Tricentenary.

This year is the tricentenary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels – a plea for reason in an irrational human world. Did it work? Hardly, unless as a children’s favourite in abridged, decontroversialised form.

The fact is, enamoured as Enlightenment folk were with “Reason” as a virtue divorced from material reality, it cannot be treated as separate from social reality. To be rational in an irrational society places one at odds with that society, sometimes fatally. A rational society cannot exist side by side with economic tyranny and class rule; it requires a change in the basis of society, made by a confident and aware majority determined to achieve it.
As someone said, “To be normal and adjusted in a psychotic society is to be psychotic.”