01-12-2021, 04:32 PM
In the end the rationalists win on everything but compassion and aesthetics. I can't explain what causes a woman to bond with her child, why we find overt crime so abominable, or why I find a piece of glorious counterpoint wonderful or magnificent scenery enthralling... I concede on those. Those hardly challenge reason. (Maybe we can't be too rational if we are to retain some of the animal instincts that make us human instead of machines). As someone possibly too rational for his own good -- which goes with the territory -- I can see the consequences of unfeeling behavior in people who deny feelings, fun, conscience, and aesthetics.
Rationalists know what fights to pick and usually get the upper hand. All that thwarts reason is brute force, as in "Believe this doctrine or you will be burned at the auto-da-fe". The political or religious order that can enforce so hard a choice typically loses its economic efficiency and its ability to advance technologically.
Anti-vaxxers kill their children. Anti-mask advocates who spread COVID-19 might as well be carrying live rattlesnakes because COVID-19 is about as likely to kill as a rattlesnake bite.
Rationalists know what fights to pick and usually get the upper hand. All that thwarts reason is brute force, as in "Believe this doctrine or you will be burned at the auto-da-fe". The political or religious order that can enforce so hard a choice typically loses its economic efficiency and its ability to advance technologically.
Anti-vaxxers kill their children. Anti-mask advocates who spread COVID-19 might as well be carrying live rattlesnakes because COVID-19 is about as likely to kill as a rattlesnake bite.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.