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Quote of the Day: Confusing Thinking With Feeling
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” – Thomas Sowell
This bit of Sowell food really hits the problem we are facing today: confusing thinking with feeling. That is what is behind so many of the outrage storms today. Don’t like a bill banning the sexual grooming of kindergarteners through second-grade students? Frame it as “Don’t Say Gay” and get everyone feeling badly about it. Mad at Putin? Ban Russian breeds at cat shows. (That surely deserves a prize for peak feelz.) Upset at inflation? Blame greedy corporations. Go for the emotional appeal.
When I was a child, when someone acted out their feelings they were told to grow up. Today that is about as dead as the taunt “want to make a federal case over it?” when someone was upset over something trivial. Today, no one wants to grow up and we want the federal government to intervene in trivia. Feelings uber alles!
The problem? As Ben Shapiro once observed: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Eventually, reality comes knocking. And when it does, it will not care about your feelings, and the results will hurt.
Published in General
“The problem? As Ben Shapiro once observed: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Eventually reality comes knocking. And when it does, it will not care about your feelings, and the results will hurt.”
I used to think that this sentence contains the solution to the problem. Once reality smacked these types of people upside the head, they’d figure it out. I do not believe that anymore. When reality smacks them upside the head, they just won’t be able to figure it out.
And if your feelings were hurt, there was always “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”
Gosh we were tough kids. Maybe it had to do with practicing hiding under our desks in case of a nuclear attack.
Sure, but how do those results make you feel?
Great post, Seawriter.
I wonder about the cause of this. My suspicion is that it is a natural outgrowth of the feminization of society.
I wonder how much of the feminist ideology one can adopt before creating this problem. Remember that many people who don’t think of themselves as “feminists” strongly support the early part of the feminist movement — things like voting for women, giving married women control over their own property, and the first round of reducing the protection of marriage (which involved eliminating criminal and tort penalties for adultery, for example). These changes were generally implemented in the 1910s-1920s.
I’m not saying that I oppose these measures, just that they represented a significant change from the past, and I’m not sure whether they had adverse consequences in other areas of life. It’s hard to say.
It’s a relatively easy thing to measure, I think. A key question is: do you think that a wife should promise to love, honor, and obey her husband? The obey part was included in the traditional vow. My impression is that many women today who consider themselves traditionalists nevertheless would not accept this part.
To go to Ephesians 5:23-30, it states:
That’s a Christian anchor of the admonition for women to obey their husbands. But if you read the whole thing it has another admonition: for husbands to love their wives as they love themselves. The two go together inseparably. So your question has two parts: Not just the wife shall obey the husband, but the wife shall obey the husband and the husband shall love his wife as he loves himself. So, if the husband does not love his wife as he loves himself, why should the wife obey the husband?
In an Orthodox Christian wedding there is no exchange of vows. However, with Janet, when we got married, the agreement was that in life-and-death situations, where seconds could count and we needed one person making the decisions, she would obey me, and do what I said. But only for the duration of the crisis. The reason for that was practical. We needed one decision maker, and in most of those situations physical strength mattered and I was stronger. Better one person making decisions than the two of us arguing.
In the two or three times the situation arose, she did obey me. Part of that was that when we got married, I told her if she did not agree to that she would have to take charge because we needed one decision-maker. She recognized that in situations where strength mattered it was better for the physically stronger to be in charge. Plus, although she was smart, I was as smart as she was and as unlikely to panic as she was. In everything other than physical strength we were pretty much equals. Maybe it would have been different if I were dumb as a post. But in a crisis someone needs to be in charge, and it has to be understood who beforehand.
Also, the few occasions I commanded rather than came to a consensus with her were very few, and only when absolutely necessary. Because of that part about loving your wife as you love yourself. I always got my opinion when I did something. Therefore I needed to get her opinion.
I don’t think it has to be limited to crisis situations. Someone always has to have the final say on important matters. I’ve only come to this way of thinking recently with my ongoing conversion, and Mr. C isn’t accustomed to being married to such a traditionalist. So, our dilemma is having him get used to taking charge when it matters. He frequently still defers to me. We’re working on it.
And husbands have a tall order, since the admonition is to love your wife the way Christ loves the church — to be willing to die for her. I think we’ve got that covered and most traditionalists/conservatives probably do. I wouldn’t trust a “feminist” man as far as I could throw him.
I think these are two different things. Yes, our society is “feminized” in that people are encouraged to express and act on their feelings. But, feminist ideology is actually anti-femininity now that 3rd-wave feminism has come on the scene. As Klavan says, “feminism: turning first-rate women into third-rate men.”
Feminist ideology falls under the leftist ideology umbrella. It is godless and anti-reality (but, I repeat). It’s a Big Lie with the resultant sexual exploitation of women and over 60 million murdered children in this country alone.
I attribute the “feelz” culture to the therapeutic mindset and narcissism we’ve inculcated since roughly the 60’s. Really, we’re so wealthy we can afford not to deal with reality. If you’re struggling for survival, you don’t care much what 3rd-person pronoun someone uses to speak about you when you’re not even in the room. . .
I agree. In a very general sense, women are expected to be more masculine and men are expected to be more feminine in order to…well, no one really knows why. So everyone will be happier I suppose.
How’s that going so far?
Coincidentally perhaps, apropos of feminization, I’ve been thinking lately about the ten or twelve year old boy who was (iirc) expelled from school or some such for producing a video, or perhaps engaging in an on-line class, with a BB gun rifle within the frame (on the wall, I think).
A BB gun was everything a boy wanted at that age when I was a kid. Girls didn’t care, but boys did. A low-end BB gun can’t kill a mouse. And this kid was punished for merely owning one and letting the image of it be seen by others.
I think this is feminization, or at least demasculinization, alright.
Oh, yeah. Masculinity is frowned upon. I read some years ago that the register of men’s voices is higher now than it was in previous generations. And it’s something I’ve noticed irl. A man with a big bass voice gets your attention these days due to the rarity — and he tends to be older.
Thinking is hard and we don’t know as much as we feel we know, but its absence is the reason mass movements gather momentum until they destroy everything in their path but putting them in place helps the top end everything. thinking the reason bottom up worked. People have to think about basic interests they immediately face every day. That includes top level government folks as well. At home they have to think about what is in the interests of their daily lives and at work they have to think about what is in their bureaucratic interests. The thing is that in neither place do they have to worry about everybody else, or what people in other bureaucratic offices face or worry about. In the private sector a business will die if it doesn’t understand what its customers want, what its competitors are doing and what changes are affecting it and employees have to think about these things as well or they won’t do well or they’ll get fired. Very different worlds and they both work, but they work for different often incompatible interests. Balancing them is the key to the US extraordinary success for 200 years. One leads to growth and change the other to eventual stagnation and death. There are few if any historical exceptions. The kind of mass movements that threaten both help the bureaucratic top justify its growing power so are often encouraged by folks who think government power is in their interest. We’re seeing this set of interest play out every day in the US now and it will end as it has throughout history with no exceptions. You’d think more people would pay attention.