We begin to see our own humanity — our emotional depth, our vulnerability, our rawness — as a liability.
But here's the truth:
Emotion is not weakness. Emotion is wisdom. Emotion is resistance.
Your anger might be telling you something is unjust. Your grief might be honouring something that mattered. Your fear might be naming something real. These aren’t malfunctions. They are signals. They are intelligence. They are truth.
And choosing to honour them? To feel them? To share them? That is rebellion.
In a system built on the lie that only dispassionate minds deserve to be heard, simply showing up as your full, feeling self is radical. Listening to others with emotional openness is revolutionary. Creating spaces where people can cry, rage, and tremble without shame — that’s how we begin to dismantle the systems that thrive on our alienation.
So no — you don’t need to fix your thoughts to be worthy. You don’t need to be calm, smiling, or rational to deserve connection. You don’t need to tuck your humanity away to be taken seriously.
You are not failing for feeling deeply.
You are being human.
And maybe the most radical act in the face of this lie — is to believe that your feelings are not only valid, but necessary.
Philosophers, thinkers, psychologists and authors mentioned:
Rene Descartes
Immanuel Kant
Sara Ahmed
Antonio Damasio
Michel Foucault
Slavoj Zizek
References:
Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Ekman, P. (1992 a). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3-4), 169-200.
Ekman P. (1992 b). Are there basic emotions?. Psychological review, 99(3), 550–553
LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151-175.