Facts and feelings

There is a phrase that has become very popular that says "facts don't care about your feelings". And while I understand the intended message, something like no matter how you feel about the truth, the truth will prevail over you. It doesn't matter if you like gravity or not, there is gravity anyway. I would like to turn it around, because many times I think the opposite happens too. Perhaps for many people the phrase correctly said would be "my feelings don't care about your/the facts". We like to think that the society we live in, and particularly the West, is this rational civilization, based on science, knowledge, and whatever. At least that's what they're trying to make us believe. And that the human being is a very rational animal. But what we observe in the world is many times the opposite, because we live in a society governed to a great extent by people's feelings, not necessarily by "facts."

In a past post I talked about this, people do not react directly to reality, they react to what their mind tells them is real, they react to their beliefs, they react to their thoughts, they react to their feelings. If a person believes that something false is real, that person will react as if it were real, regardless of whether it really is or not. Lies have very real effects on the world. The falsehood too. Ignorance often presides over human action. If people reacted only to the truth, to the "facts," or to reality, then we would probably live in a perfect world where there is no failure or error. But that's not the world we live in.

In the world we live in, markets rise and fall according, not necessarily to facts, but to beliefs, to emotions, to people's feelings. A company can broke, or arise, simply because people believed that it was going to do it, by rumors and falsehoods. We see it often even with cryptocurrencies, where there is a lot of speculation and where in many cases the price of a cryptocurrency is simply based on the feelings that people have about it, and not based on facts or something similar. Remember that value is not something inherent and objective, as many people tend to think, but is something subjective, and value ends up determining the price.

Presidents are elected and governments are formed based on feelings and emotions. Countries are invaded, wars are declared, bombs are dropped, simply because of the fear of the people and of the rulers themselves of things that many times are not even real.

So yes, in the world we live in, many times our feelings don't care about facts. We have to realize that, many times, we become so obsessed with what is objective, with reality itself, that we forget that the subjective also exists and also determines the world in which we live. Not only does the truth matter, it also matters what people believe to be true. In fact, many of the things that some call facts are simply deeply held beliefs. I myself don't like to use this word because it demands a degree of certainty that I often don't have.

People have the power to make their beliefs come true as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, both the objective reality (truth) and the subjective perception of it (opinion), matter. The human is a rational animal, but also an emotional one, for which his actions will be determined not only by facts, but also by feelings. So, in a way, both facts and feelings care.

---

Image Source: 1