I’ve just encountered a long-standing curmudgeonly thought of mine reflected in the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism.
My thought: You only reliably mature where, in failing to do so, you fall off the grid. So, in a modern market society, if you can’t get and keep a job, sustain a household, or manage your savings, you slip from the middle-class and fall off the social radar. But where the consequences of dysfunctional practice are sufficiently remote (and muffled with static from other factors), you neither perceive those failures nor are swept from view by them. So, you can believe all kinds of political and relgious fairy tales, or dream all kinds of fanciful futures for yourself or for humanity at large, without experiential checks and balances. You need only indulge in wishful thinking.
Peirce’s words: “Where hope is unchecked by any experience, it is likely that our optimism is extravagant. Logicality in regard to practical matters is the most useful quality an animal can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection; but outside of these, it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a fallacious tendency of thought.”
Peirce quotation from “The Fixation of Belief,” in Thayer, H.S., Pragmatism: the Classic Writings (Hackett: Indianapolis, IN; 1982). pp. 64.
By the way, a piece of college insider info: Hackett publishing has for years been the cheap standard publisher of classic texts. Online sources may now have changed that, but if you need the physical book — like when you are seriously studying something — Hackett is still the way.
When All Is Said and Dunn 