A Note On Irrationality

Or Things I Scream at My Visibly-Bored Therapist

A taste of what’s to come for all of us.

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I was screaming at my therapist this week (my therapist who dutifully tried to get me back to discussing my feelings and my childhood like the forthright Freudian she is), pounding the drum I’ve been pounding these last few years ad nauseam, ad iram, ad everything unpleasant, “I don’t need to investigate the adolescent origins of whatever emotion I am currently experiencing, I just need to know, I need you to tell me, how am I supposed to live in this world without feeling fucking insane all the time?”

My problem, which I’m sure is also many other people’s problem as well, is that living in metastatic irrationality makes me feel nuts. Phenomenologically, it’s like having a low-level migraine all the time. Watching contradictory behavior and contradictory decisions play out with all the chaos that contradictions engender, makes me want to eternally rub my temples clockwise, teeth gritted, eyes wrenched shut. Joe Rogan has spent the last few weeks praising Hitler on his podcast, with nary a mainstream syllable of condemnation from any prominent Jewish person, yet there are many still up in arms over Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech, where he basically just explicitly said the moral of the movie he just won an award for. It’s like being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, but back before human society destroyed itself. “You maniacs, you’re currently in the process of blowing it up! Damn you!”

Between stifling yawns (not a joke), my therapist reminded me that the decisions other people make aren’t irrational just because I don’t agree with them, and that stopped me for a beat. I don’t know if she took that pause to check her e-mail or to just take a moment for herself – a moment to bask in a silence that didn’t contain the words “Covid” or “genocide” – but I’m sure the weighty interlude was an oasis in a sea of kvetching.

What stopped me for a beat was that I realized I’ve been a little blasé with how I’ve been talking about rationality and that maybe a little definitional rigor is needed. Because she’s right. Just because someone operates from a, let’s say, alternate conceptual scheme, doesn’t make them irrational. Irrational decisions are Looney Tunes, Yakko, Wakko and Dot, Judge Doom after he’s revealed to be a toon, right, wild insanity loosed upon the world. When I talk about civilizational irrationality, I’m not talking about a person making an insane decision or even many people making insane decisions; the decisions most people make are for reasons and by dint of that, those decisions are rational.

So, just because one ignores Covid and doesn’t mask or doesn’t get vaccinated or doesn’t stay home when sick – things I think are both insane and morally reprehensible – doesn’t mean that the person making those decisions is necessarily irrational. They might conclude that Covid isn’t a problem anymore or that it was never a problem or that it’s still a problem, but they don’t care if it’s a problem if it means having to change their lives. I think a lot of these decisions stem from denial or willful ignorance or being successfully propagandized or out of a dearth of empathy, but they’re still, on this microlevel of human beings making decisions for reasons, rational. At least on a very compartmentalized, non-holistic understanding of the world.

But the irrationality I’m talking about isn’t a description of any specific low-level, strictly-rational personal decision that I may think is fucking stupid, but rather a description of that decision when seen against the backdrop of reality, whether or not the person making the decision knows or understands THE WAY THINGS ARE.

Look, people do things for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, they just act impulsively. Sometimes, they think about their actions before they act and act for those reasons. Sometimes, they do that and then act for other reasons. Sometimes, people’s emotions overwhelm them, and they act out of that. Sometimes people just do things, consciously maybe or even absentmindedly, and then justify those actions with a reason ex post facto. There are libraries of analytic philosophy overflowing with narcoleptic tomes that dissect every version of these decisions and try to find what level of mind these things are happening on. And it’s all bullshit. It uses a bad or misshapen understanding of humans, devoid of culture, history, class, identity and such, and completely misses the topographic and paradigmatic ways in which humans and Geist interact with each other.

That is to say, this is the kind of stuff I was talking about in the last EXCITING INSTALLMENT of THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMPENDING COLLAPSE: history has gifted us with THE WAY THINGS ARE (the current stage of Geist), which was built from the dawn of human culture to the moment you are reading this sentence. Humans act both to support THE WAY THINGS ARE and to react against THE WAY THINGS ARE (and everything in-between). Some of that feeds back into the system and ultimately strengthens THE WAY THINGS ARE.* Some of it chips away at THE WAY THINGS ARE.

*For example, transphobia is fucked up no matter what time period, but in a culture that is actively menacing, making life difficult for and stochastically killing trans men and women, transphobic speech, especially from kaiju-sized shitheads like J.K. Rowling, feeds back into the system, strengthening the hateful atmosphere, so that it becomes even more dangerous.

THE WAY THINGS ARE is constantly changing based on how human actions are filtered through the system, and how those actions affect THE WAY THINGS ARE is a function of the power of the person doing the thing. This is just a fancy way of saying that powerful people have an outsized effect, and the more powerful a person is, the more they can dictate the shape of THE WAY THINGS ARE. Also, this is topographic, in that the system filters human action differently in different parts of the world. I would assume, based on ZERO evidence, that the closer one is to the Imperial Core or the closer one is to WHERE THINGS ARE HAPPENING, the more their actions can feed into the system, but again, that’s just a guess.

THE WAY THINGS ARE is a constant negotiation between physical reality, the historical development of THE WAY THINGS ARE* and the current, complex, topographic interplay of human action reacting to THE WAY THINGS ARE. If one part of this equation changes drastically, like say physical reality, but the people act – either out of ignorance or denial – as if it hasn’t changed, it’s going to cause some deep contradictions within THE WAY THINGS ARE, and because this is a complex system where THE WAY THINGS ARE feeds back into the system, those contradictions are going to feed back into the personal, low-level, everyday decisions of regular people. If this positive feedback loop continues, it creates a constant churn of tension and contradiction that flows throughout the system causing chaos, hence the term “metastatic irrationality”.

*Not exactly, but this is kind of just a philosophy-speak way to say:

When I say that people are behaving irrationally, what I mean is not that they are personally making decisions like Ren & Stimpy in “Space Madness” – just twiddling your lips with your index finger, giving straightjacket – but rather that the version of reality that a lot of people are living in is divorced from physical and scientific reality to such a degree that when people take rational actions, they are taking rational actions in relation to this Unreality. They’ve fucked off to Narnia, but still think they’re reacting to the conditions on the ground in Omaha. When you rationally react to Unreality, you personally are being rational, but those rational-in-the-context-of-Unreality decisions now feed back into the real system, and it is that process that causes irrationality and long-term instability in THE WAY THINGS ARE. Especially in our paradigm, which pre-2020 was already building towards a critical mass of irrationality.*

*I would also venture that some - if not a large part of this - is class related. The collapsing of the bourgeoise psyche, under the weight of its own contradictions, is causing a lot of this irrationality too, at least in the circles I run in. Like, I personally know a lot of middle/upper middle class/ lower upper class folks who are aware of the actuality of THE WAY THINGS ARE around the edges of their everyday life, but through money and privilege have been able to insulate themselves from it totally impinging upon their lives.

This will become less viable as the central contradiction in their lives intensifies. For most of my life, we (I’m including myself in this class) were able to keep our own purported moral beliefs and our own material circumstances, which are based on the opposite of our purported moral beliefs, in an amicable tension with each other.

For most of the 20th century, we could recycle and donate a little bit at the end of the year, and feel like "it's worth it/I'm giving back" but by 2024, it's become too obvious that the number of bodies we feed into the furnace to support our lifestyle is not offset in the least by composting. There are a lot of people that struggle with doing better, some that are giving up their material circumstances in order to fight against the excesses of Empire, but also, there are a lot of people who are deeply wrapped up in their superficial identity as A GOOD PERSON, but don’t want to change a single meaningful aspect of their lives to truly be A GOOD PERSON and can't handle the fact that A GOOD PERSON does GOOD THINGS and truly at their core, they don't actually care about the moral duty that comes lock, stock and barrel along with their purported beliefs.

And sure some people – especially this strawman I am constructing – will say that instability is good because the status quo fucking sucks and needs to change. It’s a system that turns us all – in the Imperial Core – into Little Molochs, feeding off the human sacrifices happening wherever wealthy whites aren’t. But positive change doesn’t come out of just destabilizing THE WAY THINGS ARE and vaguely hoping when it falls apart SOMETHING GOOD??? takes its place. It won’t. Fascism will. So, instability in the system that arises from contradictions, instability that could bring the whole thing tumbling down, this kind of instability is NOT GREAT!

I don’t know if I can say it was always like this, but certainly over the last 100 years, Reality has become antithetical to the interests of the ruling class. So, over the last 100 years, different groups of rich folks built different methodologies to distort reality. Whether it was Exxon creating a propaganda onslaught to deny climate change, governments constantly waving the bloody flag to cover up the profit motives of the military-industrial complex, the construction of American fascism through beefed-up police budgets in the wake of the 2020 Civil Rights Remix* and anti-democratic Cop Cities in the name of law and order – a Potemkin Existence – this whole scaffolding, the Karl Rove “we make our own reality”, is what Karl Folk, an online writer I follow on Bluesky who has been chronicling our descent into fascism, calls  “weaponized unreality”. Wielding this weaponized unreality causes enormous amounts of irrationality in THE WAY THINGS ARE.

*Psalm One’s fantastic phrase for the George Floyd Protests.

I don’t want this to sound like a conspiracy, like the ruling class is the Legion of Doom, but rather that each of these companies or private equity firms or billionaires in each of their domains made these decisions for any number of reasons: greed, convenience, psychopathy, incredulity, a desire to kick the can down the road, a desire to not deal with the repercussions of Reality, laziness, servility, a desire not to rock the boat, arrogance, etc. Lots of different motivations that end up in the same part of the flowchart.

So, on one end, Unreality was built by the ruling class for numerous reasons that all added up to various propaganda campaigns that fucked with our perception of THE WAY THINGS ARE. But propaganda doesn’t work on everyone. So that other part of the equation is that over the last 100 years, The Resistant were dealt with by killing, blacklisting, discrediting, sabotaging, imprisoning, silencing, threatening and frightening anyone to the left of Reagan. If one propagandizes a good deal of the population and excommunicates a good deal of everyone else from everyday life, this process begins to unmoor the populace at large from THE WAY THINGS ARE, like a ship slowly drifting from the dock or an unfrozen 1960s British spy in a steamroller slowly driving towards a henchman.

A hastily-drawn graph that, if I were to pull it out in person, would definitely not make me look at all insane.

On top of this process (which really, I think, is the key process to understanding how we ended up here in 2024), as wealth becomes concentrated, more and more rich people are created. Each of them have their own aims, and for most of their aims, Reality is a problem. So, each of these nouveau riche turds now add to the above process, accelerating the manufacturing of Unreality. And just to reiterate, this isn’t necessarily a conscious, evil, Mr. Burns-tenting-his-fingers type of process. Maybe in some cases, but generally, when a rich person says “Do X”, even if X is stupid or actually undermines what the rich person wants or contradicts something the rich person said to do five minutes ago or is not possible, even is X is any or all of these things or more, people less powerful that this wealthy moron have to try and do X. And the more powerful that person is, the more X can add to Unreality.

Since the dawn of the neoliberal age in the 1970s*, more and more wealthy, powerful people have been created. Each of them, in acting, creates more and more instability in the system. Even if those actions aren’t insane, like the guy who steals his son’s blood to stay young forever, they preference short-term gain over the long-term stability of THE WAY THINGS ARE, and the more people there are with the power to affect THE WAY THINGS ARE that act with that preference, the more they feed irrationality into the system.

*I’m going to use David Harvey’s estimation of neoliberalism as class warfare, of the elites trying to take back what they thought the New Deal and Labor took from them, even though it was their shitty decisions and Smaug-like greed that crashed the economy in the first place

Then Covid created the final mass needed to tip the entire system into inescapable irrationality. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, now everyday people can act in a way that causes contradictions that can feed into the system and cause havoc. If physical reality dictates that even a mild case of the Coco can have long-lasting health implications, and repeated reinfections are disastrous, yet we do not change our behavior to accommodate that knowledge, well, now the irrational actions of the hoi polloi can fuck up THE WAY THINGS ARE just like the ruling class can!

(Is metastatic irrationality the only true equality we can ever achieve?)

My point is, and what I’ll have to communicate to my therapist while she violently holds her eyes open, fighting sleep (to the point that they’re tearing up while she’s talking to me), is that when I complain about irrationality, I’m not necessarily talking about a single person who does something I think is fucking stupid, but rather that in a world where the ruling elites have already spent decades upon decades cultivating an atmosphere of irrationality, when massive numbers of humans begin acting irrational too, acting in ways that contradict physical reality, this causes absolute chaos.

Paradigms change in the way Thomas Kuhn outlined in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the new guard must accept that the new paradigm explains the world better than the old one, and the adherents to the old one, the people in places of power that refuse to give up the old paradigm, they just have to die out. What’s driving me mad, what’s giving me a headache all the time is that the repercussions for not accepting the new paradigm with Covid, for adhering to the old status quo, are too dire both on an individual level and on a societal one, and waiting for the Boomers to kick the can may doom us all.

And maybe that’s why I find a discussion of the dystopia enveloping us all to be more urgent and vexing than the time my mom called my drawings “weird”, okay, Dr. Sokolov? Hmm? Oh, I guess our time is up. We’ll pick up here next week.