Human Ecstasy

Be Rational: It’s a much better way to live...

What is it to truly be Rational? I have always believed that being Rational is to be able to give proper explanation of anything that a person believes in. To be truly rational, one must learn to not be stubborn, and to accept the fact that they’re not always right. This may seem like an easy thing to accomplish, but trust me, in reality it is quite the other way around.

Since time immortal, the greatest weapon that man had has been and always will be his ever learning mind. It is this weapon that enables him to build great empires but it is also this very same weapon that made him destroy them too.

It was the Greeks who first discovered philosophy.

They started to question ancient practices and general beliefs in their hunger for a more detailed explanation of why something was happening. They developed principles, morals and started to abide by ethics; hence securing their place in history by becoming one of the most biggest and powerful empire of all time. Someone would bring up a topic and his views on the matter, another person would give his statement on the matter, and thus debates would go on until everybody arrived at a general consensus of the topic being discussed.

Suppose, some people are playing a game of poker, and are making arbitrary moves as an emulation of other people they have seen playing poker. It is not that they’re playing poker badly but in fact it is that they are not playing poker at all.

It is often very difficult to correctly define the difference between doing something badly and not doing it at all. In the above case, one must spend some time with the poker players and explain to them the rules and ways of the game. Otherwise, if you simply try to correct a move, they would simply blurt out that that is the way they play poker.
The same is with many cases noticed in daily life, take the case of a student giving an exam and he simply gives mugged up answers to all the questions asked by the teacher. To the teacher it may seem that the student is doing well but in reality he might not have understood anything at all.

Reasoning is a very important action performed by the very beautiful human brain. It is of utmost importance that it should be perfected. To being reasonable is in itself an activity that some people do so poorly, that they think they’re being reasonable but in truth they aren’t, actually they’re simply thinking something that a hardly acceptable logical explanation of their poorly-thought out actions.

Webster defines rationality as the ability to be reasonable. It couldn’t have been defined any better.

Rationality is very much required and even essential in today’s modern society. I can’t remember the countless times someone I know has acted irrationally on account of faulted beliefs or anything for the matter.  Being perfectly reasonable is ofcourse an obvious improbability because no one is willing to give up their views on everything, but we can strive to become more rational. Many of us do things without thinking it through, I accept I do it myself quite often. It is after we’ve went through and done the maximum damage possible, that we realize our foolishness and start over. To be able to calculate the pros and cons of everything is not what I’m suggesting, there’re some things that a person must do on instinct, but being practical is also a necessity.  We must see what we do, through someone else’s shoes. We must consider the other person’s feelings and what the potential outcome of our not thought out actions could be. Being good at being rational and reasonable is not very easy, and is many a time prone to mistakes and misconceptions, but still as a burden on our race as being the sole problem of this planet, I can simply request all of us to be reasonable and hope for a rational world.

If all of us can take a pledge to at least try and be rational, to sit down for a moment, and calculate their next move, I think that we’ll solve most of our society’s problems on that very day, very moment itself.

Ishan S Saluja