It's taken me a looong time to work out something that's probably quite obvious to other persons, intuitively at least. I have ideas about why we've been so slow on the uptake, taking ages to construct bridges between familiar concepts that others find straightforward. But I've at last solved (to my satisfaction) the riddle of rationality.

Or "rationality", I should perhaps type. I don't mean rationality as an intellectual concept, but "rationality" as an intellectual idol, a doublethinkful entity, a weapon in the endless games of social posturing. I almost feel as if English typography ought to introduce some more standard methods of accentuation so that we might better express the muddled or self-contradictory concepts employed in normal-American discourse, entities such as "race" and "conservative". Shadow-text might be appropriate. Let's talk about how American media regards the political left and right! Won't that be fun and straightforward.

We've all seen it and experienced it. We have collided with countless dozens and hundreds and thousands of persons who are, by their own description, the most rational human beings on the planet, always "objective" and "scientific" and "rigorous" and all sorts of cool positive things that I learned during my classics education but which most of these folks got out of self-help books and such. And, of course, they're hardly ever rational. They're bundles of emotions and impulsive decisions (those were the days!) but they've figured out how to tuck away their emotions and impulses somewhere in order to present an outward appearance to the world that's authoritative, forceful, impervious to "haters". They can't bear to be in the company of anyone so emotional as a [use your imagination] and they're extremely proud of finding reasons to cut people off unexpectedly—rational reasons, don't get me wrong, these people never act upon their emotions or anything like that—so that they can settle down to productive discourse with their peers, like "Munk Debates". I do not expect you to know what that is exactly, but it exists.

OK so they're irrational. Big deal. Just avoid them. Right? Well...that's a pretty good heuristic I suppose, but sometimes it is necessary to interact with such people. I've had more than my share of it...(coughs) and thrown some rhetorical punches, and rhetorical stinkbombs, et cetera, in the pursuit of understanding. I wanted to find out what rational really meant, in terms that I could understand. Collectively we've been hindered by numerous limitations and blunders and we've been agonizingly slow at taking hints, but I think we've come to some grasp of this strange sense of rationality.

Neal Stephenson furnished a giant hint, one that I completely missed for decades. In Snow Crash, a novel which I mostly detested on my first reading (although, characteristically, I did like the horny bits) but which, I must confess, turned out to be far more prescient than I wanted it to be. Somewhere in the book there's a titanically powerful repeating gun of some variety (depleted uranium slugs maybe? I can't remember) called "Reason", which some...guy or other...stole and brandished, until they died, then Hiro Protagonist brandished it more competently. He's the hero, so it's a low hurdle for him to overleap. The previous custodian of the weapon wasn't good with it, but he did idolize it, and so we're treated to the juicy sentence, the setup for an extremely violent joke: "Maybe they'll listen to Reason."

I use the shadow-text there because I realized (way too late) that the weapon's name, "Reason", corresponded to what the logicbros think of as reason. Their rationality is merely an excessive trust in excessive force. What's that line from the (PTSD I expect?) Bill Murray character from Caddyshack? Oh heck I'll just quote the whole bit:

License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill you must know your enemy, and in this case, my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will not quit, ever. They're like the Viet Cong. Varmint Cong. So what you gotta do is, you gotta fall back on superior firepower, and superior intelligence. And that's all she wrote.

I mean...I feel like that sums it up pretty well right there. Carl Spackler puts his trust in superior firepower first, and intelligence comes second. The logicbros feel "rational" mostly because they can convince themselves you'd be a shrinking violet in a physical fight (and if not, then cops!) and that their logic and rationality and braininess is so overwhelmingly large compared to the common herd that their enemies simply dash against them in vain. But they can only support that posture against the solid and reassuring might of official authority, in some form or other. They need to feel "superior firepower" is within reach at all times, and I'm sure that at least one or two logicbros have claimed to win an argument on the grounds that the United States had more nuclear weapons than anyone else.

This ties into something devilishly painful, which is the way "rational" is used by the police and what's called criminal justice in the United States. I suppose it fits in a way; it's certainly criminal, this form of justice. A violently poisonous idea has been insinuated into U.S. culture: the notion that it's "irrational" not to back down and submit to excessive force. The police have been especially fond of this notion, because it permitted them to criminalize self-defence: if a cop points a gun at you and you run, the cop considers you "irrational" and therefore an immediate threat, and...well. They've carried out a revoltingly successful emotional transfer of their own fears onto their victims. A cop fears that a suspect will escape them, but with a little emotional magic, that's now rational. The suspect must obviously be crazy or drugged up or whatever, and therefore blessed with the superhuman strength of a madman (the cops love that one) and no longer deserving gentle treatment.

I feel that I've more or less just explained why American society, especially political discourse, has become intolerably doublethinkful. The politicians and propagandists and corporate executives have their methods of doublethink, but they must be rank amateurs compared to lawyers and judges. District attorneys and judges are considered to be respectable persons in U.S. society—probably, they shouldn't be, but that horse fled the barn centuries ago.

Anyway I've never had much contact with that stuff so I'm not used to seeing it leak into general usage, I guess. I've never been friends with a lawyer or anything like that, although I do remember that the star pupil of my RL high school went on to become a high-powered lawyer (and government official, for a while.) I'm sure his doublethink game is tip-top. I remember him as very quick, too, and that's important. Normie society places extreme emphasis on speed and timeliness. Suddenly I imagine myself in an argument with this person whom I haven't seen or much thought about for decades. I'm not sure I'd do so well. Lawyers get lots of practice.

~Chara of Pnictogen

ALMOST an ideal series ~Chara

Maybe it's just my imagination but Udon always looks vaguely appalled at her own behavior. Gibbs was not like this. Gibbs would do Udon-ish things like flop down in the middle of something I'm doing and roll around with his paws in the air, but it always felt wholesome and expected, like Gibbs was merely indicating that he wanted to participate. Udon, however, always looks somehow shocked and wide-eyed. "I am on the floor with my legs in the air, human. How did this happen?! Do something about it!" seems her mood. ~Chara

I believe in democracy, and yet I'm not entirely sure why I do. I don't have an argument that would withstand much scrutiny, anyway...not yet, anyway. Because of my Catholic moralism I view all human beings, including myself, as equally untrustworthy with power. Therefore pure democracy seems like the only option. The implication is that giving anyone extra powers, for any reason, will inevitably lead to abuse. No human being is perfect; therefore no human being will ever be perfectly immune to corruption and the temptation to abuse power.

This is some sort of argument in favor of democracy but not a strong one. If I challenged any American political commentator who branded themselves as Christian with this argument, they'd shoot it down immediately, probably by attacking my assumption that every human being is untrustworthy, which I derive from my interpretation of the concept of original sin. No non-Christian would be obliged to take my premises seriously in the first place!

Democracy has never had strong defenders in any American society I've known, even from earlier decades. Democracy tends to be defended in purely negative terms, because that's what makes the most intuitive sense: as with violations of civil rights, the harmful consequences of violations of democracy are the most obvious arguments (in my opinion) for preserving democracy. It really is "the worst system aside from all the others" partly because it's also the simplest system. Designating an arbitrary leader immediately invites conflict: who gets to define "leader"? What are the criteria for leadership? There's ten thousand think-tanks who owe their daily existence to the fact that one can argue these questions in circles forever—and therefore I say the simplest solution is the best. NOBODY gets to be a supreme leader. NOBODY gets to belong to a privileged class. NOBODY gets shut out as valueless to humanity. What else makes sense?

It's quite obvious that American society has abandoned democracy. The Republicans brazenly betrayed democracy in 1980 with the installation of Ronald Reagan and the open embrace of fascistic methods. The Democrats and liberals responded, I contend, largely by giving up on democracy. Liberal political rhetoric in the U.S., from what I little I remember of the 1980s, took refuge in extreme snobbery. Stupid people were in charge now, that was the problem, according to lots of liberals. To be sure, Ronald Reagan was clearly not all there and being fed his lines; clearly he wasn't President because of his brains and his decision-making. Someone else was doing that. But the resentful conviction that Reagan and the GOP won only because Americans were "dumb" took hold of Democratic politics, and they started to normalize the idea that certain people shouldn't be allowed to vote.

And now...look where we are.

~Chara of Pnictogen