The all-seeing eye

Over the years, I've developed - as I'm sure many others do - the habit of observing my surroundings. The original idea was to have this portion of my mind that would only observe and analyze things that happened around me in an unbiased way. I wanted this unbiased insight to ultimately correct my own flaws and make myself a better person. Alas, I was trying to decouple emotion from reason...one of the hardest things that can be done.

And essential too. Because, as the great thinkers have said over and over, we do not act on something unless we're convinced it's okay to do. That applies to everything. To us a robber is a person without scruples who cannot see the distinction between right and wrong. That's because we're judging that distinction from the comfort of our armchairs. To a person who's tottering on the brink of that distinction, who's in the trenches, who's on the field playing, things always look different. Scales always balance differently. Thus at the moment a robber is slipping into a house, he will be logically convinced that what's he's doing is absolutely justified.

And therein lies the fundamental flaw with logical reasoning - no matter how hard we try, our brains aren't just purely thinking machines. Humans have emotions, and those emotions always tend to bias our thinking. That's why some people justify that alcohol is allowed in Islam, and others go out of their way to prove that it isn't. Really, if you put your heart into it, you can justify anything. In the right emotional state, our minds will conveniently belittle the parameters that tend to swing the logical equation against our favor.

In the end, I think I did succeed a little bit. There is this little corner of my mind that just observes, like the motion camera in movies. It just takes in all that's happening around it. But just like a camera, it is ultimately powerless, possessing only the ability to sit and watch as event after event unfolds.