Numbers are powerful tools. They enable us to assess our surroundings with precision. People who specialize in working with numbers care about the details because they care about getting things right. Usually, that’s because they care about the people they’re trying to serve with their quantitative tools.
To be calculating is different from that. One definition of the word, of course, describes the simple action of doing mathematical work. The word “calculating” is also used as an adjective, describing someone with an attitude that regards other people objects to be manipulated as coldly as numbers and symbols are manipulated in an algebraic formula.
Those who are calculating often prefer to depict themselves as merely rational, without any emotional motivation. Rationality is a means, however, not an end. Motivation in human beings is always based in emotion. The motivation of a calculating person is self-interest, without regard to the needs and desires of others. The emotional perspective of a calculating person is adopted out of the feeling that one’s own feelings are the only ones that matter.
To be calculating is the perspective of a predator, considering other people only as objects to be exploited, coldly measuring their value and making plans to use it at a future time.
Executives at digital corporations who create elaborate systems to automatically gather information about people, using algorithms to deploy that information in schemes of manipulation for the sake of financial profit have chosen to be calculating in their relationships to other human beings. Tech entrepreneurs who create schemes that seem to be able to be able to measure human emotion en masse with statistical precision are doubly calculating. These Emotion AI grifters have measured up the greed of other business leaders, and have concluded that their executive clients’ eagerness to emotionally manipulate consumers in a calculating manner makes the executives themselves vulnerable to emotional manipulation. Emotion AI is just a calculating simulation of emotional understanding, engineered to appeal to people who themselves hope to become more skillfully calculating.
Of course, everyone tries to understand other people’s emotions, and uses that understanding to cultivate advantageous relationships. It’s human nature to do so. Typically, however, these relationships are mutually beneficial in some way, and involve feelings of caring about the well-being of others. The difference with an emotionally calculating person is the lack of any interest in reciprocation. When we are calculating, we only care about what others can do for us.
