Caleb Beers, guy who once owned a book on philosophy, but lost it.
One of the curious things about emotion is that it is basically solipsistic. We can all perceive reality if we choose, but choosing to do so inevitably does some violence to our emotions. Moreover, in a technological society where external challenges are almost non-existent, where most of the really bad diseases have been eradicated, where there are no predators or crop failures, all of the challenges and all of the rewards come from other people.
The best way to get other people to give you things is to engage with them on an emotional level, and this is where the trouble begins. If you can get everything you need to stay alive from other people, and if you do that by engaging with them emotionally, then gradually you lose the idea that there is a reality outside of what humans agree on. This is why we throw tantrums when confronted with truths we don’t like: a human being socialized in modern society cannot fathom the idea of a reality outside of what everybody wants and agrees on. “Reality,” for most people, is defined by whatever idea is socially acceptable, because having socially acceptable ideas is how we survive.
Unfortunately, that big nasty thing called reality is still there, and it always wins in the end. If we all believe socially convenient lies, the truth will always catch up to us in the end. It’s just that the bubble, the cushion created by modern society, is so big that the consequences of believing lies take a long time, decades or centuries in fact, to catch up with us.
So if you’re a person who has decided that reality comes before human feelings, you’re going to get a lot of blowback because you’re surrounded by people who have lost sight of reality outside of what humans agree on. The worst part is that they cannot correctly interpret what you say to them, because the idea that you would value truth for its own sake is simply not on their radar. In their world, everything you say and do must be rooted in a desire for a particular emotional state. They explain your behavior to themselves by saying, “He wants to feel like…” because the idea that you may not hold your Precious Fee-Fees (tm)front-and-center is just completely invisible to them. You’ll notice that this tendency is stronger with people who do not have to take care of themselves, either because they live with their parents or are on government assistance or have easy jobs. These are just more severe cases of a general trend, however.
Given these considerations, it becomes abundantly clear why people think you’re a dick if you value inconvenient realities: to them, the idea that truth matters, or that there is a reality outside of how we feeeeel about it, is just bizarre and totally incomprehensible. You’re supposed to believe things because they’re “empowering” or “liberating” (i.e. things that feel good), not because they’re true. If you value truth, it must be because you want to feel like you’re right and everyone else is wrong, or you want to feel like you know things other people don’t know, or whatever. Clearly, you must want to feel a certain way, because what other motive could you have?
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