We read this recently from an old internet colleague:

The remedy for bad speech, they say, is more speech. Counter negative speech with positive speech: it’s very rational. And the right answer to bad speech would indeed be the rational answer—more speech—if it were only the literal meaning of the words that mattered.

If, that is, we were calculating rational beings.

But we are not.

Instead of calculating rational beings, humans are feeling beings. Speech’s effects on us pass far beyond our awareness. Hypnotic language, for example, speaks to our unconscious minds. Persuasive language makes us feel we should do what we might otherwise know we shouldn’t do. We decide things based on emotion, and then we rationalize our decisions.

True? Not really. We speculate that our colleague was steeped in psychology at some point during his education.

There are certain verifiable statistical and psychological realities that can be applied to large samples and populations. These form the basis for such businesses as advertising and insurance. We recall our “insurance law” professor instructing us that out of, say, 100,000 homes it is a near statistical certainty that, for instance, 5 of them will burn down in a given year, and no one really knows why this is the case.

It is also a psychological certainty that effective advertising can sway large numbers of people into buying Brand B as opposed to Brand A.

Obviously, however, the statistical reality tells you virtually nothing about whether this or that house will be among the five. That winds up being a related, but entirely different question. We must also note that the willful destruction of a home by fire skews the statistics, which is one reason insurance fraud is a crime. The models don’t work to predict deliberate behavior, only random chance.

What about the psychological realities, though?

What our colleague says may be accurate among and across a large population, but only with respect to things that are basically trivial. It may be true that advertising can sway millions who are not devoting any serious study to whether Brand A is better than Brand B. But among those who are making a serious study, the advertising most likely has no effect at all.

It is a very dangerous idea: that we invariably decide what to believe based on emotion and then use reason to rationalize what we already want to believe in the first place. That is an abuse of reason, not reason. And just as we go from the macro to the micro to make our previous counterpoint, we go from the serious to the trivial to make our next one: we use the reasoning process effectively and accurately all the time, for the most part unconsciously, virtually every waking moment of every day. To change a light bulb. To drive our cars. To cook our meals. We could go on.

We are, in other words, utterly and quite properly governed by reasoning that has nothing to do with our “emotions”; rather, reasoning is our primary faculty for accurately navigating our way through the actual world.

We have always worried about psychology’s tendency to travel outside its lane, its casual denial of this bedrock axiom of human existence – reasoning – in the name of “science”. It is a lie, but a lie that many good people just as casually accept, not for its useful “macro” accuracy but also for its destructive micro application.

We can and do use reasoning properly in matters great and small, and it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the denial of this reality is a prelude to a peculiar type of hell on earth.