A Eulogy For Reason
Dearly Beloved
We are gathered here today to mourn the quiet loss of reason.
We gathered, and we did not bring flowers.
We brought our phones.
Witness the content creators bearing the coffin,
In which critical thinking lies.
logic folded gently like a handwritten note that will never be sent.
We stand, not in silence, but in the chaos,
the chaos of a world that feels louder than it thinks,
where conviction arrives before comprehension
and ignorance dressed as certainty is worn as a fashion piece,
on the social media catwalk.
We outsourced our intelligence,
first to calculators, which was forgivable,
then to search engines which was understandable,
and to machine learning algorithms which was inevitable.
Now we mourn for,
that unfashionable practice,
of holding a belief up to the light,
and asking if it still looks true every side.
If doubt is the beginning of wisdom,
We traded our reasoning,
for the ease of automated certainty,
and mistook access to information
for possession of knowledge,
rewarding outrage over accuracy.
Righteous indignation winning,
the hashtag court of public opinion
where truth is negotiable.
We mourn,
But there are no tears,
Just the indifference of a people waiting.
People waiting to be told,
What to feel,
When to rage.
Rage,
Rage against the burial of reason,
intellect once neglected,
does not vanish with spectacle.
It withdraws.
It waits.
Like a seed,
beneath the ground.
Waiting for the resistance,
Against the algorithm’s calculated embrace.
~B
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