Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Good News Quote #33


From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.


As reason welcomes emotion and subjects it to the self-criticism that values truth over self, the two end up pulling together in the direction of making us better people.


Of course not all our reasoning works in that direction. When it goes off in the wrong direction, the problem is not that we're thinking too much, but that our thinking is bad, lazy or dishonest. Our reasoning then is not in the service of truth, which is what reason is really for, but promotes our own self-serving agenda. This results in the perversion of reason that psychologists call "rationalization," as I mentioned before. It's a form of irrationality in which our thinking is all about serving emotional needs that have nothing to do with what's really true. So instead of learning to put truth before self, and thus turning emotions toward justice, generosity, and humility, our thinking is corrupted by the wrong kind of emotions, which end up driving everything.

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