There are many people who think that they are rational, who use reason as a cover for abusive behaviour. What these people don’t understand is that reason is a tool. Tools are what you are using them for. If you are using your reason to make contributions in science or engineering, then you are doing the right thing with your reason. If you are using it to abuse people, then you are doing the wrong thing with it.
So we have many such people claiming such things as that love or creativity or spirituality are irrational. That you don’t understand the reasons for something does not make it irrational. It makes you stupid. I have known eminent scientists from World War II generation who started their marriages with love at first sight. These people are far more rational, and far more responsible, than the people who militate against love.
I had a very beautiful and intelligent girlfriend named Layo. The man she was with before me was an engineering student. He thought that she was crazy and irrational, and he kept running her down. Yet he was completely in love with her. His thoughts and his feelings were not in accord; and that combination can only produce misery. What is wanted is not valued; what is valued is not wanted. You either get what you want and are dissatisfied with it, or you get what you value and don’t enjoy it.
So we have such statements as “women: can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” On the upshot: Can’t live. This is a stupid way to live. For happiness to exist, thinking and feeling must be in accord with one another. One must either learn to value what one wants to want what one values. Thus, I both value and want women who are artistic. And I have had quite good relationships with such women.
Of course such women will get attacked by people who think themselves rational. However the people who make such attacks want these women as well. They get the woman; then they keep running her down. They make her miserable and they make themselves miserable. That, once again, is a stupid way to live.
What needs to be done in such situations? It is to bring thoughts and feelings into accord. It is to have an advanced enough understanding of reason that you can rationally conceptualize things such as love. John Nash said that the greatest truth is found in the equations of love. Here is a man who was more skilled at reasoning than just about anyone; yet he didn’t find love to be irrational.
As for myself, I am nowhere close to being stupid. I was a child prodigy, and I finished University of Virginia at age 18. I worked for a long time in computers. I can do reason well enough. I also know from experience that the materialistic worldview does not begin to describe the whole of reality, and there are many real things that these people do not see. Planet Earth is not limited to its crust. There is also molten metal at the centre, atmosphere and oceans at the top, and all the life that lives on it. The people who see only the crust do ignorant things, such as crushing all things that are not the crust. What they do is very wrong, and there is nothing rational about it.
To the person who thinks that he’s rational and that others are stupid or crazy, the worst nightmare is a feeling-oriented person with a brain. He is a nightmare for two main reasons. One is that he may be in a position to help other feeling-oriented people whom one would like to see downtrodden. The other is that he cannot be credibly portrayed as being stupid, which invalidates one’s belief that feelings are for the stupid. So such a person must be portrayed as dangerous or demonic. This happened to me; it has happened to many others.
Abuses of reason are not the same thing as reason any more than abuses of beauty by stupid teenagers and unscrupulous plastic surgeons the same thing as beauty. Many valuable things are owed to reason, and irrationalism is wrong. What is even more wrong however is abuses in the name of reason, such as persecution of things such as love, spirituality and creativity. The abuses of reason discredit reason itself, which gives birth to irrational ideologies. And a man who truly respects reason will respect it enough not to commit abuses in its name.