Op-Ed
Why Facts Do Care About Your Feelings
The Inescapability of Emotions in Factual Knowledge
The famous refrain “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” popularised by Ben Shapiro, is often deployed as a blunt rhetorical tool in political and cultural debates. Its underlying assertion is that facts exist in an objective vacuum, immune to the subjective whims of human emotions.
This appears as a robust defense of truth against relativism, suggesting that facts remain unaltered no matter how one feels, as though they exist on a purely external plane untouched by the internal world of thought, perception, or affect.
However, this view not only simplifies the nature of facts but also fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between facts and the human capacity for interpretation. The belief that facts do not care about feelings presupposes that the mere existence of a point is sufficient to render it meaningful.
Yet, precisely, our feelings, experiences, and biases curate the facts we prioritize, the ones we overlook, and how we interpret them. To suggest that facts are self-evident without recognizing the complex emotional and psychological landscapes that shape our understanding of them is a gross oversimplification of human cognition and experience.
