Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason Audiobook (Free)

A fascinating background that reveals the ways in which the pursuit of rationality often leads to an explosion of irrationality

It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans had been benighted by superstition and irrationality, but the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme worth. Discovering that reason may be the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational pet.” But is certainly this flattering story itself rational? In this about Irrationality: A BRIEF HISTORY of the Dark Aspect of Reason sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today-from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the living of irrational quantities to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump-Justin Smith says the data suggests the opposite. From sex and music to religious beliefs and war, irrationality accocunts for vast majority of human existence and history.

Affluent and ambitious, Irrationality ranges across philosophy, politics, and current events. Complicated conventional thinking about logic, natural reason, dreams, art and science, pseudoscience, the Enlightenment, the web, jokes and lies, and death, the book shows how background reveals that any triumph of cause is short-term and reversible, which rational plans, notably including many from Silicon Valley, frequently result in their polar opposite. The problem can be that the logical gives birth towards the irrational and vice versa within an countless routine, and any work to permanently arranged things to be able eventually ends in an explosion of unreason. Because of this, it really is irrational to attempt to remove irrationality. For better or even worse, it is an ineradicable feature of existence.

Illuminating unreason at an instant when the world appears to have gone mad again, Irrationality is certainly exciting, provocative, and timely.