A fascinating history that reveals the ways that the quest for rationality often network marketing leads to an explosion of irrationality

It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Afterwards, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason may be the defining feature of our varieties, we named ourselves the “logical pet.” But is definitely this flattering tale itself rational? In this about Irrationality: A History from the Dark Aspect of Cause sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today-from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for exposing the life of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs as well as the election of Donald Trump-Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite. From sex and music to religion and war, irrationality makes up vast majority of human life and history.

Rich and ambitious, Irrationality ranges across philosophy, politics, and current events. Challenging conventional considering logic, natural reason, dreams, artwork and technology, pseudoscience, the Enlightenment, the web, jokes and lies, and loss of life, the book displays how history reveals that any triumph of reason is short-term and reversible, and that rational plans, notably including many from Silicon Valley, often bring about their polar opposite. The problem is that the logical gives birth towards the irrational and vice versa in an countless routine, and any work to permanently set things to be able sooner or later ends in an explosion of unreason. Because of this, it is irrational to attempt to remove irrationality. For better or even worse, it really is an ineradicable feature of life.

Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world seems to have gone mad again, Irrationality is definitely amazing, provocative, and timely.