Most humans live in their instinctual feelings: love, guilt, hate, fear, pride, anger, happiness, awe…. Unless something reverberates in our beating heart, the idea doesn’t feel real to us. Logic can seem as alien as Spock. We cocoon in the comfort of our instincts, and our modern technology entertains us with exciting fantasies about alien technology manipulating our brains. Ironically, our cable TV hearth targets our instinctual responses, in order to keep our attention on imaginary loves and fears for profits. Instinctual thinking limits us to recognizing our confusion, delusions, and fear. But then what?

No. If we’re going to solve our trouble with thinking, we need to overcome the limits of our instinctual thinking, ask honest questions, organize how we think, be methodical and logical. We need a far more advanced way of thinking: rational thinking. How do we go about that? Fortunately, rational thinkers keep records.

Socrates began the western history of rational thought by asking questions methodically, and his Socratic method is still employed at advanced universities. His student Plato believed that knowledge acquired through reason is more ideal than what our senses and experiences teach us. And Plato’s student Aristotle tempered that view to organize all thought rationally, whether the ideas came from observation or logic, inventing the scientific method and categorizing knowledge into physics, biology and politics. Aristotle’s logic helped him determine that the Earth was a sphere and that rain resulted from evaporation, around 350 BCE. In China around the same time, Confucius, Mencius & Xunzi similarly codified more rational ways of thinking. Math was already long known to the Egyptians and was advanced by later Greeks like Euclid and Archimedes.

But, most humans still being primarily instinctual thinkers, the ancient rationalism was almost lost after the Visigoths, Vandals and other barbarians sacked Rome, and in the Dark Ages of Europe, when only one story was read, the world turned flat and stupid again. Math continued to advance in the Muslim world, where the Indian decimal system was combined with Greek math and ancient Babylonian formulae. Around 825, the Persian Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi used the Indian concept of zero to balance equations, inventing Algebra. Some 375 years later, an Italian named Fibonacci brought this math to Europe.

The Church was unable to stop the Black Death, and the survivors started to rethink everything. Muslim scholars arrived in Spain and Italy to share their knowledge, and Renaissance scholars dusted off the Ancient Greek tomes and hit the books. The Medici, a merchant family in Florence, funded some of the most important scientists of the Renaissance: Brunelleschi, Da Vinci and Galileo. After exploring Roman ruins, Brunelleschi designed a huge, unsupported dome for the Florence Cathedral, proving that math still works even after being forgotten for centuries. Da Vinci studied human anatomy by dissecting cadavers, describing the nerves that connect our senses directly to our brains.

Then, Copernicus explained that the Earth revolved around the sun—as proposed by Aristarchus 1800 years earlier—, publishing both his observations and the math behind them. The Scientific Revolution had begun. Despite the Church’s opposition—including burning Giordano Bruno, who theorized that distant stars were like our sun with planets of their own, at the stake in Rome—Galileo made more detailed observations, expanding Physics and Astronomy, describing the moons of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings and the Milky Way, before being imprisoned for the remainder of his life. Francis Bacon described the scientific method (2,000 years after Aristotle). Newton reduced Physics to simple formulae, requiring neither God nor magic to employ.

René Descartes wrote cogito, ergo sum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, and, much as Plato before him, Descartes decided to believe only in what was supported by reason. The Age of Enlightenment began. Now, not just the infallibility of Church dogma, but the Divine Right of Kings was threatened. The ancient Greek ideal of Democracy returned. Revolutions followed. Americans who believe that our founders were guided by Christian faith have history exactly backwards. America was founded by rational thinkers, like Franklin, Jefferson and Madison, whose philosophy was explained by their compatriot founding father, Thomas Paine, in his book, The Age of Reason.

Rational thinking survived the collapse of civilizations, barbarian invasions, centuries of religious inculcation, enforced ignorance, public executions, tyranny, torture and wars. In the modern era, irrational fears and fact-free conformity still vie with what Judge Learned Hand called “the eventual supremacy of reason”. Rational thinking has proven itself to be both correct and valuable. Rational thinking is how we solve problems using facts, logic and math.  Rational thinking is what we learn in school and what we use in many professions, such as ecology, economics and engineering.  Boring, repetitive, linear, slow, and pain-staking though it may be, Edison consistently applied rational thinking to develop marketable light bulbs, transmitters, recording devices, movie cameras, batteries, coffee percolators and more in his lab and study below.

The general objective of rational thinking is to get the right answer.  The specific problem and methods vary, but we do not think rationally in order to get the wrong answer.  That would be stupid.  Rational thinking is smart.  The origin of your rational thinking is especially important.  If your thinking begins with a neutral observation, a plain fact, without embellishment, without judgement and without any bias of personal feelings, then you may begin thinking clearly in a rational way.  We gather information, make sure the facts and data are accurate, we use reliable methods, and we check our work.  The reason we went to school, studied, did our homework and passed tests, is so that when we need to solve a problem, we have the skills to think rationally to solve it.  

While others may wallow in their instinctual thinking, many of us primarily think rationally.  Fighting is counter-productive.  People should be more logical.  Facts matter, which is why we keep track of them in history books and databases.  If you want to know which player is better, look at their statistics.  Get the information you need, be organized and think it through step by step.  

This is how to succeed at work and in life.  Status matters less than income, and income matters less than savings.  You decide what you eat by cost, time to prepare, variety, nutrition and sufficient calories.   When you attend social events, you seek out those who are informative, especially in a way that might profit or benefit you.  Marriage is desirable for many reasons: two can live as cheaply as one, two heads are better than one, you can share life’s burdens and each of your strengths will compensate for the other’s weaknesses.  You want your children to be well-educated and financially successful.  You are planning for your retirement and even your death. 

Rational thinkers view their way as correct and believe that the world would be better off if more people thought rationally. Yes. Rational thinking may not feel real to instinctual thinkers, but air travel is a reality. And to rational thinkers, physics is what makes the world go round.