Feelings Seemingly Trump Facts
In Just a Thought, January 27th, 2009
Which is the most important factor in making a decision…our feelings or the facts?
Our culture has elevated feelings ahead of the facts when we face hard decisions. The most important question we ask is, “How do you feel about that?” We want to feel good.
In public education children are advanced from grade to grade even though they haven’t mastered the material required to advance because we don’t want to hurt their feelings. And we end up with one of the highest illiteracy rate in the industrialized world, find ourselves less and less competitive and wonder how it happened.
We try to make the world conform to what makes us feel good…for example, we try to make home ownership a right without consideration of the ability to repay the loan, then live with 81,000 home mortgage foreclosures in 2008 alone and spend billions of dollars in bailout money when reality sets in.
Wishing the truth away doesn’t make it so. Two plus two still equals four.
