 So this video goes out to all you reddit to your thinkers out there and also all you edgy teenagers I want to talk about how people understand the word rational or irrational or you know logical or other stuff like this Because I think there's a lot of things that are going wrong in the world, and I think it's becomes from a kind of Rational deconstruction of the world around us Now I'm gonna make a very elementary. I think it's something I think of as a very elementary note But I think I don't think it it's not either said enough or the implications of it aren't adequately Stated and that is humans are not fit to understand the world around us And I don't mean that that oh there are things about the universe. We don't know or something like that I mean that we have evolved and developed mental capacities and mental habits and You know logical bags of tricks that are not sufficient to understand everything around us They're not sufficient to we cannot sit down and logically deduce the universe. It's not gonna happen In fact, you know the road to hell is sort of paved with people who have deductive Ideologies and they rationally work out how everything should work and then they destroy everything Okay, so when it comes to rationality well, I'll save to the end my point, but Let's put it this way. So there's a tendency for Well, we'll put it this way. Okay, so Humans let's say something like quantum mechanics because people I don't know is like people some people talk about it's like a buzzword almost But quantum mechanics is a good example of something in science Where we are sort of being exposed to a mechanism of the universe that it isn't just like oh we didn't know We didn't know about it before but it's something that utterly You know flips up and down are under you know the mechanism that we think of in the universe like the the logic that we Sort of implies always going to be there in the universe is totally upturned by something like quantum mechanics It's just utterly different or even something we now take for granted something like gravity when Newton Coined gravity as a concept as we now understand it gravity. I mean what it's an absurd notion It's like an occult force that draws together all the matter in the universe It totally went against everyone's understanding and even today when we really I mean really when you think about gravity Most people are just thinking of the force that draws everything down to the ground. We just happen to have a name for it But so, you know, there are a lot of things in the history of science for example that have shown us that you know human brains are really developed for I Don't know the African savannah or I mean not really but you know, you know what I mean the evolutionary environs that we find ourselves in and really to address the social problems of humans But even then well, not even the social problems of humans But we have the capacities to act as individual humans not necessarily to I guess design society Now what I mean by that is even in I guess social domains Reason breaks down pretty quickly. So if you take something You know, let's take something like traditional gender roles. Okay, so recently I mean especially since the 1960s, but there's a good bit of this going on beforehand, you know people sat down and they said Well guys, I don't think it's fair that or it doesn't make sense There's no rational reason for example for there to be different social expectations of men and women Okay, no, there's no rational reason for that And for them that that was true. They couldn't they put their human logic to the test They, you know went around and you know tried to think up reasons and they couldn't find any and so yeah I guess I guess you're right. There's no particular reason for Traditional gender role. I mean stupid to call them traditional gender roles. They're just gender I mean, they're just how men and women are in every society including in our highly deconstructed unself-aware society so You know people of course Once you find once you deduce that this kind of cultural institution is irrational You then have to deconstruct you have to remove it from society Because it would be Irrational not to and so you get rid of you basically lobotomize Portions of human society that you can't figure out the purpose for you know, it'd be like if some kind of culture You know in popular culture I don't know if this is actually true, but you know the Egyptians didn't think the brain was useful for anything So they extracted it from mummies now. Let's say The Egyptians thought that the brain was useless So they extracted it from normal people and they couldn't think of a rational reason for you know not to do that That's sort of what we do to our culture And we do it because we have this sort of cargo-cold understanding of rationality now What is the problem now? I sort of alluded to it, but I didn't say it explicitly the problem is that Hugh the thing the things we think of as rational that the concepts that are in our brain the Chain of deductive logic that we think of as being rational that is not sufficient to sit down and plan society because The we do not have every variable at play in our brains And even if we did it would be a little too much for us to analyze all at once So Society a good society is not one that's rationally planned in fact every single society that is rationally planned is a disaster and will always be a disaster because a Rationally designed society is one that is only as as as Capable as managing problems as one human brain. That's ultimately because something rational is really just something Comprehensible to the human brain, but societies that exist are they're not planned. They're emergent They grow over time social conventions grow and change not because some journalists told me That gender roles are irrational therefore. I'm going to force myself to change but a kind of natural a trial and error process And that cultures do change not all cultural changes are bad. What I am critiquing is the kind of rationalistic mode of thinking where You know, if I can't understand the reason for something, it's irrational Now I actually did a podcast episode on this check out my podcast not related dot XYZ. That's the website I did a podcast episode on this and it's all also very common in psychology for example to look at Things in the human brain and to say that they're irrational So like, you know, I'm out in the forest right now as you can see, you know Let's say it in a couple hours. It's gonna be really dark and I might hear of Russell in the bush Okay, now what actual chance is there of that being some kind of dangerous predator? I don't know, you know point zero zero one percent out here It's not very high, but I am going to react as if it's you know a hundred percent or you know, fifty percent at least If I hear that, you know, I have this irrational reaction And you might say you might sit down and say that that's an irrational thing and that's an aspect of human psychology I'm not gonna be able to change But the fact of the matter is if I if if I have a false negative That's something that can kill me, but false positives don't There's a big difference there, you know human psychology Because in the same way that cultures grow via trial and error human psychology has developed over a kind of trial and error and a lot of the things that smug redditors will call Irrational are really just aspects of our psychology that have a very important and Basically vital use and if we lobotomize that portion of our brain It would be disastrous, but they might not necessarily see the use or the origin of it so when I want you to come away from this video from I'm not really talking about anything particular in this video other than the idea that you can rationally sit down and You know, you're you're a smart guy if you can say something like You know religion really oh religions a good point actually I should probably mention that before we go, you know religion is an example of something which if you sit down and You rationally ask yourself does it really make sense that Jonah was eaten by a whale and blah blah blah Does it really makes it this Hinduism really makes sense? Does you know blah blah blah? Does any of these religions really make sense dude? I'm so smart because I realized this sounds stupid That you're missing the point if you do something like that When you look at a social institution like religion your approach should not be does it make sense to my rational faculties you should look at in terms of what does religion actually do for the people who practice it what is its purpose and Honestly, if you want to have big-brained esoteric takes about religion you can understand the Mythology true or false. I mean mythology is beyond true and false But you can all understand the mythos of you know, even something that seems extremely irrational like religion In the light of its actual what how it actually serves people in society now So anyway, what I want you to take away from this video is things that you do not understand the reason for or things that you think are Irrational that doesn't mean that they're actually bad. And in fact Things that can survive and appear irrational are probably things that are there for a very very important reason and a reason much more important than You can probably anticipate So that's what I want you guys to take away. So anyway, this has been another episode of boomer rants in the woods I will see you next time. Oh wait, I'm gonna wait till 10 minutes. I'm gonna keep the video running But I will see you guys next time See ya