The Trap of Hyper Rationality

April 7, 2022

A Deconverted Man tends to be quite intelligent.

He was once trapped in a religion, perhaps even raised in this religion, meaning it was extra difficult for him to break out of it. It was indoctrinated into him throughout childhood and then, for a long time—sometimes half of his life or longer—he lived according to these dogmas, teachings, and sermons and considered them to be the Truth.

Until… he deconstructed his faith.

At which point he read a bunch of new books, gained a bunch of new knowledge, and actually took the leap, left church, and scrambled up his entire life in the process, intentionally sacrificing a comfortable and easy life in religion for a difficult and challenging one post religion.

In this process, the Deconverted Man learns a lot of new material he’s never heard before, mainly because the Church has a significant interest in keeping the members of their congregations from learning certain things that make the Church look bad. For more information on this, read my article A Knowledge Differential Creates a Power Differential.

Therefore, at the end of the deconstruction process, you have a Deconverted Man who is quite fond of logic, rationality, reason, science, history, and hard facts. It’s not difficult to see why. When he was in religion, he actively had to suppress or avoid much of that information in order to maintain his beliefs. Now that he’s out of religion, he honors those things above all else, eternally grateful that these things led him out of religion.

So what could go wrong?

A lot, actually.

You see, it’s entirely possible to take rationality too far. It is good, yes, but as they say, too much of a good thing can be bad. The same is true for rationality.

But how could something so powerful and objective as rationality, which led many a person away from fundamentalist religion be a bad thing? Surely the more rationality there is, the better, right?

No.

Hyper rationality is an unbalanced state. You are not using your whole brain. Therefore, you are not experiencing all there is to experience in a given situation, or considering all that should be considered.

Here are three things that comprise what I call The Trap of Hyper Rationality:

Being Hyper Rational Excludes Emotion

Hyper rational people exclusively use the left side of their brain in pretty much every situation. They remember all the emotions that came with religion—including the emotional manipulation of things like worship music and church camp—and now see emotions as less important than rationality, or even go so far as to view emotional people as “weak.”

Rationalizing away emotions is not good for your mental health. Emotions are there to communicate things to you in a way that math, science, and facts cannot. By excluding emotions from your life or from any given situation, you are experiencing only half of the picture.

Hyper rational people are big proponents of removing the emotion out of most situations, especially when at work, when competing, or when trying to solve problems.

The fact is that emotions are present in all things at all times. Most hyper rational people try to cram emotions into only certain places where they believe emotions should be kept, such as their relationships and maybe their friendships (although some hyper rational people remove emotions from this as well, choosing to have friends with whom they only have super intellectual conversations with).

It’s entirely possible to approach life with rationality while allowing yourself to feel the emotions of the situation or the moment. In fact, in some situations, this is how you better experience things—it’ll create a better memory of it in the future. It helps you to exist in the present moment.

To read more about my personal journey with this, read this article: Why I Suppressed My Emotions as a Deconverted Man.

Being Hyper Rational Suppresses Intuition

Hyper rational people generally aren’t in tune with their intuition.

This was definitely the case for me. I learned how to suppress my own intuition when I was still a Christian. All messages from “my gut” I considered to either be temptation or “God speaking to me.”

Then, once I was out of religion, I still suppressed my intuition out of my own hyper rationality. I figured that intuition was “woo-woo spiritual nonsense” and, as a newly Deconverted Man, I didn’t have time for that shit anymore. Instead, I declared that all decisions in my life, both big and small, would be made with careful consideration, logic, thinking, and gathering all the facts.

Well, that also didn’t serve me.

The truth is that sometimes you just have to go with your gut. Sometimes you just have to listen to your intuition when you don’t have a logical and reasonable reason for doing so. In fact, sometimes your gut feeling or intuition tells you to do something even though all your logic and reason points towards something else.

Hyper rational people, in their quest to gather all the information and facts before making a decision, often end up in a state of “analysis paralysis.” That means they spend a huge amount of time researching but never take action. Often this research phase lasts so long that whatever opportunity they were considering ends up passing them by and the decision gets made for them since they failed to make a decision in time. Sometimes, you just gotta act. And in these situations, the best way to make the decision is to listen to your intuition. Hyper rationality can keep you stuck.

To learn more about my personal experience about this read my article Intuition & The Deconverted Man.

Being Hyper Rational Inhibits Holistic Thinking

At the beginning of the article I said hyper rational people are not considering situations with their entire mind. Rather, they are only viewing it with the left side of their brain. Doing this means you are not thinking holistically.

When you think holistically, you’re able to back away and see the bigger picture. You’re able to consider something logically and rationally, but also aren’t completely oblivious to the emotions involved, especially how a certain action or decision or situation will make other people feel.

On top of that, hyper rational people tend to really bore into only one single aspect of a situation (usually the aspect that they know best or are an expert in) and neglect all the other pieces of a complex scenario.

The expression “missing the forest for the trees” is a perfect example of hyper rational thinking that is not viewing things holistically.

Conclusion

I am not criticizing rationality. Rationality is good. Without rationality, you will live a life based on beliefs, philosophies, and hopes. When you’re right, things will be good, but when you’re wrong, things won’t be as good. Your life will be up and down.

I’m criticizing hyper rationality. Moving through life with a very narrow and unbalanced worldview will also make things more difficult for you at some point. It can even keep you from experiencing the entire other half of life—the half where you feel things.

Don’t fall into the trap of hyper rationality. Practice identifying when you are doing this and then take a step back and see if you can tone it down just a bit. My life improved a lot when I started doing this.