“But we should be cautious of the dangers inherent to any descent into the darkness of irrationality.”

I feel obligated to point out the mundane, every-day descent into the darkness of irrationality. Its so-called “gut intuition”, and it is used to defend all forms of religious, magical thinking, from flat-earth, chem trails, healing crystals, to the gut-intuition, block-headed thought the Trump administration relies on.

The inspiration of Kekule is an example of “inspired thinking done right” — a demonstration of drawing on the well of irrationality and coming up with a great insight. And, yes, all scientists think this way. In fact, all people think this way pretty much all the time: I am drawing upon deep, dark recesses just to bring these words into form and being; the process of my own writing and speaking is magical to me; whence these words flow, it is not known. Yet, as I write, I try to compose my words in a logical, self-consistent manner, so as to harness the gut-intuition with a bridle of articulated logic. That is, irrational thought works best, when it is bridled by rationality; and works poorly when its not (chem trails and the Trump administration providing examples).

The civilizational issues are these: We’ve constructed certain modes of thought — certain bridles — not just science and journalism, but also capitalism and democracy, that, although widely applied, are too constraining: they keep the horse on the hill, away from the valley. The issue for me is not that, as a civilization, we need to explore the valley (this is clear now to me, but perhaps not everyone) — the problem is which valley. The descent into madness is not a rejection of principled thought and it’s replacement by gut-sense. Because we know where that goes — religion, crystals, chem trails — and we don’t want to go there. Rather, it is specifically the rejection of certain particular large structures that harness thought and prevent insight — basically, all the modern, dogmatic systems underpinning modern Western life. Viz, we want to challenge specifically capitalism, science, journalism, with the end goal of having something better.

These systems: capitalism, journalism, are in fact large networks of concepts that support one-another. By organic analogy, my lungs support my blood, which supports my muscles, specifically my diaphram, so I can take another breath. So likewise, journalism, capital flows, advertising, science, rational thought each consists of thousands of concepts, inter-related, supporting one-another, constraining logical deduction as to the directions it can take. If you believe in this, then you must believe in that (viz, if you believe in health, you must believe in wealth; if you believe in wealth, you must believe in banking; if you believe in banking, you must believe in free trade…) So its not so much that we want to go irrational on your heiny, its that we need to deconstruct and reconstruct Western Civ. without killing it. Remove the cancers leaving humanity unharmed. Restructuring Western Civ. might feel like a rejection of rational thought, and in certain ways it is; yet in other ways, rational thought is one of many many things that must be kept alive: we want the fruits of capitalism, of science, of journalism, of rational thought; we don’t want the evils that these have visited upon us. Capiche?