Fachin Said - “I’ll Think About It” - Thinking, Fast and Slow

An open letter to Brazil’s Supreme Court — and to every Body-Territory that is about to vote

Think now about the politician you most strongly reject.

Do not say anything.

Just notice what happened inside you.

Did an image appear?

A sentence?

Anger?

Distrust?

Perhaps your chest changed slightly. Perhaps your breathing did.

And you probably did not need to reconstruct that politician’s entire history.

You simply:

already knew.

Before receiving any new evidence, your Body-Territory found a familiar path.

Or, in the metaphor we have developed throughout this series:

a familiar branch was found.

But “branch” does not mean merely a stored memory or an opinion.

A branch is an already constructed way of Being in relation to that kind of world.

It is a configuration that brings together ways of Perceiving, Thinking, Judging, Planning, and Acting.

When we enter a familiar branch, we do not retrieve information alone.

We also retrieve expectations.

Values.

Sensations.

Possibilities for response.

A certain Vibe.

This is why two people can receive exactly the same news and still not live the same experience.

They may be receiving that information from different branches.

“I’ll think about it”

Now imagine being president of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court during an institutional crisis.

Colleagues demand a decision.

The media waits.

Social networks already have their culprits.

Political groups already have complete explanations.

And Edson Fachin responds:

“I’ll think about it.”

The statement was reported on September 8, 2026, when ministers were pressing Fachin to bring to the full Court the crisis involving decisions by André Mendonça and the leadership of the Federal Police.

It sounds like very little.

But perhaps something important is hidden precisely there.

Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, made internationally famous in Thinking, Fast and Slow the distinction between a fast, intuitive, automatic mode of functioning and a slower, more deliberative and demanding one.

Thinking fast is not bad.

It is indispensable.

An experienced surgeon needs to recognize an emergency quickly.

A goalkeeper cannot consciously calculate every muscle before diving.

An experienced judge does not rebuild constitutional law from zero for every case.

Experience builds paths.

In our language:

Rock: “I already know.”

Rock can be high performance.

The problem begins when the world changes

Return to the politician you thought of at the beginning.

Now imagine that a verified piece of information appears that strongly contradicts what you believed.

What happens?

Do you revise your understanding?

Or do you immediately search for a way to preserve the branch?

Perhaps:

“that is fake.”

“that source was bought.”

“it was taken out of context.”

Sometimes you will be right.

But what if you are not?

This is where the difference between high performance and dogma appears.

High performance uses a branch while it works.

Dogma needs the world to continue fitting into it.

The flexible expert can say:

“This no longer fits.”

And then Scissors appears:

“I need to think.”

Perhaps the star player is not the one who always responds fastest.

Perhaps it is the one who recognizes when speed has stopped being an advantage.

Judges also need to leave Rock

This concern is not merely philosophical.

Guthrie, Rachlinski, and Wistrich experimentally studied 167 U.S. federal judges. They found effects of anchoring, framing, hindsight, and other cognitive illusions on judicial decision-making.

They were judges.

Trained.

Experienced.

Still human.

Their work helped demonstrate something fundamental:

experience does not eliminate intuition; the challenge is knowing when intuition must be reviewed.

This applies to Fachin.

And it applies to us.

Because there is an enormous difference between:

“I already know”

and

“I think I already know, but I am going to check.”

Now spend three months breathing an election

Every day:

“They are evil.”

“They want to destroy you.”

“If they win, everything is over.”

“The other side hates your family.”

“Only we can save the country.”

Change the names.

Right.

Left.

Center.

The mechanism does not need a political party.

An image appears.

Another.

A video.

A meme.

A sentence.

Your group shares it.

You laugh.

You become angry.

The opponent stops being merely someone with a different project.

They begin to become:

an enemy.

And information no longer arrives alone.

It comes with fear.

Anger.

Belonging.

Breathing.

Expectation.

Qualia.

This is what, within the BrainLatam hypothesis, we are calling Vibe:

a dynamic that keeps certain representational spaces in motion and makes particular Selves easier to use.

And which Self will arrive at the ballot box?

Here we need caution.

There is not enough scientific evidence to simply claim:

“anger produces irrational voting.”

A recent meta-analysis found much smaller and less consistent effects of emotion on how voters seek information and use heuristics than some theories had suggested.

So our idea of “vote quality” is normative within Religare.

A vote is not low quality because someone voted for the right or the left.

A vote loses quality when the field available for Judging becomes so narrow that almost only one question remains:

“How do I defeat my enemy?”

Health?

Income?

Education?

Public safety?

Water?

Housing?

Budget?

Climate?

Production?

Biome?

Everything moves into the background.

The vote remains legally free.

But ask yourself:

am I choosing a future — or merely reacting against someone?

You do not arrive empty at the ballot box

5D Consciousness proposes that we do not choose only with what we consciously know we are thinking.

The Body-Territory reaches the moment of choice carrying different activated and, in our hypothesis, pre-activated representations.

A repeated phrase.

A fear.

Debt.

A bad night’s sleep.

A memory.

An expectation.

A news story.

A bodily condition.

Not everything needs to be consciously remembered at that exact moment in order to participate in the conditions of the one who will Judge.

And we know repetition matters.

Research on the illusory truth effect shows that repeating a statement can increase its perceived truthfulness, including in misinformation and claims that contradict prior knowledge.

This does not mean repetition determines the vote.

It means something simpler:

what we manage to keep available participates in the environment in which judgment occurs.

What if the 72 hours before voting were different?

Here we make a proposal.

Not a law of neuroscience.

The 72 hours before an election could become a civic window for Thinking Slow.

Interestingly, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court already treats this period as especially sensitive.

For the 2026 elections, the publication, republication, and paid amplification of new AI-generated or AI-altered synthetic content using the image, voice, or manifestation of candidates or public figures is prohibited during the 72 hours before the end of voting and the 24 hours afterward.

The logic is understandable:

a highly impactful artificial piece of information released at the last moment can arrive when there is almost no time left to verify it.

But Religare asks another question:

should we not also think about what needs to remain available before the vote?

Imagine three days with fewer enemies

Open your phone.

Instead of:

“they are going to destroy Brazil,”

you find:

how is healthcare doing in your municipality?

how much was invested in education?

how have employment and income changed?

how is public safety?

how much did your city collect, and what did it deliver?

how is your water?

And then something we almost never place at the center of an election:

how is the Biome in which your future will have to happen?

Soil.

Water.

Temperature.

Production.

Forests.

Droughts.

Floods.

Pollution.

Extreme events.

Not to say:

“vote for this person.”

But to return to the voter something that months of political warfare may have taken away:

verifiable reality with which to compare the narrative.

Because the one who votes is a Body-Territory

The voter is not merely an opinion.

They breathe.

Eat.

Become ill.

Work.

Age.

Need water.

Depend on infrastructure.

Raise children.

Live in a territory.

And that territory materially depends on a Biome.

Perhaps, then, the information available before an election needs to reconnect the citizen with what they will actually have to live after it.

Within Religare:

Religion = Planning.

What future am I being offered?

Politics = Judging / Choosing / Valuing.

Is that future worth choosing?

Science = Doing.

Can it actually be produced?

The ballot box records only the final Doing:

the button.

But much of the Judging happened earlier.

And then we reach Paper

Rock says:

“I already know.”

Scissors replies:

“I’ll think.”

But Paper asks an even harder question:

“Why does this seem so obvious to me?”

Which branch am I using?

Which familiar way of Being and Thinking has been recruited?

Which Vibe is sustaining this Self?

Which information was repeated?

Which information never arrived?

Have I transformed someone into an enemy?

Does my group allow any evidence to cross into my branch?

And perhaps the most important question:

if verified information appeared tomorrow against what I believe, could I still change?

Perhaps that is the real test

We do not yet know whether Fachin will reach the best conclusion.

“I’ll think about it” does not guarantee correctness.

But it preserves something that comes before correctness:

the possibility of revision.

And perhaps that is exactly what a democracy needs to protect.

Not forcing everyone to think alike.

Not deciding which conclusions citizens should reach.

But preventing political Vibes from closing so many branches that changing one’s mind becomes impossible.

Perhaps, then, the final 72 hours before voting need:

fewer enemies;

less shock;

less manufactured certainty;

more verifiable information;

more Body-Territory;

more Biome;

more possibility of comparison.

Because what remains available before voting will also participate in the one who votes.

And perhaps the most democratic question we can ask is not:

“Have you decided yet?”

But:

“Can you still say: I already know what I feel - now I want to know whether that is enough to choose?”

And then, finally:

“I’ll think about it.”

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Guthrie, C., Rachlinski, J. J., & Wistrich, A. J. (2001). Inside the Judicial Mind. Cornell Law Review, 86, 777–830.

Guthrie, C., Rachlinski, J. J., & Wistrich, A. J. (2007). Blinking on the Bench: How Judges Decide Cases. Cornell Law Review, 93, 1–44.

Funck, A. S., & Lau, R. R. (2024). A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effects of Emotions on Political Information Search and Decision-Making. American Journal of Political Science, 68(3), 891–906. DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12819.

Udry, J., & Barber, S. J. (2024). The illusory truth effect: A review of how repetition increases belief in misinformation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 56, 101736. DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101736.

Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (2026). Resolution No. 23.755, March 2, 2026. Changes to electoral advertising rules, including restrictions on new AI-generated or AI-altered synthetic content during the 72 hours preceding the election.

Lima, D. (2026). “Vou pensar”, disse Fachin, cobrado a levar decisão sobre a PF a plenário. UOL, September 8, 2026.