When Reason Dies: How Bad Could the Collapse of Rationality Become?

Mike Adams has invented the deliberately offensive term "Retardageddon" for what he regards as the intellectual collapse of Western civilisation. Strip away the provocative terminology and some highly questionable claims surrounding it, and there is an important idea underneath: a civilisation ultimately depends upon enough of its members retaining the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, cause from effect, evidence from assertion and what they would like to be true from what actually is true.

We normally think of civilisation as something physical. There are roads, power stations, hospitals, universities, computer networks, farms, factories and governments. If these things continue operating, civilisation appears to be functioning. But underneath the physical infrastructure lies something more fundamental: cognitive infrastructure.

Somebody has to understand how the power station works and know whether the bridge is safe. Somebody has to distinguish a functioning medical treatment from quackery, calculate whether the pension system can remain solvent, determine whether a military strategy can succeed and understand whether spending money today creates obligations tomorrow. Civilisation therefore depends upon accumulated knowledge, but knowledge alone is insufficient. It also depends upon habits of reasoning that allow people to acquire, test, transmit and correct that knowledge.

Destroy those habits and the buildings may remain standing for quite some time, but the civilisation nevertheless begins dying from the inside.

Adams's strongest point concerns consequences. A rational person is capable of mentally travelling through time. He can sacrifice something today because he understands that his action will produce a benefit tomorrow. He plants a tree whose shade he may never enjoy, saves rather than spending everything, maintains machinery before it breaks and avoids accumulating debts that his children will have to repay.

Civilisations require precisely the same capacity. A society incapable of thinking beyond the next election, quarterly report, social-media cycle or financial year gradually consumes its inheritance. Infrastructure is used without being maintained. Debt is accumulated without serious consideration of repayment. Natural resources are consumed without replacement. Institutions spend accumulated reserves of public trust while doing little to replenish them.

Nothing dramatic necessarily happens at first, which is what makes the process dangerous. A bridge neglected for one year remains a bridge. A currency debased slightly remains money. A university lowering standards still awards degrees. A government accumulating another hundred billion dollars of debt continues paying its employees. A school graduating students with declining literacy still calls itself a school. The consequences arrive later because reason is fundamentally the intellectual mechanism connecting the present to the future. Collapse begins when that connection is broken.

There is another dimension that Adams touches upon but handles too crudely: authority. No complex civilisation can function if every citizen personally verifies everything. I cannot independently reproduce every medical experiment before taking a tablet, inspect every component of an aircraft before boarding it or personally verify every economic statistic published by government. We necessarily depend upon experts and institutions.

But rational trust is not blind trust. A functioning society needs what philosophers call epistemic trust combined with epistemic vigilance. We need institutions capable of producing reliable knowledge, but citizens must retain enough independence of judgment to recognise that institutions can make mistakes, acquire ideological biases, protect their interests or become captured by bureaucratic incentives.

The opposite error is equally destructive. If distrust becomes absolute, every expert becomes a liar, every institution becomes a conspiracy and every piece of evidence contradicting our preferred belief becomes proof that the conspiracy is larger than we thought.

Reason therefore occupies an uncomfortable middle position. Do not believe something merely because an authority says it, but do not disbelieve something merely because an authority says it either. Ask for the evidence. That sounds elementary. Increasingly, it is not.

The digital revolution has created an extraordinary paradox. Human beings have access to more information than any generation in history while simultaneously becoming less certain about what information can be trusted. A medieval peasant possessed very little information about the world, while the modern citizen possesses a device containing access to billions of pages of it. The difficulty has shifted from obtaining information to discriminating among it.

Social media intensifies the problem because information is no longer selected primarily for truth or importance. It competes for attention. Anger, fear and tribal affirmation attract attention, while a sober explanation beginning with "the evidence is complicated" competes poorly against a thirty-second video announcing that everything you believe is a lie.

The result can be something worse than ordinary ignorance. An ignorant person knows little, while the epistemically corrupted person knows many things that are not true and possesses elaborate mechanisms preventing correction. That person can be considerably harder to educate.

Political tribalism then completes the transformation. Once beliefs become badges of group membership, changing one's mind ceases to be an intellectual act and becomes an act of betrayal. Evidence is no longer evaluated by asking, "Is this true?" It is evaluated by asking, "Whose side does this help?"

At that point rational discussion becomes extraordinarily difficult because two people may no longer share the standards required to resolve their disagreement. One cites a study and the other rejects the institution that produced it. One produces a statistic and the other rejects the government agency collecting it. One presents a video and the other says it was manipulated. Artificial intelligence now adds the possibility that photographs, voices and eventually almost any digital evidence can be fabricated convincingly.

The danger is not merely that people believe false things. The deeper danger is that people eventually conclude that nothing can be known. That is the real epistemic apocalypse.

A society can survive disagreement about facts. Scientific progress itself depends upon disagreement. What becomes dangerous is the disappearance of accepted procedures for determining which account is more likely to be true.

Courts have rules of evidence. Science has experiments, replication and peer criticism. Journalism traditionally relied upon corroboration and identifiable sources. Scholarship uses citation and argument. Ordinary reasoning asks whether conclusions follow from premises and whether those premises correspond with reality.

These systems are imperfect because human beings are imperfect, but they provide methods through which mistakes can eventually be discovered. Once the methods themselves are abandoned, argument degenerates into competing assertions of power. My truth confronts your truth, my narrative confronts your narrative and my group confronts your group. There is then no independent standard to which either side can appeal.

This is where the collapse of reason becomes politically dangerous. Democracy assumes disagreement, but it also assumes enough shared reality for disagreement to remain meaningful. Citizens can disagree about whether taxes should rise, but rational political argument becomes impossible if half the country believes government revenue is one number and the other half insists that arithmetic itself is propaganda.

The same applies to engineering, medicine and defence. Reality does not compromise with ideology. A bridge either carries its load or it falls. A crop either grows or it does not. A drug either produces particular biological effects or it does not. A military force either possesses sufficient ammunition or it does not.

The physical world has a wonderfully brutal way of eventually correcting intellectual error. The problem is that the correction can involve dead people. This is why competent civilisations build institutions specifically designed to allow reality to correct human beings before catastrophe occurs. Engineers test structures. Accountants audit books. Scientists reproduce experiments. Intelligence agencies challenge assessments. Courts hear opposing arguments. These institutions institutionalise doubt.

When they become ideological, politicised or afraid of internal dissent, their most important safety mechanism disappears. A bureaucracy in which everyone agrees may look harmonious, but it may actually be approaching disaster.

History provides endless examples of systems in which subordinates discovered that telling superiors what they wanted to hear was safer than telling them the truth. Production targets were met on paper. Military plans succeeded in briefings. Economic programs produced glorious statistics. Then reality arrived.

This is one reason free speech is not merely a moral luxury. It is a civilisation's error-correction mechanism. The dissenter may be irritating, wrong or even ridiculous, but a system incapable of tolerating someone saying, "You have made a mistake," has removed one of its principal defences against catastrophic error.

The same principle applies individually. Reason requires humility because reasoning properly means accepting the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. That may be the hardest intellectual discipline of all. It is easy to detect motivated reasoning in our enemies and considerably more difficult to detect it while looking in the mirror.

This is where I would part company with Adams's essay. He rightly condemns uncritical obedience to authority but sometimes risks replacing one form of authority worship with another: official institutions are presumed corrupt while alternative sources are presumed courageous truth-tellers. That is not scepticism.

Real scepticism applies the knife in both directions. Government can lie, corporations can lie, universities can become intellectually conformist and mainstream media can publish nonsense. But dissidents can also lie, alternative media can publish nonsense, conspiracy theories can be false and people who congratulate themselves upon being independent thinkers can be just as susceptible to confirmation bias as everybody else. Reason has no political party.

That point becomes increasingly important with artificial intelligence. AI can enormously increase human intellectual capability. It can analyse data, translate languages, explain difficult ideas and place enormous amounts of knowledge within reach of ordinary people. It can also manufacture plausible rubbish at industrial scale.

A recent academic discussion of AI hallucination calls this "epistemic pollution": apparently authoritative material can be generated instantly, personally tailored and presented with extraordinary confidence even when unsupported. The cost of producing convincing falsehood is therefore collapsing.

Imagine that development continuing. Every political faction can manufacture its own evidence. Every photograph can be questioned. Every recording can be dismissed as synthetic. Millions of automated accounts can manufacture apparent public opinion. AI systems can generate thousands of mutually reinforcing articles supporting claims that originated nowhere.

The problem will no longer be censorship through lack of information. It will be censorship through infinite information, with truth becoming a teaspoon of fresh water poured into an ocean of sewage. At that point the ability to reason becomes not merely an intellectual accomplishment but a survival skill.

How bad could the collapse become? Much worse than people imagine. It could begin with confusion, move into tribalism and then produce institutional paralysis because nobody trusts anyone sufficiently to coordinate collective action. Eventually there is the danger of a return to raw power because if evidence no longer settles disputes, something else ultimately will. Force is always waiting behind failed argument.

Civilisation represents humanity's attempt to replace the club with the conversation, vengeance with courts, superstition with investigation and arbitrary command with reasoned rules. The collapse of reason reverses that achievement.

It does not necessarily happen overnight. There may be no dramatic announcement that the Age of Reason has ended. People continue shopping, working, watching television and arguing online, while underneath everyday life the common intellectual world slowly disappears.

Eventually society contains groups occupying the same physical territory while inhabiting completely different realities. That is an unstable condition.

The answer is not to worship experts, nor is it to worship rebels against experts. It is to recover the habits that made serious civilisation possible: evidence, logic, intellectual humility, historical memory, free inquiry and willingness to change one's mind when the facts require it.

Children need to be taught not merely what to think but how claims are tested. Universities need to recover argument rather than ideological conformity. Journalists need to distinguish reporting from activism. Governments need to understand that concealing inconvenient information destroys the public trust upon which they will later depend during genuine emergencies.

Citizens also need to cultivate something increasingly unfashionable: patience. Truth is often complicated, frequently refuses to fit into a slogan and sometimes rests upon incomplete evidence. Sometimes the correct answer really is, "I don't know."

A civilisation capable of saying those three words is considerably healthier than one in which everybody possesses instant certainty about everything.

Mike Adams may be wrong that the West has already passed some irreversible cognitive event horizon. Civilisations have recovered from periods of extraordinary irrationality before, and today's technological chaos also gives ordinary people unprecedented access to knowledge.

But his underlying warning should not be dismissed. Economic collapse can be repaired, buildings can be rebuilt, currencies can be replaced, and governments can fall and new governments can take their place. All of those recoveries, however, require people capable of recognising reality, learning from mistakes and reasoning from cause to consequence.

If that capacity disappears widely enough, every other crisis becomes harder to solve. That is why the collapse of reason would be more dangerous than almost any individual political or economic disaster.

Reason is not merely one institution among the others. It is the instrument by which we repair the others when they fail. Lose that, and eventually we lose the ability even to understand why everything else is falling apart.