If adopting a delusion yields some benefit, this doesn’t mean that there’s a lawful correspondence between the delusion and external reality—only that the delusion is socially useful in certain contexts. Valuing consequences more than truth opens the floodgates to believing what we want to believe. The net effect of this is that we move further from reality and become less likely know if the external conditions we’ve authored actually contribute to human wellbeing.
...the lack of forthright speech has been partially responsible for the never-ending the torrent of irrationality inundating every aspect of our lives. Many ideas are dangerous and stupid, and we shouldn’t hesitate to label them as such. When we become more concerned with other’s feelings than with accurate descriptions, dangerous ideas multiply. We ought to be more concerned with the accuracy of our terms than with people’s sensitivities.
- Peter Boghossian -
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