The Breaking of the American Mind

What Happens When a Society Stops Being Able to Think Critically?

Once upon a time, I took a flight and arrived, but my luggage did not. I asked the airline: “Is my luggage lost?” “No, sir,” they replied. “It just cannot be found.” “But that makes no sense,” I exclaimed. “Either it’s found, or lost.” “Well,” they explained, “we don’t consider a bag lost until it can’t be found for three months. Then you can file a claim, because we can’t find it.” “But you can’t find it now!” I shouted. “My luggage isn’t Schrodinger’s cat!”

Of course, I’d entered a Kafkaesque hell, and all reason and logic were pointless. Bureaucracies run on equivocating, rationalizing logic, a logic that’s so rational it ends up being unreasonable — and that’s what the airline was doing: the bag isn’t lost, it just can’t be found. A thing can exist and not exist all at once — as long as the system says so.

But: should we run a society like this? Can we be said to be thinking — much less civilized or reasonable people — if we do? If we treat people, laws, rules, norms, or democracies like baggage, things, objects, stuff? What happens when we start equivocating notions like right and wrong, forwards and backwards, true and false, or even people?