I’ve long considered that emotion was more fundamental than thought, as one wouldn’t bother doing the work of rational analysis unless motivated. But there are emotional rewards for coherent thinking and scientific discovery which need to be acknowledged, encouraged, and facilitated. Some young people discover such pleasures for themselves, but it’s far from automatic.
There is also a strong emotional substrate to self-respect, which can derive from nothing except honest effort to create positive outcomes despite opposition or social disapproval by the compromised consensus. I was just watching a Rose interview of Creighton on AGW, and he had almost decided not to write his latest book, a denunciation of the anti-empirical roots of the claims and projections of the “consensus” view, when he discovered himself feeling like a coward. So he wrote it, expecting (accurately) to be vilified and abused. But, all in all, he prefers having his self-respect intact.
