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"We are not the paragons of reason we think of ourselves to be."
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The affect heuristic

The unsuspecting System 2 is not known to examine existing beliefs automatically and provide new and unbiased insights.
It only endorses the feelings and impressions generated by System 1 and turn them into our beliefs, our opinions about things.
Our subjective likes and dislikes over something turn into, without our awareness, a breakdown of the associated benefits and risks of it.

Here, Daniel Kahneman argues that our emotional responses, the System 1, is the main source of our decision-making, and that our System 2 makes the effort to arrive at the logic behind that decision (I may be paraphrasing)

I'd like to take it further by asking ourselves this; isn't every decision we make regarding an idea that we encounter a personal choice governed by our perceptions of reality at that moment in time?

Maybe reason is a disguise we use to fool everyone around us into thinking we're basing our choices on an objective ground.

But when this objective ground is perceived by others in subjective ways, how can we assume it is a logical in the first place?

Whether it's the shape of an iconic structure that's influenced modern architecture to the form it is now, or the conditions of a business deal between 2 Big Oil companies to settle on a land dispute that can alter the economic landscape of the foreign country it's situated in,is it even possible to settle it on anything other than the emotion-based inner motivation of the chief architect, or the profit-making hedonistic mindset of the Big Oil execs who shook on it?

If decision-making itself rests on our capacity to feel emotional stability or turmoil depending on the outcome, then this can help us consider why our society is so fragmented.

  1. Ideas are continuously influenced by our emotional responses to it, in which the intuitive response acts as the source of a alignment with/deviation from the idea, and our effortful thinking develops or finds the logical basis for our response.
  2. If this is not true, that may mean that we do respond in a logical manner; however that would imply there exists a common system of reasoning for all of our activities. Now, while the reasoned structures are evidently present at varied levels, the assumption that we are rational beings cannot explain the fragmented nature of our thoughts, the diversity in our various belief systems which continue to dominate our overall activities in society.

I believe the distribution of emotion and reason in our thoughts structures need to be examined; perhaps a definition with the below mentioned title can help me here;

Thought Logistics; Supply of Emotions & Demand for Reason

The theory is this; the ideas that dictate and run society in its current terms stem from an emotional perspective on how life can be. And the reasoning we provide for these ideas enable us to make it an objective part of reality so that it can be followed by everyone else.
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Logic can be seen as a delivery channel, a transportation system for irrational thoughts/responses to these thoughts.

Everyone demands a reason for the way things are. We continue to provide ourselves various reasons for each thing we undertake.

Ultimately, we want to know that we're being treated fairly.
Because we're aware of the concept of fairness.
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But perhaps the biggest failure of society in its current form
is that all of us desire to be treated fairly even when we know that it's not possible.

We continue to rely on reason to satisfy the source of our actions; our emotional drivers.
Reason that cannot truly be justified as the objective way to be.
After all, we discover something new all the time. Our interpretation of it changed with every realisation that an existing system can be replaced by a better one.

In 20250122_NeverSplitTheDifference_pen, Chris Voss talks of the best practices for bending the counterpart's reality into accepting our propositions.
If life is a continuous series of negotiations, then aren't each of us, consciously or not, bending each other's reality with our respective emotions?

How can we ever hope to achieve a 'Unity of the World' when our memories and subsequent emotional structures drive us to form our own respective realities?