Many see reasoning as "boring", and life is supposed to be exciting according to American cultural norms.

Plus if you reason and you're proven wrong, you're just wrong, because that's how logic works. That's no fun. Especially if you're not good at it, and constantly being judged for it, like in school. You learn to not even try to be rational because you're always wrong anyway. Learned helplessness.

But if you feel something, no one can take that away from you even if it logically makes no sense. It's yours to own. And in a world where ownership is being lost by the middle and lower classes, and things are being taken often in ways that don't logically make sense to you, at least you can always have your own feelings. It's the one thing you can own that cannot be taken from you.

People relate logic to being shamed at school, and then in turn relate emotions to free-thinking and perhaps even mental freedom itself. So there is a preference for emotions over logic. Logic is seen as something a person is forced to do, where as feeling is seen as something voluntary and easy.

I think that's the cultural mindset that caused us to get to where we are, if I had to distill it down.

A considerable amount of what's taught in Education programs these days is how to teach students the "right" ways to think about topics as opposed to critical thinking. This started in the 1990s with the concept of "Safe Spaces," where students' feelings were seen as the most important thing as opposed to facts and logic. Since then, giving priority to feelings over facts has grown like a cancer throughout American education.

The wife of a friend of mine went through an early childhood education program, and now her Facbeook posts are all about how the most important thing to teach young children is antiracism. She's been completely brainwashed.