David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

philosophy

Economic Man needs no heart, because love and God are dead

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In the modern era, Economic Man has had his heart ripped out. He doesn’t need it anymore.

Economic Man is supposed to be a perfectly rational creature. The culture has declared God to be dead. It’s ridiculed sacrificial love and religion and faith. Devotion to family is frowned upon. Economic Man has nothing left to believe in other than production and efficiency and acquisition.

Economic Man isn’t supposed to have feelings. He certainly has no soul. He can deal only in the emotions his brain can process without having to feel. He can be angry. He can be jealous. He can covet what someone else has. He can hate.

But Economic Man is not supposed to feel deeply. He’s not supposed to feel the painful joy of true love. He’s not supposed to feel the prick of a heart that has been pierced by joyful feelings which can make him cry.

Did you even notice when the culture ripped out your heart and taught you not to feel? Did you notice when you were stripped of your humanity and turned you into a rational robot focused on production and efficiency?

Is it any wonder that life seems more and more empty to Economic Man?

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World is a surreal alien landscape where nothing makes sense to me

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People sometimes play practical jokes on someone by having everyone in a group pretend not to notice something obvious — an unusual sound, for instance. When the target of the joke mentions the sound — a drum beating or a horn blowing or something else — others seem oblivious and nonchalant, acting more and more as though they believe the person who hears the sound is joking — or maybe hearing things that aren’t there.

For much of my adult life, I’ve had a vague sense that almost everybody in the world is playing such a practical joke on me. I’ve halfway expected someone to finally laugh and say, “OK, we’ve been pulling your leg. Did you almost believe we were all crazy? Or did you think you were crazy?”

And that’s just it. I have a horrible sense that the world around me is fundamentally insane — or else I’m insane. Because if what I perceive of the world is real and accurate, the world is fundamentally nuts. But if the world is sane and rational, I must be insane to perceive it as making so little sense.

I’ve never really harbored any suspicions that I was the unknowing center of something like “The Truman Show,” but I’ve often thought that such a bizarre thing would explain a lot — because the world as I experience it makes no sense, unless everybody is putting me on.

You see, I have a strong need for the world to make sense — and little about this world seems sane to me. So am I crazy? Or is the world as irrational as I perceive it to be?

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When it comes to ideas, should we prefer complexity or simplicity?

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Take a look at this photo. Is it a picture of complexity or simplicity? Or is it something entirely different — an ordered complexity that creates simple beauty?

It’s become a truism today that complexity is bad and that we should strive for simplicity. I agree. Kinda. Sorta. I’m here to offer a qualified and narrow argument in favor of complexity. Of course, the people who hate complexity don’t read things such as this anyway, so I figure I know who’s still reading.

In almost every discussion, the complicated and nuanced position is at a disadvantage. The simplistic and emotional appeal is almost always going to win most people over. I know because I tried both in politics. The only thing that works is dumbing things down, because very, very few people are willing to take the time to understand a complex idea well enough that it seems simple to them.

In the first election I ever managed — when I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing — we consciously decided that we were going to talk about issues and not personalities and trivialities. We ran a full-page newspaper ad with more words on it than you’ve ever seen from a campaign in your life. We issued white papers recommending policies based on ideas from think tanks. We talked about what the issues really were — and we got something like 3 percent of the vote. A couple of years later, we took the same candidate and ran again (for a different office, but in the same city). This time, we didn’t mention ideas. We didn’t mention policies. We didn’t mention philosophy. We just talked about what a great guy the candidate was. We won.

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