Walking the middle path

There is so much conversation today about what is right and wrong. We have boiled morality down to the choice of saving the world or saving our grandparents. We demonize the other as Masters of Destruction, be it economic or at risk populations. There can be no nuance. But in private discourse we all have these conversations.

I’m not here to debate morality. For one I find it is a rather flimsy piece of real estate for most who decry theirs most vehemently. But I also find that there are very few absolutes in this world and morality does not escape this. Instead, I look to expand our view of possibilities and broach the idea that two truths can simultaneously coexist.

Data is cold and heartless. It doesn’t care about our feelings or our intentions. It just is. How we interpret said data may be rife with bias but the data itself is agnostic. This is our logic side.

Feelings are unpredictable and erratic. They don’t care about facts or truths or consequence. They are what connect us and divide us all at once, it’s how we relate.  This is our emotional side.

We need logic and emotion to be human. Each of us naturally gravitate more towards one or the other. Self awareness helps us to recognize those biases.

People make choices based on emotion. We like to claim we are logic based but most of our decision making will be heavily influenced by our emotional mind. We can move towards a middle path by using more logical mind in our process. We must learn to examine data that both supports and can potentially disprove our bias. That is not easy.

We must also realize that logic on its own is psychopathic in nature. We can not look at the world through a lens devoid of emotional mind. Even when we claim to, we are often using our own bias or value as our viewfinder. The data can confirm our emotional desire to see a different outcome than that of our current situation, and that can be just as dangerous as basing decisions on pure emotion.

We aren’t machines. We aren’t globs of emotional discontent. We are human. And that is a beautiful amalgam of logic and emotion. It is messy and challenging but we can all be better by simply working towards that middle path. And isn’t that the goal? To be better?