Unreasonable Reason

We became scientific in a blockheaded way, rigid and rule based instead of intuitive and flowing. We forgot how to sense and know by reflection, relying on formulas and road maps so everyone could be taught to emulate what is natural in the well formed. The barren spirit faked having a mind when the instinct of his gut had been silenced and nullified by domestication.

Science was true in a sense, or at least theoretically could be, but anyone could fabricate experiments, data, and conclusions as proof for almost any desired outcome, depending on the motives of whoever was paying. It was not cheap, and everyone funding scientific outcomes had something they wanted, especially companies pushing experimental substances onto consumers that did not want to know the adverse long-term consequences.

Universities were retasked with the mission of giving out degrees to every paying customer, so made youth into robots with artificial intelligence faking their way through diluted material they couldn't understand. This in turn made art off limits to the newly educated because the metaphors and parables of the past were not sufficiently linear, concrete, material, and literal for moderns. Who could any longer make sense of literature, music, theater, opera, or philosophy when none of these could make irrefutable objective claims or offer sterile mathematical proofs? Everything had to be made smaller and more obvious, free of subtleties and expectations of living experience.

God was a ridiculous concept, as were specters, souls, love, passion, premonition, will, eternity, aspiration, and any notion of transcendence. "Give me something provable I can read about in a grade school textbook," insisted the recyclable man.

Accordingly, the world was denied, bifurcated into the insignificant but absolute (an endless wasteland of petty Huxlian frivolities), and the pulsing but unmeasurable river of life that the two dimensional stickman could not get his fingers around and consequently rejected as uncertain and unknown.

"Much learning does not teach understanding." - Heraclitus

No longer grasping situations and relations by looking and living, but struggling to assess, measure, and relate with the world. As the observer assumed himself perfect and the world flawed, he decides he lacks only a sufficiently complex system and scheme, though the matter at hand is usually trivial and plain to anyone unburdened by an education. His approach is faulty and inevitably fails, at which point he explodes with blame at all who do not acknowledge his innocent cleverness that promises enlightenment one day soon when nature and reality bend to match his delusions.

It would be hard for this generation. Perhaps they had learned the wrong things? Yet they had a degree in hand, even if life was for some reason difficult and seemed to require the strain of a furrowed brow and intoxicants.

They had forgotten the lessons of their childhood and what all animals already knew.