Think: Don’t Be Devout
It would not be a horrible idea for the FBI to start a file on anyone with more than two bumper stickers on their car.
Here’s a good test. If your heart races and your nostrils flare when someone disagrees with you, you’re devout.
When a politician, preacher, salesman, or grifter sees you coming, their mouths water because they’ll be able to make you dance like a marionette by tugging on those emotional strings of yours.
Our emotions are not what make us human. Our emotions are what make us animals. Reason is what makes us human.
Emotions come from the limbic system, that part of the brain often referred to as the “lizard brain”. That’s where emotions and instincts come from. What makes us human, and separates us from the other animals, is that top scoop of ice cream called the frontal lobe. This is why we have language, memory, logic, ambition, hopes beyond having sex while avoiding hunger and pain, and metacognition — the ability to think about how we think.
The devout make the king serve the jester. They shift executive power to the lizard brain, and then task the frontal lobe with rationalizing the decisions and conclusions it reaches.
“If I could change one thing about the discourse in this country it would be that we would stop nodding approvingly when people say, ‘I’m a…
