All living beings have only three faculties.
Each of these faculties—thoughts, emotions, and actions—interacts in an intricate dance, shaping our identities, relationships, and communities. Understanding this triad is not only the key to personal growth but also to navigating the complexities of life. Misunderstanding can lead to bicameral collectivism, which removes the 'qualia' from life and replaces it with 'quantia'.
Thoughts x Emotions = Intentions
Thoughts are the building blocks of our inner worlds. They build the frameworks through which we perceive reality. Our ability to reason, imagine, reflect, and judge springs from thought. While thoughts can be empowering, offering clarity and direction, they can also be limiting and clouded by bias or fear (emotion). Importantly, not all thoughts are our own, as many can arrive without stimulus or warning. However, we can control which thoughts we focus on, which requires other thoughts to replace the undesirable ones. Every great action starts with a thought, while thoughts of possibility and purpose can propel someone beyond their perceived limitations.
Emotions, on the other hand, are the undercurrents that colour our experience of life. Joy, anger, sorrow, hope—these are not merely reactions but signals that something meaningful is occurring. Emotions are not weaknesses, as they’re often portrayed, but essential tools for survival, achievement, connection, and detecting the objective difference between right and wrong. They tell us what matters, what hurts, and what inspires. While they can lead to irrational decisions if left unchecked, they also give depth to our existence. A world devoid of emotion would be colourless and tasteless, even if perfectly rational.
Then there are actions—the bridge between the inner and outer world. Actions are how thoughts and emotions manifest in tangible form. They’re what others see, judge, and remember. What is real is recorded in the physical world through action.
No matter how profound a thought or intense an emotion, change occurs only through action. A kind thought becomes kindness only when it is expressed. An idea becomes an innovation only when it is pursued and executed. Inaction, even when backed by noble feelings or brilliant plans, ultimately results in stasis. Importantly, all actions require an actor to perform, necessitating agency and the ability to choose for each individual, not groups. Ultimately, concepts such as responsibility and culpability are only meaningful when referring to individuals because groups cannot have agency, choice, and control over something--only individuals can.
Intentionality and Outcomes
Intertwined thoughts and emotions form to generate intentions. Eventually, choices are made out of decision-making and preferences. The whole chain of progression from first thought through to thinking, feeling, rationalising, and eventually executing action is a nuanced version of steering.
What’s most fascinating is how these three elements continuously feed into each other. A single thought can spark an emotion, which can drive an action. Once taken, an action may provoke new emotions or inspire different thoughts. For example, a decision to help someone in need might begin with empathy (an emotion), lead to the thought “I should do something”, and culminate in the action of offering assistance. That act might then foster feelings of gratitude, purpose, or connection—fuelling the cycle anew.
At the core of self-awareness and personal development lies the ability to observe and influence this cycle. By learning to question one's thoughts, understand one's emotions, and choose one's actions mindfully, one begins to shape one's life with intention rather than react to circumstances. We cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can affect how we think about events, mitigate how we feel about them, and most importantly, have complete control over actions and what we choose to do next.
In essence, to be human is to think, feel, and act. Mastering the balance between these three is perhaps the greatest journey we can undertake—not just to better ourselves but to enable genuinely collaborative communities.
However, there is a problem. Most people have been led to believe they are responsible and accountable for all three, when, in fact, they are only accountable for one of them: actions.
Deja Vu
Dystopian themes were with us all along. Concepts such as "thought crime" and "groupthink"—popularized by George Orwell's 1984—have often been dismissed as dystopian fiction without actually being true. However, in modern legal and social discourse, it seems we've been living in a dystopic reality for quite some time.
Individuals are already being scrutinised, condemned, and even prosecuted not just for their actions but also for their thoughts, intentions, speech, or affiliations. The line between actual crime and mere thought or speech about crime is now dangerously blurred.
One clear example of this trend is the treatment of
individuals who express verbal support for acts of violence, even if they
themselves do not commit the act. For instance, if someone publicly endorses or
praises a violent act committed by another, they may be investigated,
deplatformed, or even charged with incitement—regardless of whether their
speech had any direct causal link to the crime.
While society rightly wants to prevent harm, this form of pre-emptive punishment raises profound questions about free speech and the right to hold controversial opinions without fear of legal reprisal, ultimately harming accused individuals.
Legal Entanglements
Similarly, legal systems are increasingly willing to hold people responsible for what they “intended” and what they "should have known" without an action taking place. If a person provides a weapon to someone who later commits a violent crime, and it can be argued that the provider was aware of the recipient’s intent, they can be held legally accountable. This is often framed as aiding and abetting or accessory to a crime, but in practice, it sometimes becomes a judgment on the person's mindset rather than their concrete actions.
This is particularly troubling when intent becomes speculative. In many high-profile cases, prosecutors and media figures dig into text messages, past associations, or online posts to argue that someone must have known how they were feeling/thinking, serving as evidence of “premeditation” and planning.
Yet proving actual knowledge is incredibly complex and can become a matter of interpreting someone's thoughts or beliefs through circumstantial evidence. In such cases, actions are not being punished; perceived thought is.
This shift reflects a broader cultural tendency to judge
people based not only on what they do but also on what they believe. In the digital
age, where comments, likes, and associations are preserved and searchable, a
person's intentions can be retroactively constructed from fragments of their
online activity. If someone expresses controversial or radical opinions, those
statements can later be used to portray them as complicit in acts they did not
commit simply because they voiced support for certain ideologies or
individuals.
Mens Rea Destroys Justice
The danger here lies in the erosion of the presumption of innocence and the broadening of criminal liability to include not only what someone did, but also what they intended and thought. While it is desirable to see lower crime rates, individual liberties are arguably more important. Holding people accountable for intentions, especially when no direct action is taken, risks punishing ideology, not conduct.
The creeping acceptance of punishing thought, not deed, marks a troubling transformation in how justice is understood and administered worldwide. As societal discourse wrestles with threats to safety and stability, we must be vigilant not to sacrifice the foundational principle that it can only be justified to be judged for what you do, not what you thought, felt, or intended.
Our modern dystopia prevents individual self-development and mastery by perpetuating false principles that encourage the abdication of personal responsibility (irresponsibility), internal chaos, and collectivism.
Written by George Tchetvertakov
