Invincible Irrationality

I'm not much of a fan of Nietzsche.  I've come to refer to him, perhaps unkindly, as Frantic Freddie.  I quote him nonetheless, and in doing so include thereby a picture of him wearing a mustache not quite as foreboding as the one we see him with in other photographs, and in caricatures, looking somewhat demented.

He has something of a point in this particular quote, at least.  I ask myself how the irrationality of a thing would be an argument against its existence, I confess, but it can be maintained easily enough that it is a condition of ours, at least.  Not necessarily what we lawyers like to call a condition precedent, perhaps, but a condition at least to the extent a characteristic can be one.

It was Aristotle I believe who wrote that we humans are rational animals, meaning that we are capable of reason.  The Stoics thought that capacity was what made us, in small part at least,  participants in the divine intelligence of the universe.  Reason was long honored with the highest place in the history of human thought, and then replaced (or supplanted) by faith when reason was thought to be inadequate, only to reappear during the Renaissance and then explode during the Enlightenment.  Since then it has been dying a slow death; slow, because the achievements of the methods of science cannot be denied entirely, but dying nonetheless because it seems not to satisfy what we want, because what we want now is to be irrational.

That seems obvious enough given the fact that apparently thousands if not millions of people not merely accept that the world is flat (according to CNN) but wish others to do so as well.  This belief requires that a good deal of what seems obvious be ignored or explained away, and this is done with fascinating ease by the conviction that the government or someone or other having great power and influence wants us to believe otherwise and so fake a landing on the moon, the apparent curvature of the Earth, and much, much more.  Thus do we cycle back into ignorance.

There is currently an obsession with conspiracy.  To an extent this is understandable, as there can be little question that our politics is corrupt as are our politicians.  We've grown accustomed to deceit and combinations entered into to benefit the interests of a small and perhaps shrinking group of people who care about nothing but themselves, ultimately.  We see this every day.  We see it most clearly in the impeachment hearings, courtesy of someone who is intent on self-gratification and his minions.  But we see the appeal of the irrational in the response to the hearings as well.  It is assumed that others share the same proclivity for self-gratification and so do what they do to advance their own interests by thwarting efforts by others to do so.  There is a presumption of selfishness that must be overcome, but, curiously, it cannot be rebutted because selfishness is the rule, the standard by which all is judged.

It isn't rational for Republicans, for example, to not merely protect but encourage an executive who seeks merely to satisfy his own concerns.  A Democrat may soon be in the same place, and do the same things, and Republicans will then be faced with the same arguments supporting such conduct they used to support it when it benefited them.  It's hard to believe any rational person would be so short sighted.

But it isn't just in our politics that we see this invocation of the irrational, but everywhere.  The more that science, or statistics, or reason, or the learned recommend certain actions or support certain conclusions, the more those actions and conclusions are thought to be fake, or deceitful, or to result from some wrongful motive.  Thus the return of the flat earth theory.

When the inclination is to disbelieve what is credible and supported by the best available evidence, there is a serious problem.  It's a problem which will become increasingly significant as the attitude is encouraged and fostered, as is being done now.  Soon enough the irrational will become invincible, impervious to reason, impervious to argument, impervious perhaps to fate itself.  We'll slide into chaos and self-destruct, unthinking.