You Are Not a Vulcan

So stop trusting your gut feelings and start using your brain

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

A quirky story I heard decades ago has always stuck with me and I think it explains why everything in the world is like it is.

Supposedly, a hypnotist put his subjects into a trance and told them that when they woke up, they should close the window but without remembering he’d told them to do so. Each subject closed the window shortly after coming out of their trance.

But when asked why they closed the window, none of them admitted they didn’t have a reason for their action. Everybody came up with a plausible explanation, like claiming the room was too drafty.

We do this all the time

We would like to think we are logical people who base our decisions on facts. But I don’t think that’s the case. Instead, we do things because we feel like doing them, and then we invent a reason to explain why we did it.

Sometimes we do this because we are lying. Maybe you tell your boyfriend you only looked at his phone because you wanted to check the time and then found all his cheating texts by accident.

But sometimes we manage to convince ourselves that our motivations are pure, even though they’re far from it. One example would be claiming you voted for Trump because you believed he’d improve the economy, when really you just couldn’t bring yourself to vote for a woman of color.

We act on our gut feelings, not logic

I dedicated about 30 years of my life to the idea that if the media did its job, everyone could make good decisions.

I fervently believed I was doing important work at newspapers. In fact, I believed it so strongly that I was willing to accept long hours for low pay. It was my calling. I was serving democracy.

I was an idiot.

We now have instant access to almost the entire sum of human knowledge, but I believe we are making worse decisions than before. We always based our actions on our emotions. That hasn’t changed, but now we think we’re making reasoned decisions.

It’s easier than ever to cite a seemingly logical reason for an emotional decision.

We go straight to the gut

The most effective way to convince a person of something is to trigger an emotional response. I naively thought most people could consider relevant facts and reach a logical conclusion, but I was wrong.

You can imagine one person presenting a pie chart, some detailed background and a list of citations and being creamed by another person presenting a clever meme that packs an emotional punch.

Jonathan Swift is credited with saying “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.”

Swift was a wise old bird. He’d recognize how memes and videos exploit emotions. Propagandists today don’t even try to change anyone’s mind with facts. They bypass the brain and go straight to the gut.

Simple answers are usually wrong

It feels really good to declare you’re going to take decisive action to deal with a problem straight away.

By God, we’re going to close the border and deport every undocumented person! We’ll cut crime by putting all criminals in jail and throwing away the key! We will save all the babies by outlawing abortion! We’ll end the opioid crisis by cracking down on addicts! We’ll end homelessness by tearing down camps and jailing anyone who sleeps in public!

Dealing with complex problems effectively means considering the root causes and what unintended consequences might come from each potential fix.

If drug addiction could be resolved via law enforcement, we wouldn’t have a drug problem today. If we actually wanted to reduce the problem, we’d have to do things like improve the lives and prospects of people at risk, open and fund more drug treatment centers and do more research on addiction.

How do you put that on a bumper sticker?

You can’t. Simple (and wrong) approaches are what stir people up.

We need a time machine

If we actually wanted to fix our immigration problem, we’d ideally go back in time and stop screwing around in the internal politics of Latin America. We caused some of the turmoil that now sends people fleeing to the U.S.

Lacking a time machine, we’d at least recognize that our meddling makes us morally responsible for helping people escape the turmoil we stirred up. I doubt 5 percent of Americans know the part we played in destabilizing that region.

We’d also have to recognize the obvious fact that we depend on migrant workers in sectors like agriculture, hospitality and construction. We would design a guest worker program that would properly vet workers and allow them to cross the border to return to their home countries for visits and then return to resume work — especially for seasonal workers. We refuse to do that even though it would be better for everyone because that would require us to treat those folks like human beings.

You get the idea. Real solutions are complex and do not lend themselves to snappy slogans.

We say we want to fix problems, but we don’t. Mostly, we just want to get mad and feel self-righteous.

It’s why bad parents smack their kids and claim it’s for their own good, when really it satisfies some broken part of the parent to lash out at their child. But they will insist they need to discipline the child for noble reasons.

Swift figured all this out close to 300 years ago without even having an iPhone in his pocket. I think he’d have immediately appreciated the significance of the hypnotist’s story, too.

The next time you figuratively close a window, maybe think about whether the room is truly drafty.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is, Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My latest novel is The Trailer Park Rules.

A version of this originally ran on Medium on Nov 9, 2024.