The Allure Of Convenience

There are two general categories of convenience that something might fall into.  On one hand, there are matters of practical convenience, like being able to perform a task more efficiently or to save time or money on something one already needed or was going to do.  Convenience of this kind is in no way a betrayal of realizing, aligning with, and living for logical truths and objectively makes life less difficult, something that is all the more helpful for people immersed in problems of life that would interfere with their motivation or safety.  Modern life teems with sources of such convenience moreso than any of the other ages described in primary historical sources, those examples of convenience spanning everything from communication to transportation.  On the other hand, there is the convenience of certain grand or abstract truths.  For the latter, convenience hinges on circumstances or personal disposition, none of which dictate anything about reality except the fact that a truth is easy or difficult to live in light of.

The first kind of convenience has mostly practical applications pertaining to everyday life or less inherently existential issues, yet it does still connect with much deeper, more abstract facts and human experiences.  The allure of this convenience is there because of how it simplifies the challenge of various tasks and minimizes the amount of time, energy, or financial resources that need to be invested in order to resolve a problem or achieve a goal.  Choosing ideological stances based on convenience, however, is very different from this.  Neither truth nor knowledge of the truth is a matter of convenience.  A given part of reality has its respective nature in spite of how unwanted, terrifying, helpful, or calming it might be.  Since all truths are ultimately logical truths, though there are things other than the laws of logic that exist (though not many that can be proven to exist!), there are necessary truths about everything that cannot have been any other way and it is stupid to wish otherwise when one must rely on the very things in question--even wishing that self-evident logical axioms were false would hinge on them.

There are still truths that would be convenient for some and not for others, of course, even if a specific truth is ultimately unknowable for them.  If someone feels that murder is wrong and it turns out that not only are there moral obligations, but that murder in particular should never be committed, then this aspect of reality was convenient for that person despite its truth having nothing to do with their awareness of, preferences for or against, or feelings about the matter. If someone hopes that murder is morally permissible and it turned out that either all killing is not evil or that nothing is evil, and thus no kind of killing could be wrong, then this would be convenient for them.  The opposite would then by necessity be true: if someone longs to murder and murder is ultimately evil, them this truth is inconvenient in spite of its veracity and significance.  What most people do in either case is to just make assumptions based on what they want to be true or what they subjectively find persuasive (the only rational kind of persuasion is a reaction to discovering a logical proof) because they are not trying to know reality.

They instead want to gratify their own arbitrary, subjective whims.  In fact, even believing in something like selflessness on the basis of conscience or social pressures is really just another way of pleasing oneself by doing as one prefers!  The allure of convenience is that it makes something easier, and so the default of every non-rationalist is inevitably to believe things either without proving them or without even seriously thinking about them at all, certainly not by thinking about them in accordance with the laws of logic as they avoid all assumptions.  One person might prefer challenge or engagement over the mere ease of convenience even as another person prefers sheer pragmatism and simplification.  Neither person's personal desires have anything to do with reality except for the nature of their individual psychologies, which are not the very core of either metaphysics or epistemology.  Delighting in practical convenience and in personal relief at certain philosophical truths is not irrational, just believing in something because it is desirable or otherwise convenient.