Amazing passage! I guess the follow-up question would be: what then is to be done? If there is a large group of people with such "hardened reasoning", then how does one proceed? If we say that it is pointless to argue, then what? Do we simply allow the Elephant in the Room to go about unmentioned? I'm stumped at this point. Some issues are too important to simply stop discussing them.
Glenn, some things are up to us, others are not… Yes, the hard truth — and it took me decades to accept it — is that sometimes letting go is the only rational thing to do. What then? You engage those who are still willing to listen, and you begin to address the next generation. The fight for reason never ends, and it plays out over centuries and millennia.
What boggles my mind are highly intelligent people have a mind set that no argument can change them. There are some physicians I know feel strongly that COVID vaccine did more harm than the virus. It’s pointless to even discuss the issue.
Oh, I thought the cautery and lancet were used for reasoning by torture. 😄
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"If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide." -Mahatma Ghandi
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Amazing passage! I guess the follow-up question would be: what then is to be done? If there is a large group of people with such "hardened reasoning", then how does one proceed? If we say that it is pointless to argue, then what? Do we simply allow the Elephant in the Room to go about unmentioned? I'm stumped at this point. Some issues are too important to simply stop discussing them.
Glenn, some things are up to us, others are not… Yes, the hard truth — and it took me decades to accept it — is that sometimes letting go is the only rational thing to do. What then? You engage those who are still willing to listen, and you begin to address the next generation. The fight for reason never ends, and it plays out over centuries and millennia.
What boggles my mind are highly intelligent people have a mind set that no argument can change them. There are some physicians I know feel strongly that COVID vaccine did more harm than the virus. It’s pointless to even discuss the issue.
Naresh, yes, that’s Epictetus’s (and Aristotle’s) point: some people are beyond reach, and it makes no sense to insist in attempting to break through.
Boy does that echo through our current political discourse--or, too often, lack thereof .
Precisely. As Marcus Aurelius says several times in the Meditations, nothing (substantially) new under the sun…