On the curious way in which American culture is irrational

Very few people, especially in America, ever question the presuppositions that they take for granted in their thinking. If you try to question them about it, they will most often resort to threats of violence. This will be that of the state apparatus if they are functionaries at work.

Thinking is not having (propositional) thoughts, nor is it backing them up with evidence and reasons. It is questioning those reasons. This is how thinking has an intrinsic relationship to the political, and to the very idea of democracy.

The broad opposition to this view holds that everything that anyone says either expresses what they want, or evidences what is wrong with them, or both. The presupposition on which this skeptical view rests is that "society does not exist." A corollary is "what is can be represented, but what is desirable, the good, cannot be thought." Capitalist thinking posits this latter as an outside that is abstractly possible in the same way that the possible as such is.