A Failed Prediction For the past four years I have simmered in a state of moral outrage over Trump’s behavior, watching him trample the defining values of America – integrity, truth, justice – without consequence. How could a country constituted on these ideals not only elect but continue to support a man so inimical to them? My only resolution to that dissonance has been to view Trump as an aberration (“he didn’t win, Hillary lost”) enabled by spineless legislators.

#RantMode Let’s stipulate: There is a distribution of cognitive ability among humans, and some individuals, whether through genetics, upbringing, a lack of personal drive (or, in reality, some combination of all three) fall on the low end of the curve.1 They just aren’t smart, aren’t able to produce the same societal value as those further up the curve, and so they can’t compete in a meritocracy. Trump is the avatar for the anti-intellectuals’ revenge.

Modus tollens: Human reproduction is rationally unjustifiable (i.e., if we were rational, then we wouldn’t reproduce). We continue reproducing. Therefore, we are not rational. This is a valid argument, and I take it (2) is self-evident1, so the only way to avoid the conclusion (3) is to demonstrate that human reproduction is rationally justifiable. This is the premise I’m going to interrogate below. Better Never to Have Been For my money, the clearest evidence that humans apply rationality only post-hoc, as (epiphenomenal, if not simply feigned) justification for actions sufficiently caused by their emotions, is the fact that we keep making more humans.

Theory: The root cause of most of our frustrations is forcing a mental model onto an event that doesn’t fit. That is, we make category errors. Religion is a paradigm example of this, whereby humans force the concept of morality onto natural events, when natural events are simply (and indeed, by definition) not the types of things to which morality applies. Morality is a human construct, and it does not exist independently of our own supposition.