Episode 59 - Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings, But Decent People Do: The Dangerous Emotional Detachment of the Right

Speak Out with Tim Wise

In this episode, I examine the right's new favorite mantra -- "facts don't care about your feelings" -- and what it says about modern conservatism's deeply stunted emotional core. Looking at the political, philosophical and psychological underpinnings of this notion, that "reason and logic" are a) conservative, and b) in opposition to feelings and emotion (which are "liberal") I note the absurdity of such arguments, and also their fundamentally dehumanizing and dangerous logic. Fact is: 1) What the right considers facts often aren't; 2) Conservatives are some of the biggest snowflakes on the planet; 3) Reason and emotion are NOT opposed to one another; rather they are complimentary and both critical to making us fully human; 4) In fact, only by caring about feelings and emotions (our own and those of others) can we fully make logic and rationality function as it should, and persuade anyone of the facts we seek to share with them; and, 5) Psychologically speaking, to embrace detached indifference to people's emotions and feelings is to embrace sociopathy. It is to suggest that the nurturing of an anti-social personality is a morally compelling life goal. It is not. It is a sickness. And apparently, that sociopathy is a hallmark of the modern conservative mind: something to be resisted and defeated for the good of us all.