In the words of [[Jonathan Haidt]], ‘**The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office**.’ By this he means that we believe we are issuing executive orders, while **most of the time we are actually engaged in hastily constructing plausible post-rationalisations to explain decisions taken somewhere else, for reasons we do not understand**. But the fact that we can deploy reason to explain our actions post-hoc does not mean that it was reason that decided on that action in the first place, or indeed that the use of reason can help obtain it. --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[free-will]], [[illusion-of-control]] , [[hindsight-bias]] , **Source** -- [[202407221554 - B - Alchemy]]