[Maru]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

That's based on the assumption that emotions are necessarily good or positive things... greed, resentment, hatred are all emotions and just as a positive emotional person can live a life full of positive emotion while staying away from hatred... it is perfectly possible for the flipside to be true. So basically it is possible to be an emotional person and yet void of empathy, sympathy, love (of the universal variety).

I would say, really, that the ONLY reason he committed and ordered the awful things that he did was out of emotion. In fact, there's a very good chance that if he hadn't been so distracted / drawn off track by his emotional pursuits (genocide, his hatred of various groups) then Germany might well have won the war.

There is a good argument to be made that some criminal behavior can be linked to irrationality/bad control of emotions... and this is definitely true with many of the people my husband has worked with. He's deescalated many an issue simply by slowing them down and getting them calmed down long enough to talk them through how they are feeling until they talk themselves through and realize what they are doing is utterly irrational. Some even goes as far as to talk about the crimes they've committed, their own realization of how stupid/wrong it was, but they have issues with self-control...

I've told him I think most of the people (the small fry particularly) belong in a mental health/study program of some kind. If not to correct/rehabilitate, to study their behavior and improve our understanding of how these developmental/mental issues have an impact in general society.