GREAT AMERICAN THINK-OFF FINAL FOUR ESSAYS FOR 2007

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Which Should you Trust More-Your Head or Your Heart?

Paul D. Allick
Burnsville,  MN

Trust Your Heart

Recently I have had to think a good deal about the tension between heart and head.   I supported the invasion of Iraq and now openly admit that I was wrong.  I supported the invasion out of my heart and not out of my head.  As the evidence was produced I questioned it in my head.  My heart would push my mind onward,

“But, even the Clinton Administration feared that Iraq had chemical weapons” my heart would insist.
“But there is no proof, we should keep up the sanctions and no-fly zones” my mind would retort.
“Saddam Hussein pays suicide bombers to attack Israeli citizens and is ignoring U.N. resolutions” my heart pleaded.

The heart is valuable to the human experience.  Without movements of the heart we would never know love.  We would have no poetry, no narratives, no music, no faith.  But acting from the heart has its underbelly.  Acting from the heart can quickly become nothing but reactivity.

Reactivity is the easiest energy to tap into.  It is fueled by passions like love, fear and anger.  Its force compels us to act rather than to think.  Think of all the hyperbolic statements we make in the midst of an argument.  Later we feel guilty, insensitive and thickheaded.  Our brains shut off in order to make a point.  Our body tingles with anticipation to make the next point.  We are not listening to the other person; we are planning our next volley.

Our hearts can get us into all kinds of messy situations.  How many of us have fallen into lust and thought it was love and soul attraction?  How many of us have become unduly angry because we heard something wrong?  How many of us have eaten too much because we thought we were famished only to regret it later?

The mind is about wisdom. The mind is about stepping back and taking a breath.  It is when we step back and make an assessment that we consider that we might be wrong.  Here we discover patience;  we discover a sense of humility which grounds us.  Out of patience and humility comes wisdom.

What comes from the mind is a proper resignation.  If something deep down just does not feel right shouldn’t we step back from it and think?  Isn’t that actually where we come to useful and obliging perceptions and insights?

Everything in my heart told me that we had to protect our country from regimes like the one in Iraq.  My mind told me that this was true but something just didn’t sit right with the prospect of an all out invasion.

Without the discipline which comes from thinking, the mind, the movements of the heart are unbridled.  Without the mind our lives would be nothing more that reaction instead of planning and execution.  The mind matures.  The heart does not need to mature.  Maturity comes from the wisdom that teaches us how to handle our reaction and moods.

The images and moods of a great poem come out of the heart.  The structuring of the poem comes from the mind.  Without the structuring the message of the poem would never be communicated.  An advantageous policy of national security begins in the heart.  The prioritizing and implementation of the policy should come from the mind.   We are patriotic and we are concerned with innocent civilian lives, but without the intellect to guide how we will accomplish our plans we can actually make ourselves more unsafe.  Religious faith comes from the heart but without the tutelage of the mind we can hastily give into zealotry in order to protect those deep emotional ties to our beliefs. 

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Robert R. Anderson
Shalimar, FL

Trust Your Heart

William Butler Yeats, wrote: “The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.”  If I had realized the truth in those works earlier in life, I could have saved myself a lot of grief.  By the time I was 29 I had made quite a few bad decisions, and was about to make another.  I was looking for a job. The decision came down to two companies.  One offered higher pay, better benefits, a nicer work environment, and more potential for advancement that the other.  Easy decision, right?  Wrong!  Something just didn’t “feel” right.  Before making my decision, I talked to an old friend, expecting him to tell me I was being paranoid and to take the better job.  He didn’t.  Instead, he told me to “go with my gut” and mentally walked me back through several of my previous bad decisions.  In every case, he showed me where I had ignored my misgivings for the sake of making the logical choice.  I decided to take what appeared to be the less promising job.  Three months later the company that I would have been working for had I not talked to my friend was investigated by the SEC and closed down.

Every day we make decisions; large and small, important and trivial, of lasting impact and of momentary consequence.  We make these decisions based on several factors including logic and reason; otherwise known as the mind.  However, humans are more than beings of intellect and reason, and our decisions are based on more than mere logic and cold calculation.  The factors involved in our decision making that fall outside the realm of the mind include intuition, passion, and a sense of right and wrong.  These factors are of the heart, the vital center and source of your being, emotions, and sensibilities.  These latter factors are far more trustworthy that the former.

With the exception of the very young, everyone has made at least one bad decision during his or her lifetime.  An honest appraisal of every bad decision made in your life will reveal that each bad decision was made with your head in resistance to the cries of your heart.  Whereas your rational side can only weigh the observable facts, your emotional side has the ability to see beyond what can be perceived with the five senses.  Your heart understands things that cannot be explained or recognized by your mind.  This understanding comes from somewhere deeper; somewhere more in touch with reality. Proponents of making decisions solely with your head will argue that logic and rational thought will always lead to good decision making.  The fallacy of this position is that a failure to possess all the facts and, more importantly, the imperfect perception of those facts, produces decisions that are uninformed and imperfect.  Contrarily, a decision made with the heart not only takes into consideration the facts, but also perceives other factors such as whether or not the person giving those facts is being honest and the basic discernment of right and wrong.  Discounting the pleas of your heart precludes the use of the most basic and trustworthy factors of good decision making.

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Joe Kaiser
Minneapolis, MN

Trust Your Head

The heart should be trusted more than the head because it is the home of our conscience, our moral compass pointing us in the direction of right over wrong. The heart is our most reliable source of truth. When we listen to our hearts, we know which way to go.
 
The only problem is that it is often difficult to hear our hearts over the din that is coming from our heads. Our head is like a friend who loves to hear himself talk. In love with the sound of his own voice, he chatters on endlessly making the same points over and over. The heart is the home of our emotions while the head is the home of logic. And while emotions are pure feelings, raw without an agenda of their own, the logic used by the head is almost always in the service of an argument, an argument that serves our own self-interest. The head is our very own internal, partisan, think tank. It gathers, analyses and ultimately spins data to suit its own purposes. Our head is involved in a constant game of political calculus, judging our relative status and power compared to those around us while the heart simply knows the truth. The head is the source of lies. 
 
What s more is that even when the head is attempting to act altruistically, it is working with limited data. The head makes decisions based on hard data; tactile facts, figures and observations that can be weighed, analyzed and judged. Unfortunately there is more out there than the head is aware of. Our eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin are extremely sensitive instruments. They pick up much more data than the logical head can process. The heart has an advantage. It has the ability to synthesize the information that the head misses. We say trust your gut, or listen to your heart. What we re acknowledging is that even when something doesn t  make sense,  our heart knows the answer. 
 
I used to volunteer at a rape crisis center. We referred to the clients we saw as survivors rather than victims. Each one of them had been in situations where the decisions they made could literally mean the difference between life and death. If they survived to be there talking to us, they had made the right decisions. Even so, they all too often second-guessed themselves, concerned that they over reacted, or that they hadn t reacted soon enough, that they had done something wrong. Betrayed, wounded and in real pain, their logical head attempted to think its way out of the suffering. In so doing, it only prolonged the healing by replaying every detail over and over, looking for a different outcome, someone to blame, and ultimately, the reason this had happened. Only when they could stop thinking and actually feel the pain in their hearts could they begin to heal.
 
To stop thinking and begin feeling the sorrows and joys of our hearts is no easy task. It is like trying to appreciate a beautiful flower with the TV blaring in the background. And the noise form this TV is filled with judgments based on insecurities and worries. The head is like a 500-channel media universe, filling the airwaves with a constant Babel of banality in a war against silence. 
 
The heart craves silence. Truth is found in silence. When we turn down the volume of the head, we are able to notice beauty and feel peace.
 
I am a musician, a cellist. To make music, to create beauty, to evoke and channel emotion through this tool of wood, strings and horse hair is not an easy task. There are a thousand challenges to creating and maintaining sounds that faithfully represent the intentions of the composer while simultaneously stir something in your heart and the hearts of your listeners. Many hours are spent analyzing and overcoming these challenges, honing your craft, perfecting your technique. The head does well in taking on these challenges. And yet, music can only be made when our head is turned off and the heart is turned on. Many a student has been told,  Don t over think it,   you re trying too hard,   relax, let it flow.  What they re really being told is,  Trust your heart.  As with music, as with art and as with the art of living, don t over think it. Trust your heart. 

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Paul Ruterbusch
Flushing, MI

Trust Your Head

The fundamental focus of this question lies in the determination as to whether we should rely on deliberate intellectual thought, or an emotional response, to guide and direct the choices and decisions in our lives. The answer to this depends much on the foundation of morals, ethics, and values of the individual who is making those decisions. These basic principles affect our attitude, which is a conscious approach to choose right and wrong and is often emotionally driven. Typically, an altruistic person has a more positive emotional attitude and tends to be led by rational, helping, caring, actions. If, however, a person with values that are based on a selfish, self-centered, egocentric mind-set, their viewpoint often coincides with a more negative emotional attitude that tends to lead to irrational harmful behavior.
 
Therefore, it is important to understand the interactions of attitude, emotion, decisions, speech, and actions in all that we do. To be wise in the use of these components takes careful directed intellectual thought and is critical to the demonstration of ones principles and who we truly are.
 
Life causes a continuous interaction to occur amongst all people, where every choice and deed that we do has an impact on something or someone in sometime. If we simply react on impulse and emotion or out of ignorance, without the forethought of what the outcome will be, we can experience unforeseen repercussions that may result in profound consequences.
 
If you examine the majority of all criminal, mean, or evil activities that take place in the world, they can be found to be fueled by emotion and motivated by, or are impulsive reactions to, either anger, sex, power, or money, driven by narcissism and self-satisfaction. Most criminal pursuit is directed with emotional thoughts of only the selfish pleasure or satisfaction that will result in accomplishing their crime. Little to no thought is given to the consequences of their actions, to themselves or to anyone else. The offender ignores both the implications of getting caught and the destruction that is inflicted on the victim and others. If any thought does take place in the commitment of the immoral act, seldom does the thought proceed to maturity, beyond the deed and the exciting pleasurable feelings of triumph, to think through to the realization of the penalty or cost to all.
 
Contrary to this are the numerous accomplishments of mankind that required, no demanded, the combined intellectual thought of not just one person but of many. Often spurred on by the deliberation and insight of one individual, new ideas have lead to many great achievements. Landing on the moon, satellites to explore the universe, aircraft, vehicles, computers, lasers, radar, sonar, nano technology, electronics, cell phones, television, and the list goes on and on, the devices and accomplishments that have occurred or taken place, not by emotional desires, but by careful, calculating, deliberate, intellectual thought and the workings of the mind. The Internet collects the thoughts and ideas of millions, and has expanded communications and the knowledge base to unprecedented levels unforeseen by anytime in history. 
 
Life is a continuous process of learning, choosing, guessing, and taking chances. All of which is based upon the foundation of intellectual thought. Everyone believes what he or she wants to believe, and we can rationalize anything we wish to be able hold on to whatever truth we desire. Life is all about what happens to us and how we react to what happens. How we react depends on our attitude and values. Learning and growth in knowledge and wisdom of what is truly important most often comes at times of adversity when we must use our minds to solve the issues that cause us to face the difficulties in life. How we react to the negative as well as the positive, in all that surrounds us everyday of our lives, determines our character. Seldom, if ever, do emotions resolve any of the challenges that we face everyday of our lives. The conscious mental choices, the decisions and actions that truly have meaning in our lives, are driven by and are deliberate, carefully thought out, and precisely acted upon, based on the intellectual thoughts of the mind and not the emotional reactions of the heart. For it is the mind in which all progress, advancement, and accomplishments are found. And it is only through the power of the mind that we all lead our lives with the values to reach beyond the present towards the hope of the future.

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