On Shaw's Unreasonable Man
Updated: Mar 6, 2022
People who follow and adapt are dumb. They give up their values to fit the molds of society. They are weak and unreliable. They do whatever is profitable. They are pretty much slaves to the designers of society. There are very few who are driven by reason. With their actions, they establish truth and stay steadfastly with it. When the game of society falls apart, it is their values that guide the population. Their values alone hold society stable.
Who wants to read that? How likely is such a piece of literature to persist against time? If this gets widely distributed, all weak men who adapt to society, regardless of how fallen it is, will destroy it. Therefore, Shaw packaged the same truth satirically.
He said, "the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
In school, there are those who study to get high grades, not to learn. They lie to girls and accept their melodrama to sleep with them. In college, they allow political correctness and leftist lunacy because they are too weak to speak up. At work, they quietly allow corruption to keep their jobs. Their choices allow them to become rich and powerful, a fallen society's measure of success. My mother would call them reasonable. Perhaps, they are.
There are also those who never cheat on tests. They don't study for grades. They consider knowledge to be an end in itself. They don't lie to girls and don't put up with their dumb shit. In college, they speak against leftist propaganda. At work, they expose the corrupt at the expense of getting fired. On the measures of society, they are abject failures, for they end up with neither money nor women nor influence.
However, these are men you would want to be friends with and do business with, for you know that their integrity is unshakable, which they have proven in hard times. In the long-run, the majority discovers that they have contributed to the fall of society by falling for it, by adapting to its ill ways. They discover that the sacrifice of truth for money, fame, and influence has left them impoverished. They have gained material yet have lost the real wealth-- values, morals, and truth. Some start to come back to truth. Here, they find him again, the man they called unreasonable. Shaw swapped reasonable with unreasonable because people consider unreasonable people reasonable and reasonable people unreasonable. That's satire.
