You slide your finger across the screen of your phone to quiet the screeching of your alarm. You’re up, kind of. Rather you’re in that state of semi-wakefulness where you’re not quite sure if you’re in your childhood bedroom, on vacation with your partner, or on that rollercoaster made of caterpillars and twigs you were just dreaming of. You start to run through your morning routine.

You’ll be needing to get up so you start making mental computations, does the theory of gravity still hold true – a bit of mental math, a makeshift experiment – it all checks out. What about the conservation of momentum? More math.

What’s the weather going to be like? It looks like rain so you gather some preliminary data on the water cycle, you cross reference your findings with historical meteorological trends and factor in new climate change findings. You also take some air samples to check for smog and other air quality factors that might have an impact on the day’s forecast and decide you’ll need a coat and an umbrella.

Time for breakfast. Your ideal calorie intake is 1,800 calories per 24 hour cycle – but, as there always exists some possibility that you’re wrong, you decide to check your energy expenditure by taking the average of your daily activity, as recorded by your smartwatch, over the last 12 months. Of course your smartwatch might contain design flaws so you download the design specs. Upon review it seems that you ought to double check the engineering and manufacturing processes, just in case, and perhaps you should ensure that the translation from the original Chinese into English didn’t produce any errors.

That done, it’s time to chow down. Before putting your Moka Pot on the stove you check the physics behind boiling water and pressure vessels. You also review the chemistry behind Mallard reactions before browning the onions for your omelet.

Just as you’re ready to put on your shoes you glance at the clock. The day has flown by and you’ve only just finished confirming the fundamental science of your morning routine. Exhausted, you quickly double check gravity once more before tumbling into bed. Maybe tomorrow you’ll leave the house.

Forgive my indulgence in overkill, dear reader, but I want drive my point home; I want to make clear that despite the ever-present possibility of error we cannot constantly analyze and question every assumption that underlies our lives and our understanding of the world. At a certain point analysis leads to paralysis.

In the hard sciences we might turn to Charles Pierce to tell us that there is always some chance that we are wrong. Is the speed of light decreasing, is the universe expanding more slowly? We have no real way to know. Slowing down relative to what? And, perhaps more importantly, does the answer matter? Any change would be after all, infinitesimal.

I don’t mean to suggest that questioning the underlying assumptions of our thinking is counterproductive, wrong, or harmful. Asking ourselves how we know what we know is, after all, the foundation of scientific inquiry. Rather, I posit rejecting the existence of any absolute is to cripple yourself intellectually. If you don’t hold any premise as provisionally absolute you risk disorientation and paralysis by analysis. At a certain point, it’s just raining.

Again, I must insist that questioning the premises that undergird our research is healthy and necessary. However, holding no absolutes leaves us inert and set us, still in stasis, adrift on the vast oceans of La-la Land. To question everything is to invite paranoid dogmas and QAnon cures for intellectual cripplment.

Dogma is the danger of intellectual paralysis. We all crave, as I have put forth on this blog previously, a certain degree of ideological stability. While some have been capacitated by dint of academic training or philosophical gift to tolerate or even create instability we live in a society where that capacity is not universal. Dogmas, populist discourse, conspiracy rabbit holes, and the like restore a sense of motility to those suffering intellectual cripplment for those paralyzed by the absence of absolutes.

I use the word cripplment intentionally. The absence of absolutes is disorienting, it’s a spasm, an amputation, a paralytic. A world absent of absolutes provokes the intellectual mirror of physical disability. That is why crips must work harder to translate their sitpoint knowledge of the physical experience of disability into the intellectual realm. To advocate for the accommodation of stability and the hard intellectual work of creating and cultivating its healthy forms so as to smother nascent temptations of dogmatism in the crib.

It is almost understandable that those in other areas of critical theory miss the mark on the importance of absolutes. However, we of all people should be able to look at the way that the desire for stability is turning the world upside-down and understand that you can’t deconstruct that basic human need.