“Let your heart be your guide.”
This is a wonderful slogan for story telling and drama. It is less useful in other aspects of civilized living.
Heart-thinking is instinctive thinking. It comes easily and feels real comfortable. But keep in mind where our instinctive thinking comes from, as in, why we have it. (I'll discuss that shortly.) In the meantime, keep in mind that our instinctive thinking is well designed for Neolithic Village living, not civilized living.
Like responding to beauty, feeling guilty is a form of instinctive thinking. It is signaling. Beauty signals the instinct to cooperate with the beautiful object or person, guilt signals the instinct that our actions are threatening the survival of the community. Like beauty, guilt arouses powerful feelings, and it can do a lot of good... if it is coordinated with good head-thinking. When either are acted upon impulsively, without good head-thinking, they produce a lot of goat sacrificing.
We are evolved. Our bodies are a high performance fit for living on Earth. All our bodies are. We are all high performance because we each have trillions of ancestors who passed The Grandchild Test - they had lots of grandchildren. Evolution supports what works - it's that simple. Contrary to some modern myths such as Social Darwinism, evolution supports both diversity and cooperation - dogs eat dogs, and they also hunt in packs.
Likewise, our thinking is a high performance fit for living on Earth. It is also diverse and cooperative. Those kinds of thinking processes that come up often in day-to-day living, and in generation-after-generation, are supported by high performance designs in the nervous system. Think of our vision system as an example; computers of today still can't equal it. This kind of thinking is instinctive. It's fast and easy thinking - so fast and easy we take it for granted. Again, think of vision. We don't have to think about seeing, we just do it.
We also have a second kind of thinking. It's the kind of thinking that deals with situations that come up rarely, but are important to deal with. These thinking processes handle novelty - strange things. This is the kind of thinking we use when we learn - analytic thinking or head-thinking. When we encounter a new situation, something instinctive thinking can’t handle, we use analytic thinking to deal with it. We learn and then we use what we learn when the situation comes up again. Think of arithmetic and bike riding. If this new situation becomes commonplace, as in, we face it regularly and for hundreds of generations, then the human brain gradually hardwires the thinking, that deals with the particular situation, into an instinct. Dealing with it becomes faster and easier because we don't have to keep learning how to deal with it. Instead we instinctively know how to deal with it.
The catch is instinctive thinking takes time to develop - dozens to thousands of generations. This means that our instinctive thinking is well developed for living in the Neolithic Village environment, and hardly at all developed for living in Industrial or Information Age environments. In these environments we need to use a whole lot of learned - analytic - thinking.
Guilt is a feeling that we have taken a wrong action, or should take some action we haven't yet. This is an instinct, a signaling instinct. In the Neolithic Village environment it is signaling that we are threatening the survival of the community. Example: Stealing a tool from a neighbor. The neighbor's existence is disrupted, and healing the disruption is going to take more resources than the value the thief will gain. Plus if the neighbor (victim) ever discovers the thief, distrust and violence or exile will follow, which will consume even more resources. This has been true for thousands of generations, so guilt signaling is a way of thinking that is well developed for surviving in the Neolithic Village environment. (Note that stealing from strangers allows Us versus Them instinctive thinking to kick in, which results in decreased feelings of guilt.) Guilt signaling is great in Neolithic Village but, it can be perverted when it springs up in the civilized environment.
One big difference that effects the relevance of guilt is prosperity. In the civilized environment we have many more choices available in how to spend our time, attention, and resources. Guilt signaling is not designed for such a rich environment. When we finish an activity, dust off our hands, and think to ourselves, “Good! That’s finished. Now what should I do next?”, it is very easy for instinctive guilt thinking to pop up and start offering answers such as “You should help the poor now.” Such an answer may tug hard on heartstrings, but it may not be the right action for the circumstances. Answering this from-the-heart suggestion is where good, cool-headed thinking becomes quite valuable.
“I did it with the best of intentions.”
When it comes to goat sacrificing Good Intentions are the hand-maiden of guilt. The combination leads to wasteful actions, and the good intentions feeling is armor against criticism when the failure and waste is pointed out. “That help the poor charity I gave to was a scam? I didn’t know! I gave to them with the best of intentions in mind.” This means that, just as with guilt, actions based on good intentions need to have cool-headed thinking applied to make sure that good results actually come from the activity.
Using good intentions as a justifier opens the door to repeating waste. “I did [X] last time with the best of intentions, I’ll do [Y] this time with the best of intentions. One of these days, one of my good intentioned activities is going to pay off.” This kind of thinking can justify a lot of waste.
The following chapters will be about places where the mix of guilt and good intentions are producing a lot of waste. Guilt is a powerful feeling, and adding good intentions as a justifier is a potent way to feel even better about taking action on a guilt-inspired activity. But if some good head-thinking is not mixed in, the result of this mix will be a lot of goat sacrificing waste.