Most Americans would, I am certain, agree that our inability to compromise—about much of anything—is damaging to our democracy because the success of our historic form of self-government depends wholly on our ability to adjust our expectations as necessary and work cooperatively.

The refusal of so many to even consider alternative viewpoints, policies, or interpretations is a problem that is, of course, exacerbated by far too many otherwise reasonable Americans retreating into the unreality of an social life lived almost entirely online. The Internet and the mind-boggling array of news and information outlets it features now allow one to inhabit an echo chamber of information that reinforces our beliefs without the annoyance of contrary ideas and viewpoints that could potentially challenge—or undermine—our comforting preconceptions about our nation and its people. Like an addictive drug that slowly destroys the mind of its user, the scary monoculture of unending grievance and anger offered on our phones and other devices today closes minds and hardens hearts while convincing many that their fellow Americans are, in fact, their sworn enemies.

Discussions are further impeded when ideological rigidity results in a significant number of our citizens having no interest in how what they absolutely believe to be true might collide with the needs or ideas of others. Whether we are talking about climate change, illegal immigration, criminal justice, human sexuality, abortion, education, housing, healthcare, or a host of other issues that impact our daily lives, we must constantly deal with the consequences of those—who just won’t budge. Human obstinance is, we must recognize, occasionally the result of highly principled and carefully considered positions based on one’s values and faith, but it is likely just as often the result of of foolishly illogical logic, which helps far too many to justify the unjustifiable and shirk accountability for attitudes and actions that harm themselves, their neighbors, their friends, their families, their communities—and our nation as a whole.

To better analyze this widespread personal and cultural problem, we must wade (up our knees only, if you please) into the philosophy of how we think and what we know, also known as Epistemology,

Speaking in broad terms, and taking care to avoid the murk of too much academic folderol, we are considered to have two types of knowledge at our command: a posteriori knowledge, which requires evidence to support and justify it, and a priori knowledge, which does not require either experience or evidence to support it. Few rational people, for example, would insist we set up a laboratory experiment to prove that punching old people is bad; we readily accept this without insisting on government-funded researchers validating our belief by pummeling a group of old people and collecting the data.

This dichotomy between the two types of knowledge we daily use seems self-evident. Moreover, the distinction between them is critically important because some knowledge must absolutely depend on facts and experience. The decisions we make based solely on our feelings and intuition are many times catastrophic for both ourselves and those around us. The routine inability of so many Americans—many of whom, paradoxically, sport elite post-graduate academic credentials—to understand the importance of facts in charting public policy and personal behavior has been the root of a great many of the problems today afflicting our cultural, social, and political lives.

Perhaps never in American history has William F. Buckley’s famous aphorism regarding his preference for being governed by the first 2000 names of the Boston phone book rather than the faculty of Harvard University been both more pertinent and true because the “smartest” among us are frighteningly stupid at times.

In America today—and this is likely the case for many places around the globe in our strange age of social media mob rule—a priori thinking predominates because our precious feelings often frustratingly collide with inconvenient (and often vexingly complex) data. Therefore, minds stay closed, and information is twisted or simply ignored if it does not fit one’s preferred narrative. Although a priori knowledge is useful for explaining ideas that do not—or should not—require protracted discussions, its wrongful application to issues and situations that clearly require the facts and thoughtful analysis is an individual disaster that inevitably morphs into a societal one because democracies allow you to vote no matter how ill-informed, fact-adverse, or deeply paranoid you might be.

Ignorance and anger combined with a refusal to acknowledge contradictory information that rubs uncomfortably against one’s preferred beliefs—which usually is the case with today’s Democratic Socialists dreaming of spending money we do not have on policies most Americans do not want—is a nightmare. The dire budgetary, cost of living, and public safety crises afflicting Blue states and cities should be a wake up call for the political and cultural Left, but I would not count on many Wokesters suddenly realizing arresting criminals is helpful, mental illnesses should not be ignored, and money will never grow on trees; the vast majority of today’s Democrats will, in fact, fly into a towering rage if you try to reason with them—and call you a fascist, bigot, or both as well.

I say this with great sadness because I am a retired educator, but the root cause of much of the magical thinking that passes for deep thought in so many corners of our nation today is our systems of K-12 and higher education, where open debate is actively discouraged and only administrative or faculty approved narratives are now allowed. A scholars’ group that calls itself Uncivil recently argued “that the push for civil discourse and viewpoint diversity [on campuses] is part of a conservative and pro-Israel agenda—not a nonpartisan campaign.” Apparently, even common courtesy and routine religious tolerance are political and cultural flashpoints for frustrated professors.

All the end-of-the-world-ism that passes for both education and debate today also probably helps to explain a recent survey from the Center for Strategic Politics, which found that, amazingly, 59% of Democrats would favor a military coup to remove President Donald Trump from office, and 32% would feel positively about his hypothetical assassination. As much as I would like to be comforted by the knowledge that the sample size was small and perhaps not properly controlled to eliminate bias, my a posteriori brain finds it very difficult to not be worried about the a priori fantasies regarding violence in America today.