The Socratic elevation of the rational by way of verbal exchange disqualified the intuitive and the implicit knowledge that is essential to and congeals our sense of the whole.
The denial of this implicit knowledge creates in people a radical skepticism of the world and of each other and installs the rational faculty as man's last resort to knowing what's what. The world and the social milieu becomes flatter and uglier but it's all people have left.
A similar denial of implicit knowledge defines the Talmudic context. The Talmudists also deny what they could know implicitly in order that they derive the results through verbal, precise explication. They too fall back to rationalism as their last resort.
Rationalism is the mental world's version of scarcity.
Metaphor, the essential vehicle of myth, comes to represent falsehood. Myth becomes synonymous with fiction and untruth. The word 'myth' itself comes to mean 'untrue.'
The only truth is rational truth – that which can be derived through rhetoric and argumentation. What can be precisely analyzed becomes true; everything else is suspect, and thus devastated. Truth must always be proven, which is to say, it must always be subject to test and stress. Truth cannot be known in grace and gratitude and it cannot be a gift.
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