When disconnected from reality, reasoning can produce nonsense

Our culture is locked in a battle over objective reality.

The ability to observe objective facts and then use reason to interpret them was at the center of human progress for the last few hundred years. Science that came out of this allowed us to improve the world. We made ourselves fabulously wealthy by historical standards. We improved the lives and health of everyone.

Today, we’re slowly throwing all that away.

One group claims that men can become women — and vice versa — just because they feel that way. They claim that subjective feelings — across a wide range of issues — determines what is allowed and what is not.

Another group is perfectly happy to follow politicians who tell lies at an unprecedented scale. These people don’t mind the lies and don’t mind ignoring reality they don’t like — just as long as their side holds power.

In the meantime, a few of us still insist that truth matters. Objective reality matters. Character matters. Honesty matters.

For those of us in that intellectual and moral “no man’s land,” we watch as clowns to the left and jokers to the right insist that seizing power and defeating enemies is all that matters.

And some of us know that nothing can change until our society can once again show a principled commitment to objective reality and truth — as a broad consensus.

There used to be an assumption that ideas did battle in the public arena. Even when groups disagreed, the intellectual supporters of those ideas could broadly agree about what reality was.

Today, the mainstream groups who see each other as battling for control have no interest in truth or objective reality.

The populists of the right want to impose their vision through the naked exercise of political power. They’re not even attempting to make intellectual arguments for what they believe. Even when they occasionally do something that I agree with, the rank and file are so intellectually bankrupt that they have no interest in making a reasoned case — grounded in reality — for what they want.

The elites of the far left are dangerous in a different way. They have adopted policies that are based on feelings and ideology. Many of those things are wildly in conflict with objective reality, but that’s OK — because they tell us that everything is subjective now. They bully anyone who objects to their conclusions. Rational argument and appeals to truth aren’t even allowed. Such things are considered racist or classist or somehow bigoted.

What the groups in public discourse today have in common is that they’re all more dedicated to getting their way than in being in being in alignment with truth and objective reality. But all of them claim to be the ones who are reasonable and rational. And in some ways, they are.

The human brain and its reasoning ability are amazing. They’ve given us great things. But when a human mind disconnects from objective reality and believes its abstract reasoning more than what reality around them shows, it ends up with nonsense.

More and more brilliant people and schools of thought do this today, so they end up with systems of thought that are internally consistent and rational — but which completely ignore simple reality.

Surprisingly — at least for those of us who see the world becoming insane — society isn’t going mad by becoming irrational. Instead, each group takes one rational claim that forms the core of what it believes

The modern world, in many different ways, does not usually go mad by becoming irrational. It goes mad by taking one rational idea, isolating it from every other truth, and then following it off a cliff. That is why a madman can appear perfectly logical. He has a tiny circle of logic with everything else shut out. The problem is not that he cannot reason. The problem is that he cannot return to reality.

When I was much younger and even more foolish than I am today, I had trouble saying, “I don’t know.” I had an opinion about everything. And I was right about everything, of course. I was certain of it.

As the years have gone by, I’m certain of fewer and fewer things. There are a few root-level “first things” that I’m willing to assert assurance about, but there aren’t many things outside of those few principles that I can say I know with certainty.

The list of things I proclaim as truth shrinks all the time — and I have no interest in bullying anyone into accepting my list. I have more questions and fewer answers, partly because I’ve seen myself wrong so many times and partly because I see that the world is far more complex than I realized not so very long ago.

We can disagree about what truth is — and which specific things are morally right and wrong — but the postmodern tendency to claim everything is just a personal preference is madness that leads to personal and societal disaster.

Objective reality exists, even when we can’t agree about what we’re seeing.