Do people base their decisions off of reason or emotion? When you're buying a phone, you tend to compare the specifications of everything and that combined with the price leads you to your decision. If you're adopting a dog, well... you're adopting a dog.
Although we all feel feelings (hopefully), and are always thinking things based on our emotions, I find that when expressing these emotions or making a decision, we always tend to use logic. What will be the least offensive? What will make me sound the least stupid? What has the most pros?
Now should we be basing all of our actions on logic?
Disregarding any emergency life or death situations... I think the answer to that question comes back to the age old question: Are people inherently good or inherently bad?
The good side:
Often times, people are afraid to say how they think or how they truly feel. When someone has spinach in their teeth, no one tells them because they're not sure if that will offend them or not. If someone y'know... like likes someone, they're always scared to tell the other person in case they look like an idiot walking away alone. Everyone would be less stressed out all the time if we knew no one would have to talk shit about us behind our backs, and if they had something to say, would just come out and make fun of us to our faces!
The
Yes there are people that think all people just maintain high levels of self control but deep inside just imagine murdering everyone that crosses their path. (The average person may be offended by this because maybe we aren't all secretly rapists/nazis/child pornographers/cannibals/politicians as the song suggests.. instead take it as... we are all secretly selfishly motivated and therefore bad). Inherently bad = inherently selfish. No one wants to SEEM like the bad guy... like the guys in the song. If everyone acted on their emotions, no one would help anyone, and everyone would only do what is best for themselves. Everyone would be nasty and unforgiving and there would be no such thing as a true friendship. If we all acted on emotions, we would all be sad and alone. No one is allowed to know that we are cynics.
So if I could decide for myself, if I could pick between believing in the inherent good or the inherent evil, I would tell you whether I think people should act more based on emotion or on logic.
I don't think it's necessarily true that we make all of our decisions based on logic. Going with your example, when we "like-like" a person, I may not choose to tell that person for any number of reasons, but why did I choose to "like-like" that person? Even answers like "they have a good personality" or "they're hot" are emotionally driven. And what about when we analyze what we tell people because we fear that we will offend them? Our ability to identify that our actions affect the emotional responses of other people is a result of emotion. You make several good points, but not everything is black and white, which can be easy to forget when given two sides to choose from.
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