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The Death of Reductionism
Wednesday, 3 December, 2025
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit brandonrichey.substack.com**Take NoteIf you're tuning into today's episode understand that this particular episode will only be available in full length to all-access members on my Substack. However, please don't click off because I'm offering a substantial preview for you to get an idea of today's message. You can bypass the paywall by going to brandonrichey.substack.com to sign up to become an all-access member. You can also download the Substack app and sign up for a trial period to access the episode as well. Thank you very much for your support and understanding. The Official Substack Of Brandon Richey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”― Albert EinsteinIdeology is an interesting thing because many people in today’s world are definitely married to their own systematic body of concepts which make up their belief systems, particularly as it relates to their worldview.The thing is that there are people who have the ability to be married to a certain ideology, but then can also recognize when that ideology doesn’t hold up in a scenario involving a real world application. It’s at this point that these people are open to the prospect of either abandoning their ideology altogether, or they’re at least willing to subtract and add in some concepts of their own in order to enable existing belief systems to hold up under whatever current test the circumstances demand in a real world application.There’s no shame in either one of these reactions from people who are open to adjusting or completely changing their worldview. The only shame that should exist are with those people who continue to double down on a worldview that just simply doesn’t hold up in a real world application.Granted, when I refer to an ideology not holding up in a real world application, what I’m specifically talking about is an ideology that results in the destruction of liberty, one that fails to correct economic peril, or one that continues to contribute to the oppression of its own citizenry.The type of people that I’m referring to who are resistant to change are only succumbing to pride and pride only accelerates one’s own destruction. However, this happens simply because such people lack discernment and the ability to think deeper about the dark realities of human nature that clearly exists in a fallen world.To more clearly illustrate in identifying this archetype, I recently heard a master influencer and behavioral expert Chase Hughes referencing a story about a group he studies who specializes in diving into deep discussions involving the study of consciousness.I cannot remember the name of the group, but the reason I’m bringing it up is that the point Chase was making in his talk about this group was that they did a deeper dive into trying to understand life and how things work by exposing the shallowness of reductionism along with society’s hyperfocus on materialism.For instance, in order to illustrate this he was making the point that there’s no study that can explain the power of music. In short, music has the ability to move people emotionally and to stir up certain internal feelings about the music itself, or perhaps stir an emotion based on the fact that certain music may trigger a certain memory within people who tie an emotional moment to a particular song.He was saying that the group’s discussion about this was that they were exposing the absurdity of modern day reductive science using music as an example to illustrate the intellectual laziness, and lack of wisdom, that much of the world has succumbed to during this modern age. When examining music, in an effort to try to understand how it’s able to do all of the things that I just mentioned concerning its influence over people, he gives a very clear example of a reductive approach in trying to seek that understanding.According to Chase, in their example they demonstrated this with a thought experiment. They did this by saying that the reductive approach would be to take all of the musical instruments that created a certain piece of music and they would smash those musical instruments into a million pieces.Once doing this they would suggest putting the small pieces of the smashed instruments, along with the shredded pages of musical notes, underneath a microscope to study them in an effort to figure out how the music worked.Of course, you and I understand that this sort of thinking and this sort of approach is absurdly stupid, but it’s quite often the same process that people follow when supporting a broken worldview. They’ll go this far to support an insane ideology that they’re married to in an effort to defend the failed application of their beliefs in a real world scenario. This is reductionism in application.Fast is Slow and Slow is FastIt wasn’t that long ago when I had a certain individual comment on one of my Facebook posts when I happened to reference the concerning level of Marxist left wing political violence that had been noticeably going on for years, but had obviously escalated to new heights since the recent introduction of political assassinations.I had made my post within a couple of weeks of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk and it was this self-professed anti-Trump Libertarian that tried to share an absurd study from the CATO Institute with a caption stating that my position about Marxist left wing violence was incorrect. His position was that most political violence had actually been coming from the right wing side of the political world and his only means to back up this statement involved sharing some so-called study from the CATO Institute.I don’t typically respond to stupid posts, but in this particular instance I somewhat knew this guy and I noticed that he had recently started to get a lot more vocal in his anti-Trump rhetoric since the political violence had obviously reached a new level within the country.However, I also accidentally noticed a previous post by this individual where he had also made some disrespectful comments towards Christianity and Christians while simultaneously making some absurdly inaccurate comments about Charlie Kirk.
