The Intellectual Mind
There are two type of people in this world; there are those that make decisions based on their emotions like I do, and those who rationalize every situation and make their decisions based on what they interpret as logic. Personally, that is a boring way to live in my mind, but I won't judge those who choose to live that way because in the end they probably think I am rash and illogical for my decisions. When I think of someone who decides to, or rather is forced to make intellectual decisions are teachers. There are of course some teachers who choose to act on their emotions for what they think would best benefit their students, but most teachers choose to go by the book for fear of judgement or the potential loss of employment. For example, when teachers are confronted with an unruly student, what do most teachers do? They send them to the office to receive their 'punishment', but there are some teachers who might know that it is something more than how they are acting, a family situation perhaps that they try to deal with themselves first. Like every decision, these both have their pros and cons and so do intellectual and emotional decision makers.
Being an intellectual decision maker does have many positive attributes, even though I do not usually use logic for every simple decision I make, it isn't always a bad thing to rationalize. In the situation I described, the logical thinker chose to send the student to the office while the emotional thinker chose to intervene themselves. But what if the student was violent, and attacked the teacher, then the student would not only have been sent to a detention home but the teacher would have had to deal with a black eye! The way I see it, being a logical thinker produces less negative consequences since using logic can usually keep you out of bad situations, but withholds so many more possible rewards in life. A logical thinker would call the police if he saw a woman being mugged instead of taking action, and the woman might be saved and have her stolen items returned, or she could have potentially been hurt or even killed due to the 'logical thinking' of the bystander who witnessed the crime ad it happened. No mindset is ever foolproof, every action, whether positive or negative, holds a consequence.
Just as thinking rationally can be a positive thing, it can just as easily become a terrible decision in the blink of an eye. So what if that bystander in the last theoretical situation would have taken action, he might have gotten himself killed, or would the victim have been sparred a terrible fait? And the student, what if he had just gone through the death of a relative, or the loss of a close friend, then does he deserve an emotional thinker to ask him what's wrong? Or should he simply be sent out to go to the principal to be assigned his punishment? No matter how you think about it, there are always consequences to a mindset, no way of thinking or making decisions if a perfect one. But one thing is for sure, thinking emotionally or deciding rationally in every situation is only asking for trouble, a truly smart person learns when to use logic to solve a problem, and when to sympathize and take risks.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven."
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
