Rationality, if you ask me, is deeply erotic. Commander Spock, that cool monument of logic, never had to flex muscles or shout in stadiums to attract attention. His power was quieter: the sharp eyebrow, the stillness of someone who has calculated every path through chaos and chosen the least destructive. Rationality, in its true form, is the art of long-term seduction — the kind that promises civilization itself might survive the night.
Yet somewhere between the twentieth century’s nuclear nightmares and our own age of memes, rationality became the least fashionable virtue. The new political libido belongs to those who sweat certainty and radiate ignorance as if it were charisma. They sell emotion as evidence and grievance as policy. They are not the first — history moves in tides, and every few decades the irrational surges back, painting its face as authenticity. The crowd adores it. They always do. Fire is prettier than algebra.
This cycle has a pattern older than democracy itself. A society grows complex; it demands nuance, data, trade-offs. The rational voices, burdened by evidence and statistics, speak carefully — too carefully. Then enters the performer, who turns complexity into pantomime: villains and heroes, “us” and “them,” fear and faith. He (and it is almost always a he) waves his arms and the crowds feel their confusion evaporate. Who needs to think, when one can believe?
But belief without thought is a luxury species rarely can afford. Short-term political lust — tax cuts now, votes now, anger now — has the same metabolism as a wildfire. It devours what feeds it. The leader who trades truth for applause is not a fool; he simply discounts the future at one hundred percent interest. The audience, meanwhile, mistakes noise for vitality. Civilization is quietly mortgaged for entertainment value.
If you doubt it, look at the way some governments treat human capital — that delicate phrase economists use for people who can actually do things. The rational calculus is simple: invite those who contribute more than they consume, who invent, build, teach, or heal. Whether their pancreas behaves perfectly is a trivial detail compared to their mind’s output. A rational society would roll out a red carpet for such individuals. But populism does not calculate; it performs. So instead of welcoming the productive, it postures about purity. It finds new heresies — health, origin, lifestyle — to turn into slogans. Excluding the competent becomes a patriotic act.
This is how irrationality dresses as virtue. It does not burn books anymore; it drowns them in sentimental rhetoric. It replaces arithmetic with indignation. And because the emotional payoff is immediate, the damage feels remote, like climate change or the death of languages — things happening always somewhere else, to someone else, sometime later.
Spock would raise an eyebrow, not in surprise but in weary recognition. We know better, he might say, yet we do worse. The reason is simple and humiliating: rationality demands effort, while emotion is instant gratification. But the future is not impressed by our feelings. It only keeps the score.
So here we are, in a world where the logical choice — to let in the skilled, to value reason over noise, to plan beyond the next election — is branded elitist, unfeeling, “out of touch.” And those who pride themselves on “speaking for the people” would rather deny entry to a qualified professional with a managed chronic condition than confront the arithmetic of national well-being. It is as if a captain tossed engineers overboard to make room for cheerleaders, then wondered why the ship no longer moves.
To be rational is not to be cold; it is to be adult. It is to acknowledge that civilization, like science, is a long experiment that can fail. Rationality is sexy because it endures — because it builds instead of burning, because it wants tomorrow to exist. The tragedy of our times is that too many leaders find that thought inconvenient. They prefer applause to survival. And the crowd, hypnotized by the glow of its own outrage, applauds right back, until the lights go out.
