Reason Will Only Get You So Far

Western education relies heavily on logic and hierarchical thinking. Thoughts end up manifesting, both in individuals’ ways of encountering the world, and also in institutions themselves. As a result, the modern world has developed in such a way that reflects linear, hierarchical thinking. X leads to Y, and so on.

People chase goals and think they’re on a straight line, or “climbing a ladder”, even if they’re being thrown in every direction and feel deep dissatisfaction. Bureaucracies and corporations are organized from top to bottom, even if this method of organization is remarkably inefficient. Countries are operated in the same way, and citizens on the ground are left wondering what the hell actually gets done, along with students, employees, civil servants, and even artists. The list goes on.

The lesson? Reason will only get you so far. Top-down reasoning doesn’t just cause coercion and power struggles, it relies on them. When you place one thing above another, and begin comparing things on an up-down left-right dichotomy, you cause violence.

We’re all Gods in the sense that we create the world we live in; if we charge concepts with dualistic meaning, we create their opposite. If you pursue Good at all costs, you create evil.

We can only cause concepts to clash when we pit them against one another! Day and night don’t fight; they coexist. Sun and rain don’t try to outdo one another; they simply function autonomously. People always want to take sides, to reason from one point of view.

Pure reason will lead you to violence; its purest form is fascism, in which nothing exists outside a strict top-down pyramid ideology. Learn to put reason in its place. Use it when navigating the symbolic world of artificial humanity, but when dealing with your own feelings, your intuition, and nature, there’s no need for it. Let your inner self guide you to “truth” when logic fails.