You may heard that the second dialogue in Bahrain will soon begin. There are many topics in my guess that social/political/government organizations will discuss, which most definitely include the issues where no consensus was reached in the first dialogue about a year and a half ago. They will include elections and how currently the electoral districts are badly divided, as well as refining the system of checks and balances. Fine to me, however, I see that there is a more important topic to discuss, and I hope much attention is paid here.
As you can see above, I call my website ‘My Emotional Rational Meet Here.’ Also, as per last week’s article, I’ve received some comments on Twitter telling me that I seem to emphasize a lot on education and that I perhaps portray Arabs as mindless goons. Not to that extent, but I’d like to make some explanations and tie one thing to another, while showing its significance in Bahrain.
What are emotions and what do I mean by rationale? The way I see and believe, a person, like you and me, has two decision making machines. One under his chest, emotional decisions, and one inside his head, rationale. They feed into each other sometimes, and disconnect some other times. Based on the level of sanity a person is in, one decision making machine can overpower the other. It doesn’t matter whether a person is in state of comfort or not, a person can use his emotional side of decision making when, for example, he allows his kids to skip homework to go on the PlayStation. Also, another person might use his rationale when choosing to buy the most economical car in the market, even though he may be very uncomfortable spending more of the money he does not have.
What is important here is having the ability to control your emotional decision making with proper acknowledgement that you’re choosing to place your rationale aside to satisfy your sensitive human aspect of the situation at hand. This is not something to disregard or underestimate, because serious shortcomings by the educational institutions in Bahrain to send this message to our youngsters is dragging our nation down to rock bottom.
Having political or economic problems is nothing new to any country around the world. This is life, when governance is an uphill struggle at difficult economic or social times. People always demand more, let alone if they don’t have anything that grants them hope and optimism for the future. Governments have to always continue gauging people’s demands to try to either provide or explain the difficulty of providing those demands. Western nations are going through much difficulty, but they’re much better than Middle Eastern nations in explaining to the public that there is no money in the bank.
The problem Bahrain faced in March of 2011 was strictly emotions facing emotion, rationale took a serious back seat. Speeches in the now-gone GCC roundabout were touching the emotions of attendees who failed to rationally think about how to be a developing force in the country, and decided (but failed) to stage a coup. Seeing how sectarian things turned up to be, which also happened to be right around the time where Iraq’s pro-Iranian government turned against Sunnis, the police force also responded emotionally and out of thought. One question remained not discussed and unanswered, why did everyone fail to have proper control over their emotional decision-making machine?
No matter what your answer will be, there shouldn’t be any excuse whatsoever for the massive failure in this past phenomenon that brought us down in history. Yes, as a person grows, he becomes more rational and less emotional in his choices, but this is because he picks up life experience events, and he learns. However, as we enhance ourselves today as well, education can also provide much more than experience if delivered properly, and this is where I believe much attention should be given.
I don’t mind sounding like a broken record, but through revolving our poor education system we will be able to come up with massive changes and developments. Today, everyone is connected, which means everyone should be taught the proper and necessary skills of becoming an important leader and figure in our society. Let’s do this, let’s invest here, let’s invest in our backbone, because changing anything else is simply just a waste of time.
Dr. @saqeralkhalifa 
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