There are many insurmountable hurdles in achieving a perfectly rational mind. Human beings are a mish-mosh of emotions and rationality. Raymond Tusk from House of Cards put it best when he said: "the rational and irrational complement each other. Individually, they're far less powerful." And the guy's a fictitious billionaire energy mogul so I'd take his word on this one.
Now I'm the type that seriously favors my left brain; logic and rationality are useful, emotions aren't and I have no patience for useless things. But the irrational side is what makes us human. Engineers can program computers and robots to follow a logical set of code. Logic can be replicated, but human emotion can't and it has it's own value. Irrational thinking is what saved a ton of peoples' lives in The Dark Knight. In case you don't remember the Joker had two ferries rigged with bombs. One ferry was filled to the brim with innocent civilians, the other with Gotham's worst thieves and murders. Both were rigged with explosives and each ferry was given the detonator to the OTHER ferry. If one ferry blew the other up then that ferry would be saved, if neither did it by midnight then the Joker would blow them both up.
Think about your two options in this scenario:
1. You blow up the other boat and live.
2. You don't and get blown up, either by the other boat or by the joker.
So your two options are literally live or die. It's a simple choice, a rational mind would have blown up the other boat in a heartbeat. One such "rational" mind on the civilian boat points this out and notes that the criminals deserved to die more than the civilians did. Eventually he takes the detonator but doesn't pull the trigger. Faced with the choice of life and death both boats chose death rather than kill the other boat. An amazingly irrational decision that bought just enough time for Batman to swoop in and save them both.
Emotions and the irrational have their value, but are also the source of the biggest flaw in human thinking. Most people let their desires cloud rationality, causing them to ignore consequences that aren't immediate. Think about all the people who believe in a religion that holds that you will be punished for sins. Not a single one of those people, myself included, has completely avoided those sins. Often times we knowingly do these things for no other reason than the pleasure from said sin is immediate and the consequences are far off. But this is expected, believing in an afterlife is one thing, visualizing it happening is another. Plus there's the rather moronic expectation that you'll live a long enough life to be "good later" so we tend to ignore the consequences right now.
Now let's look at the shorter term; it doesn't take a lifetime for us to ignore non-immediate consequences. A kid enters the workplace at 23 years old and gets a decent job. He saves up $10000 in two years and is wondering what to do with the money. He could lock that money up in a Roth IRA, earn 11% a year and turn that ten grand into more than half a million by the time he can collect on the IRA, that's $580,000 tax-free. But no one does that at 25, instead they buy a motorcycle, a new car, or a 65' T.V. Choosing the sexy option that provides enjoyment now is usually more preferable than waiting for the better prize.
Even shorter term now: grades in school. There's two ways to look at this one. For some white folk the need to graduate high school in four years is overshadowed by the current need to party, have fun, and not focus on schoolwork when your future depends on it. For some people of any other race the need to avoid the can of whoop-ass for getting bad grades at the end of the semester is overshadowed by those same reasons. Think about the bums you remember from high school, the ones who wouldn't even try or show up to class. It's so stupid looking back, to not graduate or not get into college because you were skipping school to get high or even just sleep and play video games instead of going to class.
Moving on to my favorite example, this one takes place in a matter of minutes. The last few examples have been over the course of months, years and decades. Keep in mind this doesn't apply if your parents wake you up or if your parents are home when you're supposed to be at school. During my last semester I had to wake up at 7:30 every morning to get to my 8:30 classes on time. These classes were ones where I needed to be in class to understand the material properly. Every so often I'd wake up to the sound of my alarm and just feel so tired that I'd go back to sleep, knowing full well that after I wake up I'll spend an extra 5 hours trying to understand material and copy notes for a 50 minute class.
After the consequences eventually come into the picture all those immediate but fleeting pleasures that we enjoyed at some cost in the future seem so horribly trivial that we marvel at our stupidity back then. Think about the few kids who took those 15 A.P.s in high school and put in work while everyone else was living it up. They were the ones that got those ivy-league acceptances in April. I'm not saying that these kids were all work and no play but that they had the foresight to budget their time and energy responsibly. The retirees who invested when they were young are counting their millions now. The kid who woke up for his 8:30 class is able to enjoy a stress free nap later in the day instead of copying notes. The religious person is able to enjoy a clean and healthy conscious. This trait is naturally ingrained in our psyche and it takes serious strength to overcome. Most people realize this over a grueling period of mistake after mistake and only fix it after an extraordinary period of time. The people who realize this earlier on and overcome it in their everyday decision making are the ones who end up being successful in life, especially those who start from a young age.
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