... and why that shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us.
I am writing this before checking in on the results of the 2024 US presidential election, and one thing I can predict with absolute certainty is that reason lost.
It’s not a simple matter of observing how much illogic occurred, with one side dismissing whole populations, then another side being accused of doing the same, then many of those same populations voting for people who despise them and who have put forth no real plan to improve their lives. There’s nothing logical in any of that, yet that’s not the real problem we have queued up today.
It is a much deeper issue than that.
It’s the flawed perspective—the one that has been dominant in the US for most of my life—that if we make reasonable policies and do reasonable things, those will prevail. It’s that if we 'just do the right thing' or are 'right in our facts and data' we will prevail. That's utter rubbish.
Lately I’ve found myself asking: why do we assume that reason can, will, or should prevail? Why is reason held up as our guiding principle?
A question that pollsters often asked voters during this election season reveals a deeper truth. “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” Now, many of the policy and data-focused people seem to expect that voters should answer this according to the facts such as: that the economy is doing better, wages have improved, and inflation has been tamed. So, by extension, one mode of reasoning says "of course you are better off, and should answer in the affirmative."
Many people did not answer that way in the lead up to this election. The disconnect is because the question pollsters are asking, and the one people are answering is different.
The question many voters are actually answering is, “Do I feel better than I did four years ago?”
The difference between those two questions exposes a fundamental flaw that otherwise “reasonable” people miss out on entirely. We miss the bus on this, and there is no other bus coming for at least four more years.
The flaw has to do with an assumption often at the core of our scientific and academic institutions. It’s the assumption that what’s important to people is facts, and that therefore facts will prevail.
We could loop into endless debates about whether people are materially better off now than they were 4, 12, or 50 years ago. There are plenty of facts in support of that argument that they are, and there are counter arguments as well. The problem is that it’s the wrong question.
It's like bringing a yardstick to measure the temperature of a room.
The tool is precise, but it's the wrong one for the job. By and large, for most of the billions on this planet, whether or not we are materially better off now than before is irrelevant to our daily experience, and to how we feel now.
If we consider whether people feel better about their lives, the world, and the country they live in than they did 4, 12, or 50 years ago, the answer—based on very abundant evidence in the run-up to the US election and other events going on around the world—is NO.
In general, people do not feel more secure, more safe, more empowered, more enthusiastic, or more optimistic than they did in times past.
I’m not interested in pointing fingers at who’s to blame for that. Assigning blame is highly complex and ultimately ineffable, because it's always easier to point fingers at others than to accept our own part in a failure. Who's really to blame? We are. All of us. And so what?
Rather than engaging in a losing blame game, I want to focus on the fundamental flaw in our assumptions. That is this: it is unrealistic to expect people to always be 'reasonable.'
The problem comes from the inherently limited nature of the reasoning process itself.
I recall times teaching a bioinformatics class for graduate students, and discussing with them the limitations of computation. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem was one of my favorites -- and it still is. The implications of this theorem are clear: reason is only as true and accurate as the premises or assumptions fed into any system of reasoning.
According to Gödel, there's no way around this. If you want to "prove" your logic to be true and correct, you have to refer to assumptions that are unproven. If you want to prove those assumptions correct, then you'll have to bring in more assumptions that are unproven to do so.
The implications are profound, yet the 'reasonable' crowd often misses this entirely in their blind adherence to 'being reasonable.' It shows that reason is fundamentally limited by its reliance on assumptions. There is no such thing as 'being reasonable' in an objective sense. "Being reasonable" is irrevocably contextual; always based upon our inherent assumptions, beliefs, biases, and values.
And as my computer science instructor, way back in the days of room-sized computers, used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” If you feed your logical arguments garbage, then the outputs of your logic, no matter how precise it is, will be garbage.
What do reasoning people base their reasoning on? Often, it's built on many unexamined assumptions about what is important and what isn’t.
For instance, there's the common yet faulty belief that data and facts should or will matter more to people than their feelings.
Why do we assume that facts are more important than feelings?
Perhaps it stems from the flawed assumption many economists once held. They assumed that 'people will act rationally in the marketplace.' While the economics community has largely moved beyond this belief, it's surprising how few seemed to recognize the implications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. If they had, they might have realized that true rationality is impossible without relying on a set of base assumptions, which cannot be universally applied to everyone in the same way.
I picture some old guy economists trying to train cats to walk in a perfectly straight line, and then exclaiming, 'Why won't they just follow the rules?!' when the cats don’t obey. Their flawed assumption is that cats would ever follow human rules for so-called efficiency.
We could debate endlessly about the correct premises and assumptions to make about our world, economy, politics, and life.
Scientists do this all the time. It’s an interesting and occasionally worthwhile intellectual exercise. Yet it rarely leads to a definitive answer on what will genuinely make people feel better, except in specific acute situations—like curing someone in pain. Too often, those of us immersed in data overlook this question entirely, working under the flawed assumption that feelings don’t matter—only data does.
Let’s imagine telling those cats: 'Walking in a straight line is clearly more efficient than strutting around all cat-like, so why don't you just get it?'
The cat's answer? A blink, a tail flick, and a stroll in the direction of its own choosing—just because it feels like it.
We humans are not as far removed from those cats as we might like to think.
I see this frequently in my work helping clients craft stronger, more compelling grant proposals. I do my best to fight the battle against deeply ingrained beliefs, trying to convince them that data alone doesn't win grants; success isn't about how much data you can include to prove you're 'right.'
What wins grants is creating an emotional connection with your reader. This is done by telling a compelling story that aligns with what the reviewer or funder currently believes is important, exciting, and true. There is no 'one size fits all' answer, as what reviewers and funders want is specific to their field, interests, and the trends of the time.
There is no single 'reasoning' that can predict what all reviewers will want at all times. Similarly, there is no one logic that can explain why people 'should feel better' just because we've presented them with data that says, 'Of course things are better for you, the data says so!'
If you are one of the people who wakes up to the election results and thinks: “Wow, this is really messed up,” then you might take the time to consider:
"What were my flawed premises that caused me to assume it 'should' or 'would' be such a different result than it was?"
Before the election, I've done plenty of anxious worrying. After seeing the fruitlessness of that, I did the same examination I suggested above.
I found that I had flawed premises that caused me to think people "should" or would listen to what I thought of as "reason" in making their voting decisions, yet some part of me also knew they wouldn't actually do that.
I finally concluded that I was having a childish fantasy. By 'childish,' I mean the naive belief that people will always act based on some kind of generic "reason," if we just present them with enough facts and evidence.
I was not following the advice that I so often give my grant writing clients. I was succumbing to a fantasy about how the world should be, not how it is.
The reality is that no matter who won the US election, reason will not prevail, nor will it ever—unless we substantially alter human nature. Some people will be unhappy about the results, while others will be happy.
Will the people who are happy today still be happy in four years? Or will the people who are unhappy today be even unhappier in four years? It's impossible to predict now, though I have my guesses.
What I know for a fact is that the answers to those questions won't come from some policy wonk spitting out data, it will only come from real people feeling their lived experience and assessing it at that place and time.
So today, I am vowing to drop the fantasy that reason will (and should) prevail.
Instead, I am going to replace it with another, much more functional and realistic belief:
That the only thing that really matters is how good of a job we do in advocating for our own beliefs and values, clearly, simply, and powerfully.
One side of the political community in the US seems to have figured this out long ago, whereas the other side seems woefully behind on that understanding.
Maybe it’s time for more of us to drop the fantasy that things “should” be “reasonable,” and instead take the responsibility to do the hard work of clear and compelling advocacy for what we believe to be important. I can say for sure that won’t happen by browbeating people with our preferred facts and data.
Finally, I want to be clear that I am not cynically advocating for manipulating people’s feelings, especially through fear-mongering, "othering" and similar tactics. Feelings like joy, inspiration, and compassion, which never come of manipulation, are qualitatively far superior to fear, hate, and shame.
One of my own base assumptions is that we should work together to create more of those qualitatively superior feelings and experiences for all humans (and animals) on the planet. This is what I choose to advocate for. It is not something I can prove we “should do.” It is simply what I want to do.
What do you want to do? What do you choose to advocate for?
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Post election results observation: After finding out the results, it reinforced everything I said above. We have our work to do, and that work is not about just repeating with frustration, "why don't people get it?" The problem is not whether "they" will get it. The problem is whether the proverbial "we" will realize we need a different set of assumptions and approaches, if we want things to change for the better.
