The Laziness Of Irrationalism

There is a very specific reason why irrationality is the default from which reason and rationality (with reason being the actual laws of logic and the truths grounded in them and rationality being someone's grasp of reason) must be voluntarily chosen.  Irrationality takes little to no effort, and rationality requires the effort to initially change, even if it can quickly become so familiar that it does not take any significant amount of effort to persist in afterward.  Since irrationality involves holding to assumptions or believing in contradictions or non sequiturs, it can be random, selective, driven by emotion, or so thoughtless that it only involves thought in the bare minimum sense that one cannot believe anything without some degree of conscious reflection, however shallow or false those beliefs might be.  If irrationality is the default for all who have not intentionally pursued the necessary truths and absolute certainty of reason, then it is obvious why there are far more irrational people than those who recognize and cherish reason as it is: it takes effort and depth to be rationalistic, and errors, ignorance, and emotionalism can be very comforting.

It is automatically more likely for most people to be irrational because it takes little to no effort at all to not avoid assumptions, to not care about transcendent necessary truths, to not be perfectly consistent, to not live in accordance with rationalistic knowledge, and to not look to reason to discover whatever precise, deep truths about reality that one can.  To be holistically rationalistic, one must be willing to put thorough effort into restructuring one's worldview to reflect the inherent truths of logic, to stay devoted to the truth even at great personal expense, and to orient one's thoughts, words, and actions, around these truths instead of selectively acknowledging them after they are discovered.  Very few are willing to even start the latter because of what it ultimately entails, while irrationality is the default, for until one has forsaken assumptions in favor of logical truths, the process of which is always a voluntary, conscious thing, one is a slave to assumptions, contradictions, apathy, or ignorance--or all four at once.

Although the worldviews and priorities of most or even all people could change all of the sudden, it is extremely improbable that this will occur, and, indeed, the vast majority of people across all of recorded human history never came anywhere close to rationalism.  At most, they happened to subjectively care about a given subject enough to make fewer assumptions, to think about it more directly, or to haphazardly end up at a certain true conclusion without actually knowing why, if this conclusion truly is knowable in the first place, this truth could not be any other way.  Even if a non-rationalist is right about something, they either do not know or do not cling to the inerrant truth of logical axioms that all things hinge on, so they are at best still highly irrational.  To ignore logical axioms that everything and everyone already relies on metaphysically and epistemologically, a person must in one sense try to avoid facing the inescapable core of reality.

But when someone does not discover or understand the inherent truth of logical axioms and what follows from them, he or she is not truly a rational person anyway.  The laziness of belief in irrationalism is not the most fundamental motivation behind it, as that would be stupidity, but philosophical laziness is indeed how many non-rationalists express their deluded priorities.  Of course, many of them are still desperate to be regarded and treated as if they actually are rational, which is a hypocrisy rationalists can exploit to humiliate them into silence.  Even manipulating them into silence by means of embarrassment will not likely lead to them giving up their intellectual laziness, though.  After all, it is inherently easier for a non-rationalist to put little effort or no effort at all into even thinking about deeper matters of reality at all, much less thought without assumptions.  Their laziness, selfishness, and irrationality nonetheless do not change the truth or knowability of logical axioms and what follows from them.  Their laziness just becomes such a comfortable expression of irrationality that they do not want to separate themselves from it.