Feelings Don’t Care About Facts

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” is currently the mantra of lib-owners everywhere. There are two problems with the phrase as it has come to be used, though.

The first problem is that it has become a rallying cry for wrongful opposition to moral claims and arguments. For example, “Children should not be kept in overcrowded, unhygienic cages” is a moral claim. It should not be too hard to think up arguments for that claim. But the people who most regularly say facts don’t care about feelings do not seem to understand that a properly factual claim can and sometimes should also raise strong feelings. As a result, I see “facts don’t care about feelings!” used  to justify things that are factually atrocious – like keeping children in unhygienic, overcrowded cages.

The second problem is that the people shouting “Facts don’t care about feelings!” are typically just as prone to emotional biases as any of their political opponents. Libs and Republicans demonstrably all get riled up about plenty of things, and it usually is not pretty when they do.

The “facts don’t care about feelings” coalition needs to give up its pretensions of calloused intellectual superiority. Democrat or Republican, Left or Right wing, we are all prone to strong visceral reactions that interfere with our ability to be as rational as we think we are.

Feelings care about the way we perceive things. Feelings could not care less about the way things really are. Feelings don’t care about facts. Rational, calm people care about the way things really are. Not very many people qualify as rational or calm in the current political environment.

A lot of people need to do a lot of soul searching to honestly evaluate the way they feel about politics and how well those feelings fit with reality.

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