Guns are great, America is great, God is great, Democracy is great.

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The affective context model has enabled me to begin to understand the sounds that come out of people when they open their mouths to speak.

Now you may have thought that at least some of these sounds are things like: reasons, explanations, or argument. You may have assumed that people are basically rational creatures. And you would be wrong.

This is because the basic form of human spoken interaction is something like ‘song’.

What I mean is that our vocalizations work in the following way: they reflect how we feel, and they convey those feelings to others in the form of sound. In that sense they are very much like song – a series of sounds that create an emotional resonance in creatures of a similar kind.

Now of course I am sure you find this preposterous – you cannot imagine that philosophical argument and political debate can just be the sound of people expressing how they feel – but they are, and your emotional reaction nicely illustrates my point.

Over the centuries we have managed to obscure what is really going on in our lives with a grand lie about reason and rationality. But the truth was never very well hidden: Socrates discovered that people couldn’t actually come up with good reasons for doing what they do (and they put him to death), Kahnemann argued that our real reasons for doing things are almost entirely obscured (and they gave him a prize), but the point is essentially the same: we feel our way through existence, singing an elaborate song that reflects those feelings, and pretending that bits of it are rational - coming up with post-rationalisations.

That is not to say that rationality doesn’t exist: just that it is a peculiar type of refrain – like a specific chord series that people are attracted to.

Of course people don’t realise that this is what they are doing, nor that this is how they work. Sometimes it only comes into focus when you challenge them on something they feel, but have never had to explain.

I was in a taxi once, in Texas, having a perfectly friendly and reasonable conversation with a Houstonian when I made the mistake of suggesting that maybe allowing everybody to own a gun was a bad idea. I hit a bum note. The mood changed suddenly. There was a flurry of irrational justifications, and then we moved on.

At some level I think you know this: that people who feel that guns are great, or America is great, or  God is great do not really feel that way because they have been persuaded by the arguments – hence it is pointless to argue otherwise. These are profound feelings which emerge in conversation – as a particular type of song. For someone to sing a different song they would have to come to feel quite differently. And sometimes they do.

So far you probably sympathize with me: most of my readers ore not devout, or gun-owners, or American. So you like the sound of my song.

You probably also think that democracy is great. I don’t. I think democracy is a lot like guns – we give pretty much anyone a vote regardless of their ability to wield it responsibly, with terrible consequences. Democracy is not a good system in our modern age, it leads to things like Trump and Brexit.

Notice the emotional reaction this causes in you. Possibly no-one has ever challenged you to justify democracy before. A flurry of incoherent rebuttals come to mind – perhaps the Churchill quote ‘democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others’ is on the tip of your tongue. A little popular refrain to sing.

But my point here is not to persuade you that there is a better system than democracy – we probably both know I couldn’t do that anyway, no matter how rational my argument – because it’s something you are deeply attached to. It is a song you have sung all your life.

Instead consider that these ideas: guns are great, America is great, God is great, democracy is great are not really ideas at all – they are feelings. Deeply felt ones, ones which illustrate a broader contention - that all our ‘ideas’ are feelings. When we speak our ideas, we sing a song, we share our feelings. I don't doubt that you can come up with 'reasons' - but neither do I doubt that these are just the complicated sounds that your feelings make as you express them.

Some feelings are so deeply held that we will sing them however crazy or deleterious they are. They are like nursery rhymes. Other times we will hear a song we like and sing along. We will have experiences that change how we feel, and the songs that we sing.

In this way we can begin to see people for what they are; at the very core of them are nursery rhymes – songs that lie at their very heart. As adults, swirling in catchy songs – what the Greeks called rhetoric – with rationality not so much in opposition, but a flavor of rhetoric for those people who have fallen in love with the chords that make up the rational tunes. Reason is just a pop song.

So this is a song that I expect no-one else to sing today, but I hope everyone will sing one day.