A chara, – In relation to some of the strange, unfounded ideas which people sometimes hold passionately, even aggressively, Seán Moncrieff wrote of the puzzle that “once minds have been poisoned, it seems extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, to bring them back to anything like reasonableness” (“Too often our emotions – anger, frustration, fear – propel us to search for ‘facts’ to fit how we are feeling”, Magazine, August 10th), Jonathan Swift wrote in 1720: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired” (A Letter to a Young Gentleman Lately enter’d into Holy Orders”).
It seems that it is not just in our times of social media, the internet and conspiracy theories that we encounter this phenomenon.
A civil and civilised society must learn each day how to address it. – Is mise,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,
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Sandyford,
Dublin 16.