How many freaking psychology experiments have to be done before we accept the fact that people are NOT RATIONAL? I would personally like to smack Descartes upside the head for helping to start this nasty rumor. We are not extruded from a robot's ass. We are soft, fallible, organic, emotional. And speaking of emotional, it is about time that we move the paradigm* away from the idea that the best decisions are made in the absence of emotional influence. How many economists does it take to pound this into our heads? Intellectualizing our lives, stripped of acknowledged or leveraged emotions, being constantly "reasonable" and "down to earth" don't do us any favors as an ideal philosophy. Because we will always fail. Can we learn, as a culture, to integrate our emotions into a new "rationalism"? Or are emotions fundamentally incompatible with our capitalist culture and its values?
* Sorry I used the word paradigm. It's so over-used and mocked and it's one of those corporate-speak words that gets my panties in a bunch. But I'm borrowing it from Kuhn's usage here, so bring down yer hackles.
