Good decisions

I find it odd how we pride ourselves on making "informed" choices - yet emotion is still pretty much the determining factor when it comes to the choices we make. The reality is that we are not rational beings as much as we are rationalizing beings.

But there's another factor and I was compelled to clarify it as I recuperated from a near fatal attack back in 2013. For those who don't know the story, I was feeding the homeless when someone attacked me with a box cutter, severing the anterior branch of my carotid. Although my attacker went to trial and was found guilty of premeditated attempted murder, she was also declared insane, rather than being evil and as a consequence she was sent not to jail. but to a state psychiatric hospital where she's expected to remain for the rest of her life. This prompted me to ask the question: what does it really mean to be insane?

I found the following quote by G.K. Chesterton compelling:

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

He went on to explain that such people are working with a limited universe of facts, so they have no way of avoiding coming to the same conclusion over and over.

Again, it seems that emotion plays a part in this also. Even when things can be shown to be factually true, people will often refuse to accept these things. Acceptance of fact ends up being an act of will vs. intellect. And it all boils down to fear, though the category/object of fear can vary from person to person. For some, fear of their self-image being diminished results in the coping mechanism of needing to be right all the time. And the more fragile they are in relation to their egos, the more deeply entrenched they'll be in this behavior. For others, it's the kind of fear that accompanies an event in one's personal history.  The fear accompanies the desire to avoid re-experiencing that personal pain. And there are other types of scenarios I imagine that we've all seen in others, or ourselves.

It occurs to me that people could be helped if they could be made to feel 'safe' so as to be able to accept whatever truth it is that they currently can't embrace, prompting them to make flawed decisions over and over. The problem, truth is almost never "safe". It often requires a lot of courage and strength to embrace certain truths.

The bottom line: I've come to believe that the ability to make good decisions is commensurate with our ability to identify and conquer our own fears.