The Madness Of Irrationalism

Irrationality is madness; passion is not, though emotionalistically living for passion is inherently a subcategory of broader irrationality that is true insanity.  Rationality and non-emotionalistic passion can still seem quite bizarre, uncomfortable, or even insane to people who are not also in alignment with reason.  If a perfectly rational person does not even make any blunders in communicating the truth (which is not the same as misunderstanding reason or anything else within metaphysics and epistemology), they would still almost certainly be misperceived as insane by those who are slaves to errors and assumptions.

To believe that the material world is there just because it seems to be is irrational, an example of true insanity.  To have strong emotions and allow them to dictate one's beliefs is madness.  So, too, is thinking that one's perceptions of things prove anything that does not logically follow from them.  Thinking that logical axioms are false or anything other than true in themselves and self-evident because of this is the most grand form of insanity.  To realize and live for the real nature of logical axioms and the necessary truths that follow from them, the latter not being self-evident like the former but still being intrinsically true and rooted in the former, is to escape the madness of irrationalism.

The real madman or madwoman is the person who misunderstands reason without correcting themselves by looking to pure reason on their own or without allowing the aid of rationalists to stir them from their folly.  To not think about reason and its inherent truth, as well as its resulting binding of all other things in existence or possibility, is madness, and to think about reason in the grip of assumptions or to ignore what one has genuinely discovered about it is madness.  The intelligence or frustrations of a rationalist, however, might very well seem like insanity to a person or culture of people who are used to irrationalism.

More than this, someone who is partially familiar with reason--and no one can escape necessary truths, only remain oblivious to them or choose to neglect them--and refuses to align with it in full abandonment of assumptions is in some ways even more insane than the blind fool, the latter being lost in his or her avoidable avoidance of deep philosophical pursuits altogether.  This person has at least a faint, incomplete mental brush with the real nature of logic and turns away from going further so that the can remain in assumptions, ignorance, or emotionalism.  Yet they might think they are the sane one!

It is easy on one level to be an irrationalist.  One must only not think about anything more than whims, perceptions, and practicality, making assumptions, and inescapably random ones at that, that fit one's preferences or unexamined experiences.  The laws of logic transcend and govern experience and everything else, so they could of course be terrifyingly foreign to an irrationalist even as they are metaphysically relying on reason already and even relying on a distorted grasp of it epistemologically.  To escape madness is to look to reason for what it is, which is not psychological clarity or scientific observations or the divine will.  No, all of these things and more are dependent on reason for their very possibility and necessity.