Thought vs. Action
What Defines You More?
What is more telling about a person, what they think or what they do? People have been known to think all sorts of crazy things, but are they really crazy? Actions are much more public, easier to see and understand, but can’t they be done in a solely symbolic fashion, can’t it all be an act?
Action stems from thought. An impulse or an idea to obtain something must be achieved by doing something. The two are definitely related, but are their intentions always matching?
Actions are definitely public displays of some thought or idea. They give other people an idea of what you think and believe; they symbolize your true person. What you do shows people who you are, or at least gives them an impression of who you are. Why else would you do something if you didn’t believe in its ends? To refute this I point to Congress. They vote to please their constituents, but not based on their own personal beliefs. The implied thought behind the action and the true thought on the matter are not the same. The action of voting on a bill in a certain manner implies to the public that the Congressman believes in that side of the debate on the bill; i.e. he believes in gun control. But this implication may not be true. The Congressman may hate gun control and may have a gun rack in the back of his SUV, and think that it is totally bogus and unconstitutional; but his constituents in Northern Virginia want the bill. The implication is false; the belief and the action don’t match. The true belief behind the action is not support for that side of the bill, but the belief that “if I vote this way, I’ll get re-elected”. The action may not symbolize the right belief. Actions can lie, therefore, they cannot be truly telling of a person.
So, thoughts must be the true insights into a person’s personality, character, and just basically who they are. Thoughts define who you are. Every whim, every crazy idea, every dream, every fantasy; they all define who you truly are. The ability to stop yourself from acting upon those ideas, with conscious or subconscious thoughts of morality or reason, also shows who you are. If a kid daydreams about blowing up his school, it shows he has a violent side. But the kid doesn’t blow up the school because other thoughts about how wrong that would be intervene. All these thoughts tell about the true self, which is defined by the mind.
The mind is a set of ways that a person will think; it defines the true person. It’s like all the variables are pre-defined before running a computer program. When running a very basic program, say the calculation of a*b+c/d, and there is no user input, the programmer has to define each variable by coding a=5; b=3; c=7; d=8.337465. This last part is how the mind is programmed to cause certain thoughts, except it is more like: stealing=anti, gay marriage=open, and gun control=pro. These are the three ways that you can think on an issue. You can be anti, totally against it; pro, totally for it; or open, meanings that you are open to arguments for both sides and are not really decisive on the issue. In the beginning all the thinking on issues are set to “open”, as per the tabula rasa, and over time, through learning from observation and education, the issues are switched, permanently, to either pro or anti. The learning from observation is basically analyzing the data that you get from the outside world, whether it be the determination that the Earth is the center of the universe, thus geocentric model=pro, or a son learning from an abuse father that beating a wife is acceptable. Learning from education can be seen in say, a child studying going to Sunday school, their views on morality are going to conform with those of the religion. Parents play a key role in this part of the definition of their child’s person. Their views are likely to coincide with the ones in the child; a child with parents that are pro-choice will probably be pro-choice. This is how I see the development of a person’s mind, and thus their true self.
Anyways, back to trying to figure out who a person really is. This is the quest for the true self, the true person, the soul of a person. Looking at the mind can demonstrate the true self, because you can’t totally rely on actions to figure out how a person really stands on an issue, and must therefore analyze how the person thinks about an issue. The thoughts of a person determine who they are, what their true self really is. The only problem is that you cannot get inside another person’s mind, and thus, you cannot truly know whom they really are. All you can go on, to figure out who a person, is their actions. Even if a person is telling you about their ideas, which sounds vaguely familiar, the communication of those ideas is an action. You can’t trust this action because the ideas may not be expressed in their entirety or whatever. So, whomever you think you know, you really don’t.
Actions are the products of thoughts; thoughts are the products of a set way of thinking. The collection of the all the set ways to think on separate issues is the mind, and the mind tells about the true self and defines who a person is. But since there is no way to determine the mind without the ambiguity of action, there is no way to truly know who a person is outside of you.