About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
To be clear here, when I say “reason” I mean the fundamental capability humans have to use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors. If this is the understanding you had when you wrote your comment I suppose we just disagree fundamentally, and that’d be an exceptional take on the matter.
We can be both emotionally and logically intelligent creatures, the two aren’t mutually exclusive and reducing people to their base emotional responses takes away from their agency. In my experience people are typically much more reason-based in their decision-making, even people who are victims of the term “unreasonable woman”. We don’t go around doing things just because.
I don’t think I shall commit to the insane proposition that humans use logic, rationality, and data to make decisions and inform their behaviors when climate change is currently killing the planet’s ecosystems off. To some extent I think you’ve got a high bar to clear for that proposition to be accepted!
Jokes or half-jokes aside, it’s not a new observation that people rationalize their politics after having decided what it is they feel. I’ve seen too much consensus reality with completely reasonable paragraph after paragraph to take reason all that seriously.
But I do believe that people are ‘reasonable’ in the way that you say: we don’t go around doing things just because (and to the extent that we do, it’s a good thing!). It’s when a group of people gather around a list of reasons that become an ideology that I start to get twitchy.
Feminism is a great movement but men who apply it as an ideology have missed something fundamental about the basis for reason in the expression of emotion.
