Instead of Illusion
I am not Spock.
When I ponder the Big Questions, I strive to preserve the separation of reason and emotion. Or, if you prefer, the separation of thinking and wishful thinking. The world is full of pretty lies and ugly truths - and we have a duty to spurn the lies and embrace the truths. Even if the truth hurts, or makes us unpopular.
I know that people find solace in their ideological dogmas. I want to take their dogmas away from them nonetheless.
Sure, you can dismiss this as self-serving megalomania: “I, the noble truth-seeker, stand above the childish feelings of mere mortals.” But some critics have taken me at my word - and found fault in me. More than once, I’ve been accused of being a Vulcan. Or as McCloskey recently remarked, “I am against Bryan Caplan, if you see what I mean. Not personally against him, but against his relentless appeal to the head instead of the heart.”
The truth, though, is that I seek solace like anyone else. Probably far more than most people, actually. While I embrace the separation of thinking and wishful thinking (along with its understudied twin, morbid thinking), I spend hours every day lost in worlds of fantasy. And I never want to give my fantasy worlds up.
What on Earth am I talking about? Most obviously, I listen to music almost non-stop. Classical and especially opera, and German opera über alles, is my homeland, but I adore almost every genre of music. Heavy metal is my latest obsession. I know full well that music lyrics often paint a ridiculously biased - even risible - view of the human condition and the social world. But in the words of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas:
In these little bric-a-brac
A secret's waiting to be cracked
These dolls and toys confuse me so
Confound it all, I love it though
Sure, music lyrics tell us more about human nature than HR propaganda. Love songs willfully omit a lot of Big Facts about human relationships, but they also announce truths that most humans are too embarrassed to admit. Though there are few songs about unplanned pregnancy, there are many about unrequited love. But the main reason I listen to music all the time is not to learn anything. I listen to music all the time to savor its multiverse of fantasy. What is “Master of Puppets” even about? I don’t know, but I keep listening to it.
Music aside, I’ve crafted hundreds of stories, almost all for role-playing games. I spent most of my childhood “world-building” - creating a fictional universe for my friends’ Dungeons & Dragons adventures. Over the last twenty years, I’ve branched out to dozens of other genres. Horror. Crime. Historical fiction. Historical crime fiction. Absurdism. Post-apoc. Dystopian. Narco-telenovelas. Biblical epics. Even Japanese baseball sagas. After a good game ends, my fictional world feels more real to me than the real world for hours and hours.
So what? Most intellectually active people that I observe cope with the ugliness of the world by embracing a dogmatic political religion. While I could single-mindedly rail against wokeness or the bizarro world of the mainstream media, I’m clear-sighted enough to admit that the same goes for people I broadly agree with. Most libertarians, for example, turn their libertarianism into a dogmatic political religion. Which is itself an ugly truth.
My point: There is another path. A better path. Instead of coping with the ugliness of the world with wishful thinking, deliberately take the time to think about something other than the real world. Lose yourself in the wonder of music. Lovingly populate a fictional universe with characters larger-than-life. Read novels. Watch movies. Daydream. Once you admit that imagination is not a path to truth, let your imagination run wild. Instead of fusing thinking and wishful thinking, bifurcate the two. Cherish your rich inner fantasy life. Don’t let anyone take it away from you.
Just don’t confuse this fantasy life with the way things really are.
Same here, brother. Principles over dogma and truth is the highest principle.
Master of Puppets is about drug addiction, specifically cocaine, IIRC.
Brian,
You are a product of Gen X libertarianism -- economics-based and firmly grounded in reason.
The Millennial and Gen Z generations are products of psychology. They are reactions to the reason-based economics paradigm that dominated the neoliberal age. They are letting out all the emotions that that paradigm didn't accommodate.
But this development shouldn't lead you to doubt yourself. At all. The Millennial and Gen Z generations are wrong. As Hayek argued contra Freud, civilization depends in part on the suppression of emotion.* They are letting out repressed emotion because it's cathartic, but the effect is negative. Is the United States better off or worse off since Millennials became working age? Since they promoted both wokeism and the populist response? Millennials are at the heart of both of these emotional reactions. And most people perceive society as getting worse and becoming divided. Emotions lead to tribalism and conflict. It is reason that paves the way to cooperation and peace.
What we need is a rebirth of reason and the suppression of emotion once again. You may not live to see it, but it's something worth fighting for. We're witnessing generations with poor character undermine civilization. I'm for ultimately laying blame on individuals, but to the extent we can make collective judgements (and we should generally avoid doing so), the younger generations are emotionally immature and need to experience disapprobation.
*Hayek is seen as a critic of reason so his claim about emotion might seem confusing. But Hayek was a proponent of the part of reason he felt was unconscious and neglected. He thought we should place less value on conscious reason and more value on unconscious reason because markets operated using unconscious reason and conscious reason failed to plan economies. This is consistent with his opposition to cathartic expressions of emotion. It also explains how he could criticize reason, but also see its value in shaping society, without contradicting himself.