I was watching star wars and when I got to the line when Obi wan says 'you must do what you feel is right, of course', it made me think of something. The message in more movies, tv shows, comics, etc since before I can remember has always been 'follow your emotions'. Think about all the different kids shows or cartoons, animated movies, 80s and 90s family adventure movies and so on where the main character or hero is given some kind of advice that amounts to 'follow your heart', or 'what makes a hero is inside here' and the mentor points to the heart. A hundred different variations of that.

In contrast, characters who use intellect and reason are almost always made to either be wrong, comic relief, some kind of busybody or pencil neck rule-follower who is annoying or insufferable, and the answer or solution or action they arrive at ends up being the wrong one, and the main character who had a hunch, or acted out of love, or felt courageous despite ever reason to think they would lose and such, ends up being correct.

And I realized that the culmination of this is generations of people being told to follow their emotions and not their capacity to reason. Reason is of course one of the most fundamental strengths that sets humans apart from all other life. We can choose to ignore what our instincts or base level reactions and 'lizard brain' tells us, and instead engage a high level of intellect and arrive at an answer that may be more correct than what our 'gut' or 'heart' told us in the beginning. That is not to say emotion is pointless or without value as a consideration, but the capacity to reason should always at least be tried and worked through, before deciding if the 'heartfelt' answer is the one to pick anyways.

And I don't think I've ever seen that message in a piece of media. As we know, emotion based behavior is the feminine way of 'thinking', while reason is the masculine. And people who base their actions entirely off of feelings, also tend to be the ones most easily led, most readily propagandized to, most easily duped into something. Animals have only instinctual reactions, but no true thought. Humans are supposed to be capable of both. It is a regression to a baser and lower form of life to ignore reason and act on feeling alone. And yet that is the message that nearly all media for as long as I can remember taught.

And we now live in an era where critical thinking is nearly extinct. It didn't used to be this way. 12yo boys used to read Aristotle and Sophocles. They would have rhetoric class and be taught the Socratic Method of analysis. Classical educations emphasized the teaching of reason and how to exercise it. They don't teach anything close to that anymore, and most people couldn't actually reason their way out of paper bag. It's not just leftists either. A massive majority of the right also rejects thought and instead engages purely with how something makes them feel, and are equally susceptible to various pundits, podcasters, youtubers, and propagandists who know how to stroke their emotions and rile them up in a particular useful way. Most people don't know how to think anymore, and nearly all media that anyone currently alive has ever seen, if it has a moral message at all, it tends to be "don't think, feel". And I find that very curious.