Why Reason is in Decline in America — And How to Get it Back

Despite all the contention today, nearly everyone agrees that society is in a state of decline. The question is: Why?

My own answer to that question is the slow, tortured death of reason. A rational culture, like a rational household, is one where people tolerate, respect and reason with each other. An irrational society is one where people spew emotions, verbally and emotionally intimidate one another and — in the worst case — initiate force against one another.

You can judge the state of a society in large measure by its intellectual elite. The intellectual elites are the ones who either set a rational tone, or an anti-intellectual one. In today’s society, the intellectual and media elites — who in a better time and place would be worthy of our trust, admiration and respect — are the exact opposite of what you expect rational people to be. They might speak in soft, reasonable tones, but they tolerate no dissenting opinion beyond the combination of socialism, political correctness and the anti-America (translation: anti-liberty, anti-reason) bias inherent in just about everything they write or say. If you doubt my assertion, then watch what happens anytime a dissenting speaker — usually a conservative or a libertarian (like somber, brilliant intellectual Charles Murray, or even George Will) tries to speak on a college campus. Oops, you can’t observe what happens. They no longer speak on campuses, because hordes of rioting child-students egged on by soft-spoken professors will not physically let them.

There’s no one source to blame for the decline of reason. The government has a lot to do with it because every time we turn around, the government is forcing people to do something against their reason, and usually against their only rational obligation, which is to leave other people alone.

Schools have a lot to do with the decline of reason. Yes, it’s true that government-run schools teach all kinds of leftist propaganda such as environmentalism and the myth that anti-liberty presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama are saints, while noninterventionist presidents such as Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Grover Cleveland and Thomas Jefferson are racist and moronic. But the greater sin of schools is the fact of what they do not teach children: critical and objective thinking skills.

By now, most of the people who are parents (or even grandparents) came of age when the teaching of rational, objective critical thinking skills — never taught enough — have gone fully by the wayside. Anyone who has come of age in the last generation or two, and certainly coming of age today in the era of public school’s “Common Core” (translation: Communist propaganda, 21st Century Style), can take credit for any reasoning or critical thinking skills he or she manages to attain or develop. Because schools, at least public schools, will not teach them. Subjects? Maybe, if you’re lucky and the school is well-funded. But critical, independent and objective thinking? Never.

Because there’s no one source causing the widespread decline of reason, there’s no one thing any person can do to bring reason into dominance. The best thing you can do for society and the world is the best thing to do for yourself: stubbornly and persistently insist on living a life guided by reason. In politics, the best thing to do is support the most pro-liberty candidates you can find. They are few and far between, but if you can’t find a great and consistent pro-liberty candidate with a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, at least find one with a pro-liberty attitude (Donald Trump has some of that, in my view). Find one who will provide a counterattack against the sternly consistent anti-liberty, anti-individualism, anti-free market, anti-First and Second Amendment attitude of the hard core left, the people who now absolutely rule our media, entertainment, intellectual, educational and now even sports establishment.

I spend a lot of time as a cognitive psychotherapist trying to help people apply reason in their daily lives, to their choices, their relationships and the management of their emotions. The more skillfully people can do this, the more rational they will become, and — to that extent — the world becomes a better place.

Just as charity begins at home, reason begins at home too. Stop expecting the world to go your way, because “the world” consists of individual people, most of them badly guided by intellectual elites posing as advocates of reason who support nothing of the kind. It’s a terrible problem, and it’s the root of everything going wrong today.

If you have children, teach them two things above all: independence and critical thinking. Independence gives you the motivation to think. Thinking is how you know. When you’re independent and confident in your ability to think, you’ll see right through the moronic authorities in our educational, media and political establishment. That’s how empires fall.

And if you’re an adult suffering from emotional problems, try to understand that most emotional problems are due to low self-esteem. And the actual definition of self-esteem is NOT “feeling good about yourself”…The actual definition of self-esteem is a sense of independence and a confidence in your critical, objective thinking skills. Reason makes all these possible. Reason is the operating system (like Windows) in which our minds must operate in order to flourish and survive.

If and when enough people — and the right people, including many in the intellectual realm — start to understand this, you will see things start to change. Will this ever happen? Very probably so. When? I haven’t any idea. It certainly does not appear imminent.

Just as individuals have free will, so do mass groups of individuals acting in the group we call society or culture. I do know one thing for sure: The people currently trying to lead us intellectually are, via their anti-reason and anti-liberty attitudes and ideas, taking us right over the cliff. Whatever you do, don’t follow them. Create your own rational universe and buck the trends. Even in today’s deplorably anti-reason times, there’s a lot to make life sane and fully worth living.

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