The original cutline for this picture was "David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature."

We like to think of ourselves as clear-eyed realists around here, but as often as not, reason is the scaffolding that holds up raw instinct. You can’t use impartial logic for everything, after all. When you see a nest of scorpions or Newt Gingrich or whatever, you don’t start from first principles and follow reason until it brings you to your opinion; you throw bleach on it and get out of there. I’m speaking metaphorically, here—don’t get close enough to Newt Gingrich to throw bleach on him. The point is that our opinions may be enforced with logical reasoning, but the original dictate tends to come from our guts. That’s all well and good when our opinions our ours alone, but the system breaks down when we have to match opinions with one another. One man’s visceral revulsion is another man’s career. It’s Friday, and this week’s link roundup is all about the problem of things that are A) intuitively, obviously wrong and B) going to keep happening until we can find some airtight argument against them.

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