A MIND ALL LOGIC IS LIKE A KNIFE ALL BLADE, IT MAKES THE HAND BLEED THAT USES IT.

- Rabindranath Tagore

In the 1940s, the World war 2 was at its peak. During such challenging times, a country and specifically one person had the brilliant idea of the Manhattan project. The ensuring devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the bigsted brilliance an agent of doom.

That man was Oppenheimer and his brilliance of logical exposition had created a void so deep for USA, it can't be filled by putting the Burj Khalifa in it! Fast forward 70 years and we still USA struggling with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Iran Nuclear deal in its hope against hope of nuclear disarmament.

That level of logic and its exposition is like knife all blade. It cannot differentiate between what you have the right to do and what is right to do. It is like the ostrich that hides its head in the sand that moment a light of wisdom is shone at it.

Photo by Ember Navarro on Unsplash

A mind or logic is very good at cost benefit analysis but its incompetence at considering the human being as an end it itself is utterly disgraceful. It is a lowly origin that kills the human virtues of empathy and compassion and pushes the human into an animalistic existence of using man as a means of selfish gains.

The travesty of ideas caused by Hitler's logic of trying to make Germany great again is a case in point. He was the prodigious assimilation of all human inferiorites and used the German emotions for his own psychopathic ambitions of dominance. His conviction in his logic did more harm to humanity than any illogical being could have done. Eventually, the iconic picture of a Jewish lady running away from treacherous German kids with horror in her eyes, fills our heart with grief thinking about entire generations losing the virtues of love and compassion.

The roseate ideas not just deny human emotions their rightful place but also obscure our view of reality. All logic so far has convinced us that giving equality of opportunity with freedom of choice to women would lead to equality of outcomes too! However the onground realities refute such rational arguments made from an ivory tower. The Seandinavian countries who have gone the farthest for gender equality show that women in science, technology and maths actually decreased from 40% to 25% in past four decades as they ramped up their efforts for equity!

Such a figment of imagination created by logic ignores the inherent differences that any two human have. It is simply not possible to treat human as some data points on an excel sheet and expect to get the calculated outcomes. Such attempts are not just harmful for National policies but also for the individual happiness. The inability of the modern human to refute the irrational logic that money can buy all happiness has got him/her in their own islands of gloom. Relationships have become contractual and materialistic ostenation has become the goal of life.

All such attempts ignore the elephant in the room which has always been trumpetting that real happiness comes not from some hourded bundles of cash but by sipping your freshly brewed coffee while listening to the sound of your loved ones.

These modern workholics caught in the ratrace logic of trying to reach the top of the corporate ladder forget the wisdom of our sages that excess of everything is bad. As it is said, it takes more than intelligence to act intelligently wisdom allows the ostrich to take its head out of the sand and face the storm by flying above the clouds like an eagle. However, such a wise state of the mind doesn't come as a bolt from the blue. It takes careful analysis of all logic to become the open minded Raja Ram Mohan Roy and question the bleeding of women due to the ill-informed customary logic of sati being a proof of the purity of women and her intentions.

The Jan Andolan built by Raja Ram Mohan Roy required both prudence as well as a sense of justice to uphold the welfare of 50% of the population. Yet we can see that just analysing the reason behind the bleeding of the hand by our knife all blade is like flesh without blood. Delving a steep deeper into why are these knives all blade can help with completeness of our analysis. We see that just like a turtle neverts to its shell when faced with any danger, a human mind too prefers to stick to its comfort zone and deny any new wisdom which could cause cognitive dissonance. Such a human mind is like a ship stuck at harbour where it is safe but that is not what its meant for.

Similarly, the self preservation instinct highlighted in Darwin's origin of species prevents the person from undergoing the fatigues of action for the goal of compassion. The bystanders when an accident occurs tend to think more about preserving their sanity from the legal burdens and less about the human touch of saving a life hanging in perils!

On the other hand this is just a half baked cake as we know inherently that logic itself is not all evil. Be it the cost benefit analysis of Betham's utilitarianism or the launching of our dear Chandrayan 3, logic and rationality forms an essential component of the human mind. Even our constitutional fundamental duties exhort us to develop scientific temper and critical thinking.

Synthesizing the necessity of logic with the lack of its sufficiency takes us to the socratic dialectic methodology of holistic character development via questioning. We need to question not just the source of our logic and knowledge but also the relevance of that logic for the greater good. Such a holistic rational process has the ability to not just sustain humanity but also to progress towards the higher order goes of self actualization.

In this area of guided missiles and unguided man, the rational blade of knife must be covered by the empathetic and wisdom filled wood at the handle to prevent bleeding from any hand that holds it. Such a heart guided by love and wisdom has the ability to become a trailblazer and make this knife a brush through which we paint our collective future in brilliant and illuminating hues.

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