There is a phrase that has become very popular that says "facts don't care about your feelings". And while I understand the intended message, something like no matter how you feel about the truth, the truth will prevail over you. It doesn't matter if you like gravity or not, there is gravity anyway. I would like to turn it around, because many times I think the opposite happens too. Perhaps for many people the phrase correctly said would be "my feelings don't care about your/the facts". We like to think that the society we live in, and particularly the West, is this rational civilization, based on science, knowledge, and whatever. At least that's what they're trying to make us believe. And that the human being is a very rational animal. But what we observe in the world is many times the opposite, because we live in a society governed to a great extent by people's feelings, not necessarily by "facts."
In a past post I talked about this, people do not react directly to reality, they react to what their mind tells them is real, they react to their beliefs, they react to their thoughts, they react to their feelings. If a person believes that something false is real, that person will react as if it were real, regardless of whether it really is or not. Lies have very real effects on the world. The falsehood too. Ignorance often presides over human action. If people reacted only to the truth, to the "facts," or to reality, then we would probably live in a perfect world where there is no failure or error. But that's not the world we live in.
In the world we live in, markets rise and fall according, not necessarily to facts, but to beliefs, to emotions, to people's feelings. A company can broke, or arise, simply because people believed that it was going to do it, by rumors and falsehoods. We see it often even with cryptocurrencies, where there is a lot of speculation and where in many cases the price of a cryptocurrency is simply based on the feelings that people have about it, and not based on facts or something similar. Remember that value is not something inherent and objective, as many people tend to think, but is something subjective, and value ends up determining the price.
Presidents are elected and governments are formed based on feelings and emotions. Countries are invaded, wars are declared, bombs are dropped, simply because of the fear of the people and of the rulers themselves of things that many times are not even real.
So yes, in the world we live in, many times our feelings don't care about facts. We have to realize that, many times, we become so obsessed with what is objective, with reality itself, that we forget that the subjective also exists and also determines the world in which we live. Not only does the truth matter, it also matters what people believe to be true. In fact, many of the things that some call facts are simply deeply held beliefs. I myself don't like to use this word because it demands a degree of certainty that I often don't have.
People have the power to make their beliefs come true as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, both the objective reality (truth) and the subjective perception of it (opinion), matter. The human is a rational animal, but also an emotional one, for which his actions will be determined not only by facts, but also by feelings. So, in a way, both facts and feelings care.
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Love that! Very interesting thought thread, thank you! It's also funny how today, with the incredible pace of research, there are constantly new discoveries that literally object and refute most of the FACTS we've ALL been taught in highschool and university..
So like you suggest, I believe facts are to support a feeling that we have about something. At least that's how it works best for me. I usually don't need facts to be convinced. Often it just takes me feeling what my heart thinks about it. Sometimes it's just a dash of intrigue that makes me want to hear more and I believe that is where facts are useful to illustrate the idea, assumption or theory. I guess most of the 'inventions & discoveries', just like Art have sprung from an intuition, and from there the mind went on an adventurous hunt of facts to paint the bigger picture of that idea. A little bit like a treasure hunt where every fact is in fact (pun intendet) just a clue leading towards the real riches of (inner) Truth. 🦚
Right. I totally agree. I often think of that when I hear people talking about facts, forgetting that many of the "facts" of the past, or even "scientific facts" have been discredited after a long time, and how much of what is considered undisputed today will be disproved in the future.
I have always believed that people have to trust themselves first in order to find the truth. But many people believe in everything, in what this person says, in what that other person says, they believe in everyone, except themselves, and then for them their "facts" are simply things that other people said and that it is possible that are false. I think that people should check for themselves, inside, all these things, to be able to confirm for themselves what is true and what is false, and what is the best and what is applicable in their particular case.
Quite so!
Thanks to you and cheers!
Oh yes, you mention something that is very underestimated thanks! Absolutely, a couple of years ago " facts" were exclusively scientific papers, whereas a 'fact' today can simply be something I found somewhere on the internet, or what my parents say.
Even with how mainstream media and the entertainment business evolved, some people take their authority so serious they take all the information they get there at face value.
I like what you said, we all shall find out what is true for us and what not. In the vibe of Sovereignty, I feel like now is also a great moment to think for ourselves how we would "define" a fact for ourselves. Just like creating your own user guide of like "at what point is something irrefutable for me" or "how do I usually need to be convinced to believe something is true"
Simple reflections like that invite us also to consider our flexibility towards 'hard facts' in general. Gives us a little scale to understand our 'necessity' of facts and in which contexts for example etc.
Cheers!! Happy Weekend!
That humans are emotional beings seems to me to be an evolutionary necessity. Rationality and emotions are not actually contradictory. But of course I know what you mean and have the following thoughts:
Women are said to be highly emotional, and for a long time it was said that women were less able to think rationally when compared to men. I think that's nonsense, because I think it's like you say, people decide predominantly according to their feelings, less according to their rationality. I even thought of myself for most of my life as deciding predominantly according to my feelings and, because the trend was so one-sided, I was ashamed that I seemed to use my rationality too rarely. It's only since I've been doing social work that I've noticed that I often cut short my clients' long emotional introductions to try to get to the heart of the matter, the thing they came for: Paperwork, questions about financial entitlements, etc. To this end, my training has helped to calm clients' overly emotional outbursts or fixations and encourage them to make shifts in perspective to see their anger, rage or grief more clearly, or to work on not letting such feelings get the better of their decisions.
For me, it is paramount that my opinion, which is based on a worldview formed through childhood and many more years, is my choice. So even if I choose to believe something because I want to, that is often something that those who are in love with (alleged) facts do not want to accept, because it is believed that such an opinion as mine has long since been disproved in this fake-factual world. That is what I object to. For example, I have decided not to believe in pandemics because it disturbs my inner peace and I therefore prefer to keep this peace instead of wanting to be afraid of more and more threatening diseases. Be that as it may in the world of fact-finders and seekers, my inner statistician has never been a living witness to a pandemic in her life. However, if one should befall me and my immediate environment, I will change my view.
Politics, the money market and many other areas of life are about feelings such as vanity, greed, striving for power, avarice, pride, envy, arrogance or else about euphoria, utopia, palpitations, etc. - I therefore agree with you that very little of it really has to do with facts, because as a rule facts are very dry and many find reading such facts boring, unless you yourself are the specialist who produced them.
As always, I very much appreciate your gift for picking out the essence in the currents of the many utterances and articulating it so succinctly. Many thanks for that.
Right. I agree with everything. The problem, I think, is that many people are claiming that their opinions are actually facts, and want to suppress any other opinion that does not agree with theirs. This is a deeply irrational belief, which nevertheless attempts to appear rationality. But is not.
Yeah, I don't think reason is contrary to emotion either, they are probably complementary.
Thanks to you for stopping by, see ya!
"If people reacted only to the truth, to the 'facts,' or to reality, then we would probably live in a perfect world where there is no failure or error."
Or perhaps we would be paralyzed, finding nothing to react to. Our experience could be (perhaps defensibly) said not to be objective truth, fact, or reality. From this perspective reacting only to reality would result in non-action, unless one compromised by accepting a sort of approximate quasi-reality.
Right. Although I would not say that our experience is completely false either, just as it is not completely truth, but a mixture between both. So, in fact, we are already reacting to a quasi-reality, just that the quasi-reality of some people is more subjective than that of others.
No one has the complete truth, and no one is completely wrong, just, somewhere in between.
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