Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [78]
Applications
Select one of the articles or book chapters you read in doing application 1 in Chapter 19. Reread it. Summarize it, using the approach given at the beginning of this chapter. Then analyze it as it done in the paragraph on abolishing grades. Be sure to get beyond your first impressions and to avoid the errors in thinking discussed in Chapters 6 through 15. Answer all the questions you raise, deciding exactly in what ways you agree with the idea and in what ways you disagree.
Analyze two of the following paragraphs in the manner demonstrated in the chapter. Be sure to get beyond your first impressions and to avoid the errors in thinking discussed in Chapters 6 through 15. Answer all the questions you raise. Deciding exactly in what ways you agree with the idea and in what ways you disagree.
Feeling and intuition are better guides to behavior than reasoning. We need immediate answers to many of our problems today, and feeling and intuition are almost instantaneous, while reasoning is painfully slow. Moreover, feeling and intuition are natural, uncorrupted by artificial values and codes imposed on us by society. Reasoning is a set of programmed responses, tight, mechanical, and unnatural. Thus, if we wish to achieve individuality, to express our real inner selves, the part of us that is unconditioned by others, we should follow our feelings and intuitions instead of our thoughts.
It is commonly accepted that the best way to improve the world and relations among its people is for everyone to curb his or her own self-interest and think of others. This concern with others is the basic idea in the golden rule and in most religions. It is, of course, questionable whether that goal is realizable. But more important, it is mistaken. It is not selfishness but the pretense of altruism that sets person against person. If everyone looked out for oneself, pursued his or her own interests, there would not only be less hypocrisy in the world; there would be more understanding. Each person would be aware of where everyone else stood in relation to him or her. And no one would be dependent on others.
The institution of marriage has outlived its usefulness. More and more people today particularly young people, are realizing that it makes more sense to have informal relationships. A couple should live together only as long as both want to. Whenever one want to end the relationship, he or she should be able to do so, neatly, without legal complications. This could be done if marriage were abolished. Everyone would benefit. Individuals would retain their individual freedom and be able to fulfill their own need to develop as a person, responding to their own changing values and interests.
College instructors should not be permitted to set restrictive attendance policies; they should be made to threat students as responsible adults, leaving each student free to decide his or her attendance behavior. By the time students are eighteen years old, they know their own strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else does and are mature enough to decide which classes they need to attend. Some courses will be new and challenging to them. Others will merely duplicate what they had in high school. Some instructors will ad to the students' store of information and challenge their intellect. Others will read the textbook to students, adding nothing more than they can get by reading it themselves. Left to exercise their own judgment, students can use their time wisely, attending the classes of the good, interesting, dedicated teachers and avoiding those of the dullards and deadbeats.
Every time parents tell their children how to look at an issue, they close the children's minds to other views. Every time parents present their political