Panic, fear, are as dangerous in a fire as the fire itself. Many of the greatest discoveries in science have been counterintuitive: the earth is not flat, the sun does not revolve around us, the universe originated in the Big Bang, a huge explosion… none of that captures even remotely. our intuition. Even the very idea of evolution is counterintuitive. All these great discoveries have been based on reason, on the meticulous work of people who observed, checked, carefully noted down their data, reflected long
However, in our model of society, the value of emotion and intuition is exalted and reason is considered to be an unreliable, outdated, tiring, not to say extremely heavy instrument, an antique, wow, and certainly not suitable for move in today’s hectic and fashion world, which beats to the rhythm of hunches. Everything conspires today against reason, turned into the piece to beat.
However, the reason – from the Latin, ratio, proportion, – is a powerful guarantee of active adaptation to the environment and constitutes one of the greatest legacies that millions of years of evolution have left us. Nothing gives us more autonomy from the environment than reason. Emotions are circumstantial, reactive, short-term. Emotion is defined as an automatic propensity for action, a spring, which has been shaped by evolution to offer quick responses to foreseeable situations. But if the reason arises, it is to be able to adapt to other, much more complex realities. Reason allows us to see further, to see the ratios, the proportions of the elements of reality, which is essential in times of change and uncertainty.
Reasoning is a cognitive process of a computational nature that allows the elaboration of inferences (of an inductive or deductive type), regardless of the material substrate of the person who makes the inference. Reasoning is drawing inferences from prior information. In other words, reasoning is a mental capacity that allows us to go beyond the information provided by the initial data, reasoning allows us to cross borders into the unknown, expand our field of influence.
Thus, with this cult of emotion and this devaluation of reason, a fundamental capacity for adaptation and response to the subject’s environment is disarmed, thus opening a breach in the wall of his defenses through which manipulation and alienation break in, linked to our social model of control and compulsive consumption. It tries, then, to annul our critical capacities
Furthermore, it should be noted that our intuition is clearly linked to our personality. Because what intuitions will a paranoid have? Doesn’t he sense that he is surrounded by enemies and that they are chasing him everywhere?
In any case, it should be noted that emotion was underestimated for a long time, which is clearly wrong, as well as that reason and emotion are not watertight compartments either, but rather are closely related. But today, interestingly, reason is being devalued. In reality, the path of elaboration, of integration, is the one that can best guarantee us a combination of autonomy and interdependence, which is the basis of mental health and active adaptation to the environment. Precisely the reason has been selected in the evolution because the emotion does not work well in many aspects.
In this line of argument about the supremacy of emotion and intuition, they also want to sell us the bizarre idea that the brain is a mysterious machine endowed with an incredible automatic power of adaptation, so we just have to let ourselves be carried away by our emotions and intuitions and everything will work out wonderfully. However, this type of approach, apart from not being true, as Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out, is very dangerous because nothing is easier to manipulate than emotion.
But in addition, reflection, reasoning, analysis, are also, how could it be otherwise from the evolutionary perspective, sources of pleasure, of satisfaction. In this regard I will end with an anecdote from the English writer and historian Robert Graves (the author of “I, Claudio”). One day, already a centenary, they asked him in an interview. You. that he has been a person who has had such a long and intense life, what would he tell us if we asked him what have been the best moments of his life? . And Robert Graves replied: look, what I’m going to say may surprise you, but for me the best thing in life has been “a good walk, reading a good newspaper”
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