The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
Should We Follow our Hearts or Heads?
By
Todd F. Eklof
August 30, 2009
When the Tin Woodman in Frank L. Baum’s, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first
meets Dorothy and the Scarecrow, he tells them the story of how he came to be made
completely of tin. It turns out that he was once a normal man, in love with a beautiful
Munchkin girl who happened to be the servant of a lazy old woman who did not wish to
lose her cook and housekeeper. So she went to the Wicked Witch of the East, the one
Dorothy’s house fell upon and killed, and paid her two sheep and a cow to prevent the
love-struck woodsman from marrying the girl. The Witch did so by enchanting an ax so
that it would slip whenever he used it. The first slip cut off his leg, which was a great
misfortune, but one he soon compensated for by having the local tinsmith fashion him a
new one out of tin. But when he went back to work, the ax slipped again, cutting off his
other leg. The same thing kept happening and each time the tinsmith would replace his
amputated limb with a tin substitute. He was very fortunate indeed when the ax slipped
and cut off his head, for the tinsmith just so happened by and gave him a tin head too.
So the Woodman was feeling pretty good about things, certain that he’d beaten
the Witch and was well on his way to marrying his Munchkin beauty. But then the ax
slipped again and cut his body right in half; and, once more, the tinsmith repaired the
damage by providing him with a body of tin to which he fastened his tin legs, arms, and
head. “But alas!” cried the Tin Man, “I had now no heart, so that I lost all my love for the
Munchkin girl, and did not care whether I married her or not.”
“My body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it and it
did not matter now if my ax slipped, for it could not cut me. There was only one
danger—that my joints would rust. But I kept an oilcan in my cottage and took
care to oil myself whenever I needed it. However, there came a day when I
forgot to do this, and, being caught in a rainstorm, before I thought of the danger
my joints rusted, and I was left to stand in the woods until you came to help me.
It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to
think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in
love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart,
and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one. If he does, I will go back to the
Munchkin maiden and marry her.”
“Both Dorothy and the Scarecrow had been greatly interested in the story
of the Tin Woodman, and now they knew why he was so anxious to get a new
heart.
“All the same,” said the Scarecrow, “I shall ask for brains instead of a
heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.”
“I shall take the heart,” returned the Tin Woodman; “for brains do not
make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”
Dorothy did not say anything, for she was puzzled to know which of her
two friends was right…”
The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
This dilemma over which to pursue, the head or the heart, spelled out so clearly
and succinctly in Baum’s classic children’s story, exploits a tension in the human
condition that stays with us our entire lives—the tension between thinking and feeling.
In the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which has become the standard test used in
personality assessment, thinking and feeling are presented in opposition to each other as
ways of making decisions. That is, when it comes to making judgments, you’re either a
feeling type or a thinking type. Psychologically speaking, thoughts and feelings are as
opposite each other as are extroverts and introverts.
The great psychologist, Carl Jung, upon whose work the Myers-Briggs Indicator
is based, agreed with this positioning of feeling and thinking as polar opposites. For
Jung, the human psyche, which is, generally speaking, either extroverted or introverted, is
characterized by these four functions; feeling, thinking, sensing, and intuition. The first
two of these, feeling and thinking, as already noted, are opposite ways of judging or
deciphering information. The latter two, sensing and intuition, are also opposite ways of
gathering information. Of these four functions, one tends to be dominant according to
what type of personality we are, and a second acts as an auxiliary, or backup function.
But the backup function, at least according to Jung, can never be the dominant function’s
opposite. In other words, feeling is never complimentary to thinking. As Jung explained,
“Naturally only those functions can appear as auxiliary whose nature is not opposed to
the dominant function. For instance, feeling can never act as the second function
alongside thinking, because it is by its very nature too strongly opposed to thinking.
Thinking, if it is to be real thinking and true to its own principle, must rigorously exclude
feeling.”1 In fact, according to Jungian psychology, the opposite of one’s dominant
function, becomes part of one’s own shadow, that is, of one’s unconscious.
So, if he’s right, the simple problem presented in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
really gets at the core of a much deeper conflict between thinking and feeling present
within each of one of us; and Dorothy’s puzzlement over which of her two friends is
right, the Scarecrow or the Tin Man, is a question all of us face.
For those feeling types among us, who answer the question like the Tin
Woodman, that “brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the
world,” perhaps some of the lyrics of a song from another classic children’s story,
Disney’s Thumbelina, best express the sentiment behind the saying, “Always follow your
heart.”
You're sure to do impossible things
If you follow your heart
Your dreams will fly on magical wings
When you follow your heart
If you have to journey far
Here's a little trick
You don't need a guiding star
1
Jung, C.G., Psychological Types, CW Vol. 6, Bollingen Series XX, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1971, 1990, p. 405f.
2
The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
Trust your ticker, get there quicker
You're sure to do impossible things
If you follow your heart
North or south or east or west
Where to point your shoes?
Which direction is the best?
If the choosing gets confusing
Maybe it's the map you're using
You don't need a chart to guide you
Close your eyes and look inside you
You're sure to do impossible things
If you know where to start
Your dreams will fly on magical wings
When you follow
Just trust the swallow
And always follow your heart
I think most of us would agree that if we remove all feeling from our decision
making processes we lose the human equation and end up little more than cold
calculating machines more interested in abstract quantities, like profits and pole numbers,
than on the consequences of our decisions in the lives of others. Without feelings,
feelings that evoke the compassion of the human heart, we erect the sort of institutions
we’ve erected today, corporations, that have taken over and are quickly destroying the
world with a reckless greed that has turned “personnel” into “human resources,” life into
commodities, and moral consequences into numbers on an annual report. As David C.
Korten has complained in his book, When Corporations Rule the World, “Corporations
have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet, with the largest
among them reaching into virtually every country of the world and exceeding most
governments in size and power. Increasingly, it is the corporate interest more than the
human interest that defines the policy agendas of states and international bodies, although
this reality and its implications have gone largely unnoticed and unaddressed.”2
Isn’t it intriguing, in fact, that we call these institutions, corporations, a word
which means “body,” and our courts have determined that they are to be counted as
people with all the rights of individual persons, including the right to influence politics
with their unequalled amounts of wealth as a form of free speech? Yet they are not real
people, and their only real claim to the word “body” is that they behave more like
corpses—cold, dead, entities without human feelings. When you try to make contact
with one of them, for instance, you may, after several frustrating minutes of listening to
an automated voice suggest every possibility for your call but your own, reach a real
human being, but only to discover that person has been trained to function like a cog in a
2
Korten, David C., When Corporations Rule the World, Berrett-Koehler Publishers,
Kumerian Press, 1995, 1996, p. 54.
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The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
machine, and that the machine has become self-sustaining and perpetuating, with no real
person anywhere who really knows what’s going on or is willing to help.
But we must remember, as Jung suggested, the people who set these corporate
systems up are not really without heart, they are just unconscious of their feelings. Their
feelings have been pushed down into the dark, and can express themselves only in
shadowy ways. As such these heartless entities are but the result of our own collectively
repressed feelings, of our forgotten love and compassion. And like the Tin Man, if we
cannot find our heart, we cannot know the love of life that first ushers each of us into this
world.
Psychologist Erich Fromm said, “The most important condition for the
development of the love of life in the child is for him to be with people who love life.”3 If
we don’t do this, if we don’t teach our children to love life, to follow their hearts, to close
their eyes and look inside, we end up with a society in which, in his words, “People are
treated as numbers.”4 And if you don’t believe him, just ask yourself this, which is more
important in our society, your name or your Social Security number? “In giant centers of
production, giant cities, giant countries, men are administered as if they were things,”
Fromm says, “men and their administrators are transformed into things, and they obey the
laws of things. But man is not meant to be a thing; and before this is accomplished he
becomes desperate and wants to kill all life.”5 And this is the point we’ve reached today,
homo mechanicus, the heartless Tin Man, terminating life on Earth by attempting to turn
the world into a mechanized Death Star.
And so there is good reason to side with the Tin Man, to follow after the heart in
search of love and happiness, to find our humanity and our compassion again. Yet the
heart, by its very nature, romanticizes everything, and may too easily be swayed by this
argument without fully considering, that is, thinking about the consequences of its
actions. Isn’t this really part of the problem today, that we have, as a culture, abandoned
reason, choosing instead, to blindly agree with and adhere to whatever rhetoric satisfies
our own interests? If logic is that discipline that helps us see things more clearly despite
the emotional fog in and around us, and rhetorical ploys are those rationalizations that
justify the pursuit of our own interests, our own happiness at all costs, then our problem
today is not that we have been stuck in our heads and not our hearts.
I look at the bewildering success of propagandists like Rush Limbaugh and Fox
News and know that over-thinking things is not a big problem in our society. Just a few
years ago, for example, Rush and Fox used their propaganda machines to promote
corporate interests by denying the reality of climate change, consistently promoting the
false assertion that the scientific community was divided on the matter, even thought it
has been in universal agreement for decades. Yet today, after climate change has become
3
Fromm, Erich, The Heart of Man, Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York,
NY, 1964, p. 51.
4
Ibid., p. 57.
5
Ibid.
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The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
undeniable, and they have been proven to be unreliable, these same disingenuous
mediums, and others like them, are now using the exact argument to falsely suggest there
is disagreement among scientists as to the cause of climate change. Nonsense!
My point here, however, is that millions of people still willingly tune in to listen
to pundits tell them what they must already know isn’t true; the same way hundreds of
millions continue, after centuries, to follow the guidance of religious institutions that are
proven beyond all reasonable doubt to have been in error in matters of science and
thought, and to have consistently persecuted, oppressed, and silenced those with whom
they have wrongly disagreed. In addition, they continue to believe in the historical truth
of impossible fantasies over what their own senses tell them about the nature of reality.
You're sure to do impossible things
If you know where to start
Your dreams will fly on magical wings
When you follow
Just trust the swallow
And always follow your heart
In their book on Critical Thinking, Tracy Bowell and Gary Kemp warn us of the
sort of “sham-reasoning” routinely presented by Rush Limbaugh and the Rupert
Murdock’s minions on Fox News, saying, “As critical thinkers we should be alert to the
possibility of sham-reasoning, take care to avoid being persuaded by attempts to persuade
which rely upon it, and avoid using sham-reasons in our own attempts to persuade
others.”6 And one of the most powerful attempts at sham-reasoning they warn about are
those rhetorical ploys that seldom provide us with good reasons at all, but, instead,
attempt to persuade us to believe something or behave a certain way by playing upon our
emotions. And those among us who purely follow our hearts, repressing logos to the
shadow, pervert reason so that it comes out only in the twisted rationalisms we see in
Rush and Fox and those of their ilk.
Did you know, in fact, that logic, comes natural to us, without the need of any
formal training, and that the only reason we so desperately need training in it today is
because our natural inclination toward reason has been repressed and oppressed by the
powers-that-be? This is why, at a very early age, between 7 and 10 or so, children realize
completely on their own that certain fantasies like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Mickey
Mouse, and the like, can’t possibly be real. And we would realize a lot of other things
aren’t real too if it weren’t for certain rhetorical ploys playing upon our emotions, which
cause us to perpetually reject the truth that is right before us.
Indeed, the foundation of logic is three simple rules, 1) the law of identity, which
states that whatever is, is; 2) the law of non-contradiction, stating, something either is or
is not, and 3) the law of the excluded middle, nothing can both be and not be. Without
going into further discussion of these rules, or making them more difficult than they need
6
Bowell, Tracy, and Kemp, Gary, Critical Thinking, Routledge, New York, NY, 2002,
2004, p. 99.
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The Wonderful Dilemma of Oz
to be, suffice it to say that they are self-evident in relation to the world around us. The
dog is. Either it is a dog, or it is not. It can’t both be a dog, and not a dog. That’s it.
That’s all these rules mean when applied. Nothing more complicated than that! So
simple any 4th grader can and does understand them. So, again, my point is that this
instinct toward reason, which begins to demonstrate itself at a very early age, too easily
becomes repressed when we choose to purely follow our hearts. Purely following our
hearts, those things that make us most happy, may, as we see all to often, actually lead us
to treat others heartlessly.
So, like Dorothy, we end up puzzled, “not knowing which of her two friends was
right.” And I should not hope to resolve this dilemma now, especially as I wind things
down. For this tension, between feeling and thinking, truly is part of the human
condition, and will, no doubt, remain a perennial problem. But I will suggest that
perhaps it is enough simply to address the dilemma, and to note that Dorothy does not
know and cannot know which one is right to pursue, heart or head? And the best she can
do, as she does, is to take both of them with her on her journey. Both heart and head,
despite being at odds with each other, are our friends. We need hearts to prevent our
heads from turning the world and everything in it into a miscalculation. Yet we need the
head to temper our passions and temporal emotional states with foresight, and hindsight,
and solid reasons for whatever we do or believe. “When Faust exclaims, ‘feeling is all,’”
writes Jung, “he is expressing merely the antithesis of the intellect, and so only goes to
the other extreme; he does not achieve that totality of life and of his own psyche in which
feeling and thinking are united in a third higher principle.”7 He goes on to say this
“higher third,” that which unites these two opposites, “can be understood either as a
practical goal or as the creative fantasy that creates the goal.”8 Perhaps, then, this
unification of thinking and feeling, is Dorothy’s ultimate goal, and her journey down the
yellow brick road represents the journey each of us is on, reminding us that should we
arrive, we must ask Oz for both a brain and a heart.
7
8
Jung, ibid., p. 58.
Ibid.
6