Last week I had gone to Chennai for a day. It was a morning-evening trip, normally which is quite taxing on self. By the time I returned home and slept it was almost midnight. Next morning I had an important meeting at 10. I found it difficult to wake up in time and missed the meeting. There was guilt in my mind about missing this meeting. But then suddenly I found myself becoming very strong. My mind said that it was unfair for anybody to expect I’ll be able to reach office on time for this meeting. After all I’m also a human being and need to take adequate rest. I rationalized it well, absolved myself of all my guilt and became cheerful. By the time I reached office it was 11. But then all of a sudden I found earth shifting from under my feet. My colleague who had accompanied me for the trip reached office in time and attended the meeting. I looked like a fool to myself. It prompted me to write my thoughts on this game of ‘rationalization’ we play with ourselves.

We all make mistakes and sometime we realize them also, but the best part is that we all rationalize all our errors so well that we stay guilt free most of the time. Almost always, the person who is wrong is other than us. If there is no such person, we have ‘circumstances’ that make us rationalize our errors of judgement or actions. At any given point in time there are lot many errors are being committed by people. But if you try to find out how many are being accepted and owned by people, the percentage would be low single digit. Others would have all rationalized their conduct and actions even after accepting that whatever they did was not correct.

If we start looking at examples, we shall find that not only this starts from a very early age, we do it for small things to big things in life. If a child is unable to wake up on time in the morning to go to school his simple excuse could be, Mamma didn’t wake me up. Unable to finish home work, I had my favourite movie on the TV or any such thing. We as adults are masters due to years of practicing this rationalization. Every small and big error committed by us will have a perfect reason in our own mind and we will be at peace. As we read this we may not be able to understand the complete import of the phenomenon called ‘rationalization’. I shall try to put my thoughts to this by giving some examples from our day to day life.

Before I start my graded way of examples, I just wanted to share this latest news. Newspapers are full of a report today when a rapist has been lynched mercilessly by a mob after raiding the prison he was lodged in and releasing him from there. Ask anyone who was a part of the mob and he will say rapists deserve this punishment. But if entire country started behaving like this we will just become a mobocracy and there’ll be no way for us to prove whether the person is guilty or innocent.

I’ve already given couple of examples of how we sometime behave in our childhood. As we grow up, tendency to rationalize keeps pace. I remember once I had taken the civil services exam and was not selected. Till today I believe and say that in that particular year the question papers were most difficult for engineers. How well I rationalized it to myself. These days there’s a tendency in many people who involve themselves in eve teasing, or even rapes, to justify and rationalize their actions by saying that it is women who are responsible since they wear provocative dresses, move out late in the evenings and so on and so forth. And the shoe keeps changing the foot depending on circumstances. The same woman, in the name of modernity, will come home late at night in a drunken state and tell her husband and family that if he can do this why can’t she. There’s a perfect rationalization which allows all of us to continue with our actions by blaming others or circumstances.

So long as such actions of ours have an effect on us alone it is all right for us to live with that. Like if I rationalize that I couldn’t clear civil services exam since the engineering paper was difficult that year, it doesn’t really affect anyone else. The problem comes when our actions, errors and rationalizations start having an impact on people around us, colleagues and society in general.

I have rarely seen in my working life anyone ever accepting their acts of omission and commission. This starts from not achieving targets by the line managers to the CEOs saying that they are victims of situations, promoters, system and their senior managers. In both cases people don’t deliver what they were supposed to deliver and paid for, but the reason for that never lies with them but somewhere else. What these people don’t ever think that their actions and inactions have caused immense damage on many others. Whether it is the shareholders, other employees who have given their best to the system or the society, many people pay for actions or inactions of few people. Imagine, even in this case the person who’s caused this would have rationalized all his actions and would be sleeping well. It could go to the extent of an overworked train driver who dozed off and many people lost their lives. Both he and his supervisor will rationalize their act whereas many would have paid for this by their lives. Driver would say why the supervisor gave me duty when I was already tired and the supervisor will say that the government expects him to operate trains without giving him adequate number of drivers. This chain is endless.

This rationalization can reach epic proportions. Whether it is by initiating pogrom of Jews by Hitler, dropping off the n-bomb by the US or current problems of terrorism being faced by the world, in each case the perpetrators would rationalize their acts, though the world would have paid enormous cost for their actions.

Worst part of this rationalization is that the ‘rationale’ with which we fortify ourselves is too strong to be argued against. First, if you try to argue against it won’t have any effect. Second, any such effort will invite scorn and anger and retribution depending on the situation. Critics or critiques are generally not appreciated. Since everything is internalized very well, any external stimuli to correct it is likely to boomerang. Therefore, an internal issue can be addressed only by internal agents.

My Little Thought of Life in this respect is that we must be aware of the ‘rationalization’ that happens in our own mind. While we may not be able to influence others, what we can surely attempt doing is to be a critic of our own actions, see if we have done something or not done anything where we should have and take corrective measures. Committing errors is human, but to realize and do course correction is Divine. Often it is said that if we reform ourselves, we’ve reformed the world. May be, we can keep 30 minutes each week just to contemplate if there’s anything that we could have done better or we didn’t act where we should have and write it down. Best way would be look at ourselves from someone else’s perspective and observe from a distance. Doing this, writing it down and reading our own past stories will ensure at least we lower the degrees of rationalizations that we do with ourselves.