The difference

“Rationality will not save us.”

When this phrase appeared across the screen, I felt like a tank just rammed into me, knocked me off my chair, and imprinted the words “déjà vu” across my forehead. The idea of dealing only with the “truth”, the “facts”, and “nonfiction” is not a new idea to only Tim O’Brien; others, such as Robert McNamara have also thought of this.

McNamara credited the end of the war to the fact that “we lucked out.” All of our leaders were rational people, the data were all logical, the other world leaders were also rational, but that didn’t matter. In the end, luck prevailed.

A parallel is drawn for me between McNamara’s differentiations between rational and luck versus Tim O’Brien’s differentiation between truth and lie. Both have the warning of society needing to be wary of depending too much on the “truth” or “rational” part of life. Being rational can only get you so far, and the other part has to be luck. Humans are prone to error, not matter how rational we may be “human fallibility can [still] destroy nations.”

In my personal opinion, I believe society has placed an emphasis more on the factual and concrete ideas of life. Take our education system; once you can tell how protein is synthesized in the ribosome and then transports to the Golgi apparatus, you get an “A” for mastering the material. However, in an English class it is still entirely possible to argue that your paper deserved a higher grade, because you had effectively used the process of “redefining your terms”, avoided all of the common fallacies, and persuaded half of the class to change their stance after reading your paper. Getting an “A” is the main objective of most students, and in providing a more concrete way of attaining the high grade based on mastery and not something up to the professor’s discretion, the factual side of life is sought after more.

However, McNamara and O’Brien argued that this is not all to the world. The world is in need of fiction and luck. O’Brien captured our attention with his war stories that could possibly be all lies. McNamara told us of how close we were to war, and how even though our leaders were rational and knew how horrible war could be, they still were going to take that step, because logic dictated it.

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Here’s a further thought.
In class, I felt like there was a slight conclusion drawn on that as a society, we have placed more value on business, but English and rhetoric are the ones that are able to move our hearts and strengthen our soul. Without English and rhetoric, our souls will shrivel and die. My question is this… how come we still place emphasis on religion, when for all we know, it could just be another lie?