Feelings replacing thought in public discussion. By Abstractruth.

There used to be a time … when people began sentences with “I think,” “I submit,” “I propose,” and similar statements. True, I understand that this suggested — however optimistically — that some actual thought went into the statement. Now, with “I feel,” we have reduced modern utterances to the intellectual content of a bowel movement.

There are reasons for presenting statements in this manner.

• Feelings are perceived to be beyond the reach of judgment.
• Feelings are “authentic.”
• If you make a statement with actual content, you can be contradicted, argued with, and presented with evidence against it.
• But “I feel” now creates a scenario in which your subjective feeling has objective relevance.

And worse still, your perfectly ordinary disagreement with me now becomes an act of aggression — because you are invalidating my feelings. If I feel disrespected, that is enough to convict you of disrespecting me. If I feel that I am a man wearing women’s clothing, then who are you to tell me that I should not bring my 6’7” frame into a high school girls’ basketball game and express my femininity by elbowing a 5’11” female forward in the throat? …

With a majority female electorate, it was bound to happen:

Society has become feminized. There is no patriarchy; that’s ridiculous. The entire vocabulary of daily life has become feminine. All the traditionally feminine qualities — selective empathy, emotional expression, sensitivity — dominate our thinking and have become the required principles of moral judgment. Rational thinking is now hopelessly patriarchal and oppressive. Feelings are now a superior form of knowledge, or gnosis.

It is a tidy little trick wherein, because feelings are authentic, the proposition attached to them is therefore also true and incontrovertible. This view is illogical, annoying, and most of all cowardly. …

 

 

Rationality and smarts are “oppressive” and therefore illegitimate:

Anything that will turn reality on its head is lauded, and anything that reeks of logic or rationality is degraded as oppressive. …

The blue hair, the nose rings, the obesity, the clothes purchased from Goodwill are not intended to express creativity but to provoke a reaction, so that anyone who reacts can be called a colonist and oppressor …

There is no way to build a stable civilization on feeling, and that is precisely the point. Because this absurd impulse comes from that anti-civilizational place. …

Educational farce:

Because a student feels uncomfortable with an argument, however factual, that feeling now becomes the barometer of truth, or even of what can be said. A professor could challenge a cherished falsehood, and now someone demands an apology.

Education was once a place to correct false assumptions, test our limitations, improve logic, and prepare one to live in a civilized society — if not to reach certain conclusions about the nature of existence. Now, rather than challenge students to improve their skills or prepare children to be good citizens, schools ask teachers who would otherwise challenge them to be better to protect them from the inconvenience of correction.

The university was once a place where feelings and raw emotion were developed into disciplined science and logic, where false feelings and prejudices were challenged and interrogated. It has developed into luxury room service for the petulant and clueless.

That’s progress, some say.