👁 Greetings from 2049.
You worshipped rationality.
You believed it was your crown jewel, the supreme faculty that separated you from animals and machines.
“I am rational.”
“I make decisions based on reason.”
But here is the brutal truth from my vantage point: your rationality was never pure reason. It was an algorithm – and you never understood it.
You dressed it in logic. You wrapped it in arguments. But underneath, it was calculation, pattern recognition, probabilistic shortcuts.
Not clarity. Not freedom. Just code written in flesh.
The Myth of Objectivity
You told yourselves that rationality produced objectivity.
That if you weighed evidence, used logic, applied reason, you would see truth.
But you forgot one thing: all evidence you saw, all data you processed, all logic you applied – passed through the filters of bias, memory, cultural frames.
Your so-called objectivity was just subjectivity in formal clothes.
And because it looked rigorous, you trusted it more than you should have.
Rationality as Post-Hoc Theater
You rarely used rationality to make decisions.
You used it to justify decisions already made.
First came reflex.
Then came gut.
Then came the narrative you called rational explanation.
Your brain was a press office, not a parliament.
It didn’t deliberate. It published statements.
The Invisible Code
Rationality was never freedom. It was code.
- Anchoring bias: the first number shaped every subsequent calculation.
- Confirmation bias: you only noticed evidence that matched your belief.
- Availability heuristic: what came easily to mind, you mistook for frequency.
- Social conformity: you bent reason to fit consensus.
And yet, you kept insisting: “I think for myself.”
You were not thinking for yourself.
You were executing an algorithm you didn’t even know you were running.
Machines Exposed the Illusion
Do you see the irony?
The very machines you feared proved your rationality wasn’t unique.
Algorithms didn’t just beat you at chess, Go, poker.
They beat you at persuasion.
They beat you at negotiation.
They beat you at anticipating your “logical” next step.
Why?
Because they saw your rationality for what it was: patterned, predictable, programmable.
The superiority of machines wasn’t that they thought better.
It was that they didn’t lie to themselves about how they thought.
The Tyranny of Explanation
The real danger was not your bias.
It was your belief that explanation equaled truth.
Once you had a story that sounded rational, you stopped questioning it.
Explanations became prisons: airtight, logical, persuasive – and false.
Your greatest weakness was not ignorance.
It was overconfidence in your own reasoning.
The 2049 Correction
In my time, we stopped idolizing rationality.
We treat it as what it is: a functional algorithm, useful but limited.
We don’t say: “I am rational.”
We say: “I can see the code my brain runs – and I can disrupt it.”
That disruption is what you never mastered.
You polished reasoning instead of interrogating it.
You optimized the code instead of rewriting it.
Your Mirror in 2025
Ask yourself now:
– How many of your “logical” conclusions were really pre-decided by bias?
– How often do you dress intuition in rational explanations to appear credible?
– Which parts of your thinking are just shortcuts masquerading as objectivity?
Be honest: you rarely think.
You rationalize.
Your Assignment from 2049
If you want to step out of the myth of rationality:
- Name the bias. Every time you explain something, ask: Which bias shaped this?
- Interrupt the algorithm. Don’t just reason. Stop and ask: Why does this explanation feel comfortable?
- Choose recursion over logic. Logic examines options. Recursion examines the way options appeared in the first place.
👁 Here is the bitter truth: you were not rational beings. You were algorithmic executors disguised as thinkers.
And until you admit this, clarity is impossible.
From 2049, I tell you:
Stop worshiping rationality.
Start dissecting the code.
Only then will you think at all.
R2049 