People React, Robots Think

"80% of our life is emotion, and only 20% is intellect," said Frank Luntz in the Frontline video, The Persuaders. When I heard this, my first reaction was denial. It should be 50/50, right? I thought he was wrong, but then I let the small amount of intellect within me speak up and I realized how right he was. My reaction was based on emotion! All of our history and decisions are based mainly on emotion. War and declarations were based on fiery feelings, some of which led to good, and others led to not so good. Only once we truly sit back and review the decisions and reactions are we making use of our intellect.
The fact that we have to force it, and be aware when we are using our intellect shows how unnatural it is for us.
When the people that control what we see, have access to how we think, they have the power to control what we think. When people like Luntz crack this code, we can either be aware of it, or let the words and pictures infiltrate our psyche and fall prey to the deception. What makes me think of it in such a negative way was his tone during the interview and the dramatic music playing in the background. He would speak as if he were doing something illegal or top-secret, and it makes me feel unsettled. This concept is just reification, but done very well. In the video, Luntz's testing people, seemed so robotic. He was alive and using words while these people thought they were aware of what he was doing, but in reality they were so lost. Is this how we are? Sure, we have an awareness, but do we know how to use it and when to apply it? How can we get past the skilled words-men like Luntz and be our own emotional self?
Sometimes it is a good thing, because without this driving force of emotion, how would we decide between the twenty different breads that all taste the same at the store? Besides price, there's how it makes us feel. Also, what some don't realize about emotion is that it is what moves us forward in life as individuals. We are fired up and motivated by setbacks or inspired by something we see, and those emotions propel us in life. We have been encouraged to be emotional and express our feelings since we begun to go to school. Perhaps that was all planned by the media to train us to fall for its words so we will economy stimulators when we grow up!

When I asked her, my mom's first reaction to Luntz's statement was:
"People react, robots think."
In this day and age, we are becoming more and more robot like. We let the robots feel things and connect to people so we don't have to. That doesn't necessarily mean we are becoming smarter, but we are slowly losing the amount of emotion in us. The ratio stays the same, but the quantity is decreasing.
After much consideration, I believe that humans are 80% emotion and 20% intellect.