Mark Pellegrino on finding common ground

“Well, what are you told by the culture should guide your decision-making process in the most important areas of your life? For love, what should it be? Your heart. Your feelings. For work, your purpose in life, what should it be? Your heart. Your feelings. Nowhere in there is the mind — your primary source of information, the means by which you understand the world. It’s your instincts, your heart, your gut, your emotions. Those have become the primary ways in which you navigate the universe now. So it’s no surprise to me that people think a feeling is thinking and they conflate the two together. There’s no common ground when it’s about emotions. There’s only common ground when you can understand there’s an objective reality that our minds are capable of understanding. Then you can have a discussion with each other. But until we jettison the notion that reason isn’t a primary, then we’re doomed.”

Mark Pellegrino, Informed Dissent with Leonydus (2020)