You’ve probably had people tell you to follow your gut, or heard it said to someone else. It’s quintessentially modern advice. Amid the noise and confusion of life, amid the contradictory demands of reason, tradition, culture, the media, your family, your friends, and so on: follow your gut. It cuts through the chaos and uncertainty like Alexander the Great slicing through the knot that could not be untied. “Follow your gut” says: you know what’s right, you know what to do, forget about the confusion and do what you know you should do.
And it’s true, sometimes we know what to do, but we don’t know how we know, and we can’t explain why we should do what we know we should do. We see the truth dimly, but it’s not all there and we can’t put it all together. So we tune out the noise and the chaos and the confusion and we try to help that dim vision to grow. Sometimes that feeling in your gut can lead you to the truth about what you know you should do when nothing else could.
But your gut can also be a liar. Your gut can be the most deceitful voice of all. Your gut can tell you what you want to believe, and make it feel so true and right that you want to believe it with everything you have. You know it’s not true, you know it’s a lie, but you want so much to believe it, and your gut makes it possible. So you reject the unpleasant truth in favor of the wonderful lie.
That way lies horror. Down that road you find atrocity, indifference, hatred, prejudice. Follow your gut and you may find truth, or you may find the most filthy of lies.
Listen to your gut. But don’t follow it blindly.
