To many it seems there is an impossible situation in the modern intellectual world. Everyone is divided, split, sundered – every issue is a vicious battle of two opposing sides, without a single point of agreement between them. Crucially, both sides are utterly convinced their opponents are irrational – or even insane – while they themselves are bastions of rationality, and have clearly seen the truth amongst a web of lies. How can this be? How can people, from all different walks of life, levels of education and intellect, be completely convinced of the idiocy of their intellectual opponents– while these opponents think the same of them?
Epistemologically, the answer is Rationalism.
Rationalism is the fake intellectual’s method of thinking. It is a shortcut to feeling you are correct – a method of convincing oneself that something is true. It is the single epistemological technique that allows countless men of great intellect to all have completely opposing opinions, all while observing the same reality – the reason being that Rationalism is a method of thinking that doesn’t relate to reality.
Rationalism is a method of creating floating castles of logic in the sky, completely detached from reality itself. For example: statists bemoan the plight of the poor when they have no access to healthcare. Healthcare for the poor is good, they say, but the poor have no money, while the rich have plenty of money, and they wouldn’t suffer too much from sacrificing some of it to help pay for universal healthcare. Therefore, it would be good to tax the rich to pay for healthcare for the poor.
All of the original statements of the argument are correct, but they are assertions floating in a void, without any of the necessary context to evaluate the argument’s conclusion. It is true, in a general sense, that healthcare for the poor is good, and that some percentage of them cannot afford it, but this is not enough information to even begin to form an argument. There has been no discussion of the possibility of private charity taking care of these individuals, or whether they deserve help or have caused their problems by their own carelessness. The basic morality of the argument – altruism – is simply taken as fact, without any attempt to state why the plight of the poor as a group is morally important. Finally, the results of the proposed policy – the effective enslavement of doctors, the punishment of the rich for their success, the inevitable ‘brain drain’ progressive taxation will cause – all of this is in another dimension completely. All that matters is: ‘Poor people need something – rich people have it – therefore we should make them give it up’.
Central to Rationalism is the reliance on definitions of words as the means of an argument. To a Rationalist, as long as he knows the definition of a word, he need not look at what it denotes in reality. If, as many people do, he understands ‘selfishness’ to mean ‘acting in one’s own interest at the expense of others’, he simply knows this is true, and never checks this against reality. If he did he would see people acting for their own interests, without harming others in the process – and realise his definition is wrong.
Rationalism is central to just about every mainstream political or philosophical doctrine. We have already seen an example from the left, but the modern right is no better. Take Donald Trump’s argument for tariffs: American workers can’t find jobs in the manufacturing sector of the economy, because everyone buys manufactured goods from China. They do this because Chinese goods are extremely cheap – therefore, imposing tariffs on these goods would be good for American workers as more people would buy American goods, thus increasing the demand for manufacturing jobs. Once again, the argument ignores the context – the fact that American workers are also consumers, and subsequently benefit from cheap Chinese goods, and will be forced to suffer an increase in prices order to give Randy his job at the factory back.
The antidote to this method of thinking is Induction.
Induction is the method by which knowledge is originally created. Behind every great intellectual discovery is a man who had to induce that discovery, and the only way to do that is to look at reality. No matter whether you are discovering new knowledge or simply understanding what others have already discovered, every single concept in the argument must be brought back to concrete, observable reality. If an argument involves the word ‘good’, before accepting it you must first be sure of what this word actually means, by looking out at reality and seeing ‘good’ in action. To have fully induced even the meaning of the word ‘good’ you have to reduce the concept to something you can point at (sometimes only figuratively, as the ‘something’ may be an aspect of consciousness), and then show how that necessitates a certain meaning of the word. It is beyond the province of this article to go into induction in depth, but I will leave a link to Dr Leonard Peikoff’s invaluable lectures on induction at the bottom of the article.
It is worth saying that Induction itself is no joke – fully inducing complex philosophical concepts can take hours and hours of work, and can hardly be expected of every-day, non-philosophical people. It should be the job of the intellectuals to induce these principles and show the world in concise form how it can be done, but (with the obvious exceptions) no one is providing such a service. Therefore, if you want to fully understand politics, ethics, knowledge and reality itself, it’s largely up to you to induce everything yourself.
However hard that may seem, just remember – someone had to have the brains to induce it in the first place.
https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-courses/objectivism-through-induction
Rational Observations 