It is easy to treat emotional people as just "them", the others who are dumb and do not listen to their "reason", but "rational" people are often just as emotional as the caricatures we might have in our head, they simply express it differently.
Rationality is really a front for when things are going fine, which is to say, according to plan, when the self feels safe. Throw a "rational" person in a situation they cannot control however, or one where their livelihood is at a genuine risk, and see how their "rationality" immediately goes out of the window.
This is why scientists can be so childish when their theories and the foundations upon which they rest get critiqued. Not only does their career depend on their reputation, but they have identified themselves with their ideas 1 to the point that critique of those become personal. The Truth is beyond argument and opinions, which is why ultimately it doesn't have to be defended, it is what is the case. If a man has a distorted view of Love, it will inevitably come back to their life, in the form of a wretched relationship with women of course, or some "unexplainable" fear of other people which will disguise itself as hatred, or some surrogate of love such as an obsession with lifting weights, or fawning over animals, or an addiction.
Even if it is obviously important to write about Love and the way it is corrupted in our times, ultimately no one can be convinced about its importance and how it manifests, through arguments alone, because Love like any important quality is grounded in conscious experience, and if someone refuses to change their being, then they will shield themselves from any radical experience whatsoever for as long as life will allow them to.
Rationality on the other hand is a way to mediate experience, the mind interacting with its representations of Reality. This is why rationalists are never interested about Reality itself, only their ideas of it, which is why they tend to jump to explanations when you share a moment of wonder you've had, or why they try to bury the sense of existential alienation with justifications, as if mere ideas could change how you feel.
This is why rationality is ultimately quite emotional, because it is unable to deal with the intensity of experiences, preferring to retreat in its comfortable mental models, which inevitably cannot account for some aspects of our complex world. Instead of admitting to those limitations, rationalists tend to instead double down and blame people's "irrationality" for not complying. My plan was correct but you guys didn't do as I said!
Or what about the way in which every political and spiritual belief presents itself as "rational", or at least reasonable? Isn't it interesting how insanity throughout the centuries has always had some form of justification, which appears to the perpetrators of atrocity as sensible? We don't have to look far into the past, the way in which Jesus was crucified, or the justification for the Crusades, or the reasons given for slavery, or the holocaust, or the horrors of colonialism, or all the countless genocides and wars of the past centuries, all of which are interesting case studies to be sure, but just a few years ago, a blindingly obvious example of the hypocrisy of "rationality" came into light in the form of the covid lockdowns.
The virus, they said, forced governments to lock down entire countries. We had no choice. It was Reality herself making the decision. There was no serious consideration of any tradeoffs, of the way in which the lockdowns would disproportionately affect the working class, who have to physically show up to their job, as opposed to the middle class who tend to have jobs which allow them to work from home, or the impact it would have on the sanity of young people, stuck in front of their screen and unable to spend time outside, or the need for governmental and ideological pressure to keep people compliant, despite our obvious needs for outdoor time and face-to-face connection. None from what I can recall.
Obviously, it is easy to make critiques in hindsight, but what I am pointing out is not that the lockdowns were a mistake, (though they clearly were, from the point of view of most people) but that there wasn't even a consideration for an alternative. But, you might say, the decision was made in the name of safety, because if the virus was really as deadly as it seemed at first, we wouldn't have had time to deliberate together, since that type of decision-making process is slow and could prove fatal.
But this counter argument has two major problems to it. First of all, if the decision of radical lockdowns is made as a pre-emptive for a deadly virus, then surely that decision would have to be constantly evaluated against the actual danger of Covid. As a reminder, the lockdowns lasted around two years, with the country I lived in trying to lift them in the middle of the period (at least in schools) but which only lasted a few weeks.
Surely, if the lockdowns were done in our best interest, then the danger of a virus which predominantly killed off people in their sixties onwards, people who broadly speaking tend to die anyway from other causes, would be weighed against the colossal downsides of locking down entire countries at a time. But no, there was no sense of tradeoff, the virus forced us to lock down the entire country.
The second major problem with this argument is that, surely, this is the type of question where our friend rationality is supposed to help us out no? That being controlled by fear is exactly the type of emotionality which rationalists call out other people on. Of course it is important to keep people alive, but at all costs? A world driven by technological progress is suddenly animated by a humanitarian drive, how odd.
Of course anyone with a semblance of clarity in thinking can see that all the justifications for the lockdowns were an enormous masquerade for the age-old agenda of bringing more power and wealth to those who already have the most of it. Rationality is useful to our world to the extent that it helps those in power, and more broadly speaking, the self to maintain itself.
If you questioned the "science" during covid, the fact that the covid vaccines operated on mRNA, instead of the usual vaccines we are used to which operate by injecting a weakened or inactivated virus in the body so that it may develop immunity against it, and the fact that they seemed to come with significantly more and deadlier side effects than common vaccines, you would be called a "conspiracy theorist". There wasn't even any semblance of discussion or collective sensemaking, it was a crude tribal war between the "good" science and the "bad" dissidents, even if the latter employed the very same rationality which was claimed to be important.
Not that there weren't scientists and doctors speaking against the lockdowns of course. Science, just like any human endeavor, is far more contested and nuanced than it is often portrayed as, it is not the single hivemind made of mindless drones all working in unison which the phrase "science now tells us" makes it seem like.
But the point remains that rationality, at the end of day, is utterly impotent in the face of sheer brute force and the authoritarian drive to dominate people. Many people were afraid to speak up because they didn't want to lose their job or their credibility, or they were in denial that anything important was happening, comfortably staying at home in their work-from-home job. At the end of the day, you cannot trust a coward no matter how rational they are, because their cowardice will lead them to betray their ideals in the face of any danger whatsoever. 2
I would pin down the essence of rationality to control, even outside of the obviously authoritarian ways in which it is employed. It is a way for the mind to reduce Reality into bits that it can grasp and then manipulate.
Science is the premier evidence of that, because the models that are considered valid are those that allow you to reproduce a claim over and over again, outside of its context, which is why the control of variables is such an important aspect of it. This is why there is no scientific model of humor, or beauty, because those experiences are grounded in the context they are in. (on top of being largely useless for someone only interested in power) Take a beautiful object from an organic culture and take it into our ugly rootless world, and it appears out of place, like a wild animal in a zoo, or a flower blooming between the cracks of a pavement.
People who are comfortable being in the moment are sometimes said to "react" to the situation, but it's more accurate to say that they are one with it. Improv for instance can be described as the art of being one with the moment even if the circumstances are imaginery, and it is from this presence that emerge all the qualities of a good actor, such as genuiness, depth of feelings (not emotions), appropriate responses and tones to the situation, the ability to captivate an audience, and a total surrender to what the role asks of them.
Comedy and love are likewise one with the moment, which is why analysis of humor has a way of killing it, because we are distancing ourselves from the moment from which all humor arises, and why saying "I love you" when we mean it comes out simply and directly. How strange would it be to say "I believe that I love you", or "After pondering about it, I have figured out that I love you"?
This way of being one with the situation is fundamentally at odds with what rationalists try to achieve with their mind, which is a top-down relationship with Reality. For instance, the mind trying to control the body, or society trying to control the individual, or the theory trying to dictate the outcome, and so on. This is why rationalists are so uncomfortable with what they cannot control: genuinely feminine women, large groups of people making their own mind about something, the idea of a reality beyond our materialist frames, and the inevitability of death.
At its core, rationality is existentially afraid, which is why its natural conclusion is transhumanism, the fantasy that we can transcend our bodily limitations, plug ourselves into machines and live forever. 3 The dreaded word for those people is limitation, that there could be fundamental limits to what human beings can figure out with their minds, that our society can only grow so much before it becomes unsustainable, or that death, and more broadly speaking impermanence, is not something we can overcome, but rather something we should wisely incorporate into our individual and collective lives.
As soon as you start talking about limits however, it becomes clear that rationality is itself not the rational position it claims to be. Its ground is ultimately the self-informed self and the literal frames it adopts of the world, which it then takes for granted. It is impossible to explain for instance, within the constraints of dualism, coherence and causality, how Reality came to be, or how we can understand anything at all if we are separate from everything and can only perceive our representations of the external world 4, or even what we should pursue as individuals and collectives.
The self by itself cannot answer those fundamental existential questions, which is why, beneath its facade of rationality, there is a cold foundation of self-interest. Yes, perhaps we cannot explain how Reality came to be, but right now we have practical matters such as feeding people and keeping them alive. Only a madman would go against the project of technological progress if it helps us solve those, surely you are not saying that we should just give up on all of that?
And here we see the crux of the issue. At the end of the day, rationality cannot give itself up for anything, because there is nothing it can perceive as worthwhile other than itself. It is impossible to rationally explain to the self-informed self what could be beyond its own survival, or in other words, you cannot describe in finite terms what the value of the Infinite is. This is why rationalists will always be emotional when it comes to existential issues, because their worldview is founded on self-survival, not on the Truth.
As our world keeps slipping towards societal collapse, we should expect situations similar to the covid debacle to happen again. Tyranny in the name of "science" and safety, institutions that double down on their power because they refuse to become obsolete, and well-intended "rational" people who kindly tell us to obey to them for our own good. Because this is the only thing we can expect from a world which is unable to face its own death: cowardice with a veneer of justifications.
1 Incidentally, religious people, the kind who are dogmatic and worldly, also identify with their beliefs of God, and attack anyone who critiques those, because they know deep down that the foundations to their beliefs are non-existent. How could mere ideas uphold Reality and the Divine?
2 No doubt a point which is even more true during periods of more overt violence, such as Nazi Germany, a period which I haven't read much about and cannot comment on in any specific however, but the book titled 'They thought they were free' is on my radar.
3 There are many forms of transhumanism, but the main way it is sold is through the project of immortality.
4 The main insight from Kant's philosophy, which is confirmed to us by modern neuroscience.
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Opposames Emotionality Appearances Science Rationality Covid
2026-02-18