DURING my first visit to Singapore last week, my host and niece Cheryl – a certified public accountant thereat – took me to Sentosa Island where I met The Thinker – a larger-than-life recreation of the original bronze sculpture done by the 19th-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The black statue projects the image of a thinking hulk seated on a rock, left hand over his left knee and bowed head resting on his right hand.
For one brief moment, the statue set me into thinking about the rationality of the thinking man, who is different from other animals by virtue of his capacity to reason out. I remembered what I had read in high school – that the human brain is made up of around 13.6 billion nerve cells.
Since then, however, I have often wondered why the rational man too often commits irrational behavior. Is it because, according to science, the average person uses only one-third of his nerve cells in a lifetime, and that only two to five percent of these cells are turned “on” at any given time?
No wonder we are capable of turning “inhumane.” Let me tell you about a story I heard long ago from radio reporters covering the discovery of gold particles in Hinoba-an, Negros Occidental. The sketchy coverage turned what used to be a sleepy town into a beehive of fortune hunters from other provinces, some of whom had sold their lands to gamble on the gold hunt. But woe unto them who arrived too late to catch up; most of the gold had already been panned by the natives. That mad scramble for gold dust ended with one gold digger hacked to death.
Even the so-called intellectuals may make irrational decisions. I know a physician who defied the advice of a businessman. Against the latter’s “no please,” he put up a hospital out of money borrowed from the bank. Due to scarcity of well-off patients, however, the hospital closed and was foreclosed by the lending bank. The repentant doctor realized too late that he should have heeded the businessman’s advice.
As a college student in Manila in the late 1960s, I remember that incident where a movie actor shot to death a rich businessman whose only fault was vying for the love of a sexy actress. The actor paid for the crime with 12 years of otherwise productive life at the New Bilibid Prison. Following his discharge, he appeared on TV asking the youth to learn a lesson from his experience. Unfortunately, fatal road rages still make it to the front pages.
We have heard of rich men squandering their fortune on wine, women and gambling until losing them all. Indeed, emotions like greed, anger, envy and even love are capable of ruining the thinking process.
The human mind is also capable of rationalizing what to others is irrational. What better proof is there than poor mothers begetting more children than their moneyed counterparts? I have asked some of them, “Why?”
Most of them answer, “The children are our wealth. When my husband and I grow old, they will take good care of us.”
That belief is especially prevalent among farmers where parents expect their children to take over farm work. However, most children eventually marry and raise their own families. By repeating their parents’ mistake, their own children would also not be around to care for them in old age. They learn too late the falsity of the notion that the more babies they make, the more they contribute to productivity.
It is not uncommon to see teenagers plunging into early marriage; a deflowered woman marrying her rapist to recover “lost honor”; or a preacher patronizing a prostitute.
Ergo, the surrender of the intellect to the emotion looms as the primary reason why a person falls short of maximizing his mental power. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
