This originally appeared on my political blog at https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2021/09/some-thoughts-on-thinking.html.
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Back in the 1980s, I had a colleague who worked as a sub-contractor, rather than as an employee. He talked me into wanting to change from being an employee to a subbie, largely on the basis of the extra money. My manager at that time listed all the problems: no super, no holidays, etc - the higher money was supposed to cover that, and greater insecurity. I favoured security, so chose to stay as an employee.
Fast forward a few years, and the same manager was trying to talk me into shifting from being an employee to being a subbie ... because of the higher money.
The insecurity issue was basically laughed at: "oh you'll be OK".
Anyone in that situation who starts to look at the minutiae of the second "offer" without considering the broader context and what this all meant for them is not thinking properly - I would go so far as to say they were being stupid.
I challenged that manager quite bluntly, asking if he was lying then or now, and he was so flustered he couldn't think of a response to that - other than a blatant lie that he was trying to look out for me.
What he was looking out for was what was the company considered best for the company - and there had been changes in employment law and business management thinking where they considered worker insecurity - which they misdescribed as worker flexibility - was "better" for the company.
In my opinion, all it did was relieve the company management of the need to think ahead, plan, and manage the business's needs and the workers reasonable expectations. Instead, they could lazily respond to the currents of the day and things as they noticed them.
Yes, this was the start of neoliberalism, when the competence and quality of management started degrading.
Getting sucked in to the manager's worldview (or "the premise of the question") would have been flawed thinking.
Giving in to that flawed thinking would likely have been as a result of unacknowledged emotions.
Unacknowledged emotions leads me to the next example, roughly a couple of decades later, of "flawed" (non) thinking, which was a notoriously sexist (to the point of misogyny, at times) male telling a trans woman that he had "naturally" assumed she would have lived her home life as if she were male.
It showed that male's bias towards a false view that being male was somehow "better" - that is, it was sexism personified.
It was also utterly stupid, as it showed no mental effort whatsoever had been expended to come to terms with the FACT that the woman was clearly NOT of the view that being male was "better", and the assumption that a woman would arrange her home life as if was male was utterly moronic.
All of this came about because of that arrogant male's incompetence with emotions - to the extent that he was unaware that he had emotions.
However, knowing and being comfortable with emotions doesn't automatically mean one is a clear thinker, either.
Chronologically between the two events is one where I helped a (then) friend help her friend (all of us female) escape from a domestic violence situation.
Friend's friend had to go to court to get a court order, and the two of us accompanied her for support. I don't remember the details now, but the aim was to get an order relating to personal property. The judge pointed out that the orders did not normally include one form of support friend's friend wanted, but he would specifically include that in this case, and they just needed to tell the court officer.
This is where friend and friend's friend emotions overwhelmed their mind: their "thinking" was along the lines of "well of course that is right and just and proper, and friend's friend deserves that, so the law SHOULD be providing it and therefore it does".
The FACT that the law didn't provide that was swamped by the emotions on the topic of what they both considered - and they were morally right on this, albeit not legally - friend's friend should have.
When talking to the court officer, who said "no, the law does not require that", instead of saying "the judge told us to tell you he had added - please read the order a bit further on", they reacted from a view that what they thought should be was, and were angry - to the point of cutting me off when I tried to explain that. (They understood what I was saying hours later, that evening - and were so insecure they still resisted it.)
Clear thinking in humans is not just a matter of developing powers of logic, induction/deduction, etc. Humans also have emotions - even, and perhaps especially, in the ones who deny or try to control them (as evidenced by some judges' decisions being overturned on appeal, I suspect).
As I wrote in April, 2020:
shine from your mind,
unless you first
shine from your heart.
