FOUNDATIONS: Reason & Imperialism 2; There's No Reason, Dude

In Season 2 - our FOUNDATIONS series - we’ll examine European philosophers from the 17th through the 19th centuries, to see how their views have shaped and defined our own… whether we realize it or not.

For many, including John Stuart Mill, Imperialism included the goal of “helping” subject people to become more rational; to think more like Europeans, with a certain kind of rationality that would lead to a greater capacity for self-governance and freedom. Explicit in this goal, and often implicit in our assumptions about Imperialism, today, is the assumption that European rationality is ultimately a better way to conduct the “work of the mind”.

 In this episode, we’ll look at the work of Daniel Kahneman to determine how viable the idea of European rationality actually is… and we’ll find that it is not viable, at all.

Thus, Imperialism, for all its other faults, for all the other damage it has done, has also propagated an unrealistic understanding of the working of the human mind. Given the extent of the spread of these ideas, that mistaken view has become something like a global standard.

Today we’ll try to understand the exact dynamics of this mistake. We’ll only scratch the surface.

And we’ll talk about the Cure.