Obstinacy defines the human psyche better than no other quality
From the pages of evolutionary biology, we, as many of our mammalian cousins, exhibit some of the shrewdest emotional sensitivity seen in any life form, seem to substitute emotion for reason, in pretty much every aspect. Having had a steadily evolving, complex mental acumen for reason—probably one of the only kind in nature for several hundreds of thousand years—our mental infancy is a jarring display of how in many ways our own is fettered to our kind’s primitive analysing, not inspiring of progress. I myself, sometimes drawing conclusions from the feels-good wagon, have come to reproach later my own unfortunate decisions after realising that my blithe impulse cannot possibly replace a sound consideration of choices I have laid out. But our resorting to clumsy gut feeling—so to call it—for a choice indicates the premise of this treatise—obstinacy; our most preferred, off-the-cuff approach to issues; though this is not an absolute repudiation to viscerally inclined choices, our immediate reliance on such techniques gives us reason to believe that statements like: It must be true, my instinct says so; Stop being so negative, many others have had it worse!; I can’t be wrong, the vibe, the energy, feels good, are abstracts that more often lead to flimsy life-choices we’d rather make vis-à-vis wait for a reasonable one. There’s a very strong resilient drive in most of our kind in the event of indecisiveness.
Don’t get me wrong when I say that these resilient complacencies make poor choices at best. Not all of them are lapses in our ability to make sound decisions; there are, of course, circumstances where certain gut decisions have had a long record of being right, and you can tell apart from experience the right from the poor ones. And that undoubtedly involves a repertoire of previously garnered data from a collection of well-anatomised conundrums, which aids in our decision-making. Consider for the sake of clarity that a certain effect proceeds from a cause; and also that the same connection between the two appears to exist in as many attempts it takes to infer intuitively with reasonable accuracy that the effect is a sure-shot result of that cause. This is not, by the way, our faculty to reason helping us conclude that the event Effect is the result of the event Cause, and the simplest way to understand this better is by asking a person who has no clue of gravity why objects fall down. Without having to ask why it so happens but merely what, to our senses, repeatedly espouses what, one can establish a custom that very rarely falls flat. This very simple gift of experience humans possess can, in the absence of reason or in lieu of it, act as a sound agent if we’re to come to any reasonable conclusions. But allowing the mind to process sensual information without the experience of the aforementioned kind, or reason can lead to travesties.
You see, our instincts, often derived from personal choices, private beliefs and the likes, cannot by itself be a benchmark due to our obvious prejudices, and by our slackened attention to practical factors involved, which I shall get to in a moment. Speaking of private beliefs, this is one example of how they influence our intuition, often falsely glorified as virtue; since positivity, in most cases, feeds our hankering for happiness, an obvious spin-off is a proclamation that negativity is linked to toxicity; in a deliberate attempt to play down our genuine struggles, riddled with untold connotations to the effect that it is unhealthy to allow negative emotions, and that they should be suppressed at all costs in order to be happy—call it toxic positivity—we seem to forbear rather conveniently to heed our honest qualms. Several celebrities and motivational speakers seem to believe and peddle the fantasy that this kind of positivity will somehow overturn all your sadness and that cribbing is a weakness you need to be repugnant to; that by wallowing in sanguine—surrounding yourself with positive people—you will fare better, as if you’re awarded vitality points to go the distance. High levels of optimism won’t really help since it is extremely one-sided and selective in its approach. Extreme optimism can blind you to some of the apparent and kosher feelings of loss, failure, and disappointment that need as much attention as the hope that one should have for the future. The crippling effect it has on emotional intelligence can only be undone by acknowledging otherwise; the vital affirmation of the not-so-congenial aspects serves the greater purpose of healing our mental misgivings, acceptance is key.
Another apparently benign and frequently overlooked variant of this attitude is body positivity, which makes us want to somehow sympathise with the subject; it not only normalises overweight, which is not a good thing to do in the first place, but goes still further to antagonise those who find it positively pernicious. The physically insecure among us find this much comforting. But in reality reversible, unhealthy obesity is also extolled, for the body positivists not only find the prospect of not accepting the shape of one’s body, regardless of its eccentricity, disturbing but unvirtuous. This tomfoolery not only puts reversible obesity on equal terms with that that can’t be helped but it also convinces people that obesity is not an odd thing and that the uniqueness of every shape should be accepted. They fail to see that obesity is not a healthy choice and those who can help it must not be complacent in this manner. While some people get to grips early with the visceral nonsense this puts out, there are still many insecure enough to find this very appealing.
The meat of the matter, since each person grows up with a set of preconceptions as mentioned before, is that one finds the prospect of calling a spade a shovel dissatisfying; and the cornerstone for the lack of objective thinking is confirmation bias. Such a closely knit relationship between confirmation bias and intuition encourages us to find conforming evidence to support our narrative. What is therefore perceived as intuition is a twisted version of reality, often anathematising views different from our own by frivolously negating dissent. Even in our most conscious efforts to reason, we can rarely help anchoring our mental faculties in subjectivity, therefore reifying and validating our preferences instead of rationally investigating the matter. The efficacy of intuition in such cases is anybody’s guess. As depreciable as it may be, confirmation bias isn’t the only player in the game though. A strong affinity to familiar elements is another factor that leaves us grasping at straws to come to any sensible conclusions through intuition. Materials, ideas, impressions, or even memories can fall victim to familiarity bias. Familiar ideas are promoted while unfamiliar ones, despite them being the more logical option, are not favoured. We’d rather prefer what we had the previous time we were at a restaurant, not least because we liked the taste but because we are more familiar with the taste, and the idea of trying something new would seem somewhat unsettling. But as mindful as we need to be of the aspect, it is unfortunate that it seems easier to cajole the mind to unconsciously display a certain prejudice whether we like it or not.
In any case, of the broader theme of affairs, to cotton on the delusion of gratifying choices, it’s imperative to see how crude ones make us none the wiser. In fact, as Thomas Paine very proverbially suggested a couple of centuries ago, a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, I believe that the prevailing desire to fall back close to home clubbed with the constant vox populi assurance we’re given of intuition’s virtues, makes the proposition for it all the more acceptable to follow, let alone thinking it wrong.
Passionate Explorer 