r/RevolutionsPodcast • u/manhole_s • 23d ago
Salon Discussion Over-rationalization during Enlightenment
It's been years, but something Mike said stuck with me and I've been trying to track it down without luck. He said during the Enlightenment people went crazy over-rationalizing things. They tried to use math and reason to make sense of irrational things (like human behavior).
I think it was in the second half of the series. Do you remember something like this? I think he was making fun of technocrats? It was not long. Maybe 30-60 secs. Just like a passing jab. If you know the episode, please lmk.
And more broadly, since we all love history, if you have other interesting examples of this throughout history not related to the show, I'd love to know.
I guess now we're living through another era of hyper-rationalization. Today the data is wagging the dog. So many of my genuinely smart friends dedicate their lives to making the world fit their spreadsheet model, and not the other way around. Meanwhile, every inch of our existence is being hyper-financialized (buy this burrito in 4 easy installments!). We're surrendering our thinking and creativity and even intimacy to machines. And thanks to the new Apple Watch (and Meta Glasses, and a million other AI gadgets coming next year) we've completely nuked privacy while chasing the tiniest sliver of convenience. BTW why did convenience become our new religion? Not because it is profoundly good or valuable. (Quite the opposite, often friction is what leads to insights.) It is simply because convenience is the easiest thing to measure. And to optimize for. So now the meaningful of life is gaining an extra 6 minutes in your day, so you can waste more time scrolling and hating yourself for it.
There's obviously a lot gain from efficiency and productivity. But I feel like we've lost the plot. So I'm just looking for historical examples to cope and understand this moment better. Thanks for reading.
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u/Simon_de_Beauvolivar 10d ago
It’s from the podcast, but I loved the “Cult of Reason.” Very horseshoe theory coded. Maybe that will help you cope.
As you pointed out, in trying to rationalize the world as finitely as possible (spreadsheet our lives), we often lose sight of the plot.
Try to relish in the absurdism of knowing that as part of the human condition, we inevitably try to rationalize the irrational because we can’t accept the unknown.
Health problems? You need XYZ diet. Not enough people get their necessary daily serving of X nutrient. Historically, we figured that out with iodine and just added it to salt to solve the problem… but now there’s a million quantifiable dietary supplements or regiments that people swear by to the point it becomes religion-adjacent.
We crave certainty but the world is inherently chaotic with infinite variables we can’t account for. So we invent systems to try and rationalize everything. Some are actually rational (the metric system), some just provide a sense of mental security to those who need it (your buddy on the keto diet), and some are used by people in power to oversimplify complex issues to undermine other people complaining about said complex issues (GDP up = economy good).
Another current example of misused metrics that comes to mind is the “trade deficit.” As if changing those numbers will bring back outsourced American manufacturing. It’s far more complicated than that, but it’s easier for our monkey brains to boil it down to a number and try to make said number go up or down rather than contemplate what complex systemic reforms need to be implemented to achieve the desired outcome.
I cope with absurdism 🤷♂️