Emotions vs Rationality

Dear Rational Thinkers,

One of the common arguments or narratives around says poor political decision making is that “people don’t make rational well-informed decisions that yield to most beneficial outcomes”. Or that it is much easier to appeal to human emotions than to rationality, and the decisions which are made as an outcome of this emotional bias are poor or inferior.

In fact, many people across India, especially in urban educated India, feel that poor uneducated people in rural parts make poor electoral choices for the lack of education. That it is easy to manipulate uneducated people or non-smart people into irrational thinking and poor decision making.

Ten years ago, as a well trained rational engineer, probably I also made this strong correlation between rational and good decisions and emotional and poor decisions. But ten years of questioning this correlation, I wonder if there is any substance here.

Thereby, people make all sorts of emotional, rational, irrational, or mixed decisions, which have good or bad outcomes for individuals, society, nation, economy, etc. The general taxonomy is the emotional decisions are bad, and that is the point, I have come to contest.

Typically also become emotional decisions are primarily associated with my gender, women think emotionally, and at least personally that is entirely true. We are advised, a lot, to shift to rational thinking, which is ironic because rational and emotional can pretty well coexist. And it is often demarcated that due to the emotional aspect of our decision-making, it is flawed, though there is no serious evidence for that.

The fundamental question of this rational vs emotional thinking is whether human beings are “innately” good or bad. If left to our own devices and to the first sub-conscious, instant, non-processed decision, will we deliver a “good” or “bad” outcome? And this is where I have a very strong presumption.

Human beings, and or that matter all living beings are innately good, and the general goodness of the world must be the starting point of any perspective.

Human beings do manifest in bad, evil, harmful forms; which is typically a combination of inner value system or thinking and external circumstances. Every human can manifest in evil given strong enough external circumstances, case in point wars, riots, conflicts, scarcity; and every human does manifest in general good given the fertile circumstances.

One dangerous deduction of this rational thinking hypothesis is that in an electoral system, poor uneducated illiterate misinformed people do not make the “right” choices. The major caveat for the functioning of Indian democratic system typically comes via the example of literacy rate. “But look most people in our country are uneducated, how will this democracy be successful”

Not just democratic decision making, but lack of education has been kept as a constant denominator of apparent poor decision making by poor people which keeps them poor. Not only does it undermine inherent wisdom and intellect of an uneducated person but it provides an incorrect narrative.

One prevalent narrative, in India and the US and many other parts of the world, is the lack of education as a causality towards poorer economic growth; whereby in the first place poorer economic status impedes lack of education. And also that given the right kind of macroeconomics, education may not necessarily be a requisite for decent economic growth.

In summary, let's stop vilifying emotional decision making as something always bad or wrong. Some of the best decisions taken by human beings are entirely emotional and form the fabric of our rich beautiful loving existence.

In the name of formal education, let's stop undermining the wisdom, the intellect, and the mental apparatus that an illiterate, uneducated person has; and by extension, in the name of formal education, let's stop over-amplifying and over-respecting the decisions and opinions of the literate educated folks. Education or lack of so, rationality vs emotions, are not an either/or structure, but a both/and paradigm in which most of humanity flows.

And if we are to cancel the global hate, that we witness today, the extreme inequality present in the world, and the series of crisis staring in our face, we can be emotional, we shall feel distraught, and we must respond back to all of it with radical love. And love, my friends, is not a rational educated choice, but an absolutely irrational impulsive decision. And maybe as we enter 2020 filled with strife, conflicts, crisis, and hate, we will define and find a politics of emotion and a politics of radical love.

With Love,
From an Emotional Girl