Do You Give Dead People Medicine?
Hopefully not, but do you try to reason with the unreasonable?
There are a lot of unreasonable people in our world today. Many of them hang out right here on Medium. They often populate the comments.
Unreasonable voices have been amplified in the era of social media, but they were around in the days of Thomas Paine. Their presence in his day stirred him to write these words:
“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
How do you know when someone has “renounced the use of reason”?
It’s not when they disagree with you. Disagreement is not inherently unreasonable.
I don’t mind, for example, people disagreeing with me. On the contrary, it sharpens me.
Unfortunately, when I look at many of the comments I’ve received on some of my articles and when I look at the quality of discourse (especially on the topics of religion, sex, gender, and politics) on the Internet today…
I see people more commonly renouncing the use of reason instead of embracing it.
