Rational Thinking Doesn't Make Sense

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The articles on this page are ultimately a social and ideological critique of our current situation as a species, and while I use both reason and evidence in my analysis, I also commit the cardinal sin of being deeply emotional in my assessments. Fortunately, I have a perfectly logical explanation for this. It’s long been thought that to reach sound conclusions we must separate our rational minds from their impassioned counterparts. We mustn't let emotions cloud our judgment, as they say. If this is true, then it suggests the most reasonable people on the planet are sociopaths, and I find it hard to accept that a brain condition which often turns people into serial killers is somehow the next stage in human evolution. 

When we consider the things that make life meaningful such as love, community and purpose, these are all emotional experiences. In fact, the only reason we’re concerned with making good choices is because we care about what happens. Without emotions, we literally wouldn’t care about anything. Yet we’ve somehow decided that the best way to reach a conclusion is to distance ourselves from the internal mechanism that made the conclusion matter to us in the first place. This doesn’t exactly sound like logic’s best work. When we meet someone who actually seems as though they’re making calculated, emotionless decisions, we often describe them as not being human, and not in a good way. We’re more likely to get the creeps than to ask them how they achieved such an exalted state, and yet we’re constantly chasing rationality as if it’s the holy grail of thought. 

Many serious thinkers have long been obsessed with discovering or creating the perfectly rational mind only to be consistently met with unusual obstacles. Though originally designed as a statement of free will, a famous thought experiment illustrates this point. Known as Buridian’s Ass, we are asked to imagine the existence of a completely rational donkey. He only makes decisions through carefully reasoned assessments, free from the dark influence of emotion. This extremely rational donkey finds himself standing between two identical bales of hay. Not only are they exactly the same, but he’s also precisely in the middle between the two, meaning that both the bale to his right and the bale to his left are exactly the same distance from where he’s standing. In fact, no meaningful differences of any kind exist between his two choices. How is the donkey to proceed? After scratching their heads for a long time, many philosophers were forced to conclude that since he had no basis to choose one bale over the other, the donkey would eventually die where he stood. In other words, the rational donkey would have made the most irrational choice of all, and starved in the presence of perfectly available food. 

Since it was first presented, many people have created elaborate and logical explanations for why this wouldn’t actually happen, however, the real answer to the donkey’s fate can be found by looking to humans. In a now famous case study, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had a patient named Elliot who by all accounts was an upstanding member of his community. In addition to being a beloved father and husband, Elliot was also a successful accountant. After beginning to suffer from regular headaches, it was discovered he had a small brain tumor in his frontal lobe region. Damasio performed surgery to remove the tumor as well as some of the damaged tissue surrounding it. Yet following what seemed to have been a successful operation, Elliot began exhibiting unusual behavior that his friends and colleagues described as being far from his typical personality. A series of tests showed that his memory, language and IQ were completely intact, yet he was incredibly distractible and couldn’t maintain even simple levels of organization. His life began to fall apart, and soon after he was fired from his job, his wife filed for a divorce. 

The nature of his predicament finally came into view when Damasio began studying Elliot’s reactions to photographs that usually evoke an emotional response, such as injured people and burning buildings. The tests revealed that Elliot could no longer sense emotions at all, he literally felt nothing. While this didn’t impact his ability to analyze situations, it completely destroyed his ability to choose what to focus on and left him almost entirely incapable of making decisions. Other cases of patients with similar brain damage confirmed this phenomena. Many of them were described as being no longer human, and even in cases of terminal illnesses, they had extreme difficulty choosing between their options for care. What scientists learned is that with sufficient physical damage to our emotional centers, people completely lose the ability to make decisions. This tells us that the original philosophers were right and that the rational donkey would indeed starve.

A growing body of evidence continues to find that far from clouding our judgment, emotions inform our judgment. Not only can we not draw correct conclusions without them, we in fact can’t draw conclusions at all without their help. Yet the idea that emotions somehow undermine our logical processes continues to persist. What’s interesting about the people who feel this way is how many of them simultaneously venerate evolution. They marvel at how mutations across time seem to form organisms of ever increasing complexity that become more and more fine tuned to navigating their environments. It’s then necessary to accept that the same evolutionary process that gave us astounding physical and reasoning abilities is also responsible for the development of some 34,000 possible emotional experiences. Yet this last part is still often seen as an obstacle to how we should be understanding the world. This is an odd middle ground to be in. It seems that either our emotions are incredibly important for interpreting information or that the profoundly sophisticated process of evolution has made a serious deviation. 

This all adds color to a dichotomy I have personally experienced in my conversations with deeply intellectual thinkers. I’ve noticed that those who can be labeled as being emotional are not only much more concerned with the suffering of others, but they frequently form the most elegant and logical arguments I’ve ever come across. My discussions with self proclaimed rational individuals, however, have often left me bearing witness to the sorts of tantrums that make rabid dogs look like harmless hummingbirds. While it may be challenging to convince an emotional person that they’re being irrational, I consider it far more difficult to convince a rational person that they’re being emotional. But alas, the burden of proof is often the enemy of the righteous.

None of this is meant to say that emotions are more important than reason, but rather that evidence suggests a balance between both seems to yield the best results. Suffice it to say, I won’t be asking the reader to leave their emotions at the door when reading my work. On the contrary, a recurring theme within these articles is that we should be embracing our humanity, not denouncing it. While I will refer to scientific studies when relevant, my goal isn’t to beat you over the head with statistics. Statistics only take us so far when non-statistical matters are concerned. More succinctly, people are not data points, they’re human beings, and analyzing our social order will require a scalpel and a paintbrush. So while you are free to choose whether you want to read my page logically or emotionally, the readers who arm themselves with both qualities are likely to have the most satisfying experience. 

This rant about emotion is also relevant for another reason. In addition to analyzing how our current society functions, the articles here are an investigation of what caused these particular systems to take hold instead of others. We often seem to act as though they are the result of well reasoned assessments, but I frequently conclude that this is not the case. Far from being logical, much of our social structure has a deeply emotional underpinning. Furthermore, the emotions holding them up are largely negative ones such as hate, spite and fear, and show that as a whole we have a very pessimistic view of human nature. How can we expect the systems which assume the worst about ourselves to somehow bring about the best of individual potential or society as a whole? My examinations will repeatedly make the case that these assumptions are actually wrong and that we have many reasons to start giving each other the benefit of the doubt. 

So, let’s think again, but this time with feeling.