I ask myself, who am I reasoning for? Is it to satisfy myself? Or is it to satisfy someone else? Or a combination of the above? Or some other perspective? There might be lots of ways to look at this, but I want to compare just two.

(a) One way to look at it, is to think that I am reasoning for myself and for society. Then I must not only satisfy myself, but I must also use my reasoning to satisfy others as well.

(b) If I reason only for myself, I only need to satisfy myself and I don’t need to worry about anything else.

The first point of view, (a), is adopted by someone who is firmly entrenched in a social convention. In a social convention everything is socially defined, including one’s own self-image. One’s social self-imagine is “I am what I and the others say I am.” For that reason, when you want to change your own mind as a profoundly conventional person, you can’t be a loner. You have to convince people around you that what you believe is the case, because other people are in fact elements of your own identity. So you can’t become a different (type of) person until other people believe that you’re a different person. This is why conventional people spend as much time, for example, convincing others they’re not lying as they spend actually avoiding lies, assuming a socially-constructed identity of an honest person is desirable.

For a social person, if you believe you’re not lying, but everyone says you are, it can feel crazy. You may begin to doubt yourself and think you’re just wrong about yourself and others are right. That’s what it means to be profoundly social. Because there are many more other people than yourself, what you are in a socially-defined context is largely defined by anyone other than yourself. It means your own input into your socially-constructed identity is vanishingly small.

However, because metaphysically others acquire their ‘otherness’ only by virtue of being different from you, it is metaphysically impossible to fully satisfy other people with your reasoning. In fact, no socially-reliant satisfaction is guaranteed once you accept otherness as a metaphysical fact. That means being able to satisfy someone even to a small degree is not a given. Then it follows that to whatever degree you do manage to satisfy people with your reasoning, it can only feel as pure luck. That’s the implication of otherness in a social context.

This means if reasoning and being social are both qualities that you value, you must remain unsatisfied, perpetually. To be content and happy you have to give up on one of the following: reasoning or social convention.

And indeed, anti-intellectualism is a very strong current among very social people. It’s much easier to adjust to society if you stop thinking about stuff and just “go with the flow.”

However, it should be obvious that if you’re willing to tolerate mental solitude, you can keep your ability to reason and remain happy and content, if you de-emphasize social convention. In this case, I reason for myself. I am trying to convince myself with my own arguments and never others. It’s not easy to remember this. From the POV (b) I am the one I am trying to reach with all my arguments and not anyone else. Once I realize I have finally gotten through to myself with my own arguments, it’s no longer necessary to argue with anyone.