@nosilverv tweeted:

Wait so what happens literally after french invent the supremacy of reason and decide to overthrow tradition gets dubbed the 'Reign of Terror' because it was nothing but multiple massacres and public executions and we somehow still are default yay-reason boo-tradition!?!??!?!!?!?

I responded:

Cause the "reason" faction won the meme war. As factions that kill off all their enemies sometimes do. The Catholic Church's mind control regime was similarly strong pre-Luther, and Team Reason let the Church survive since the Church didn't seem like a live opponent. Tocqueville helped me track how the Rationalism that "won" was State Rationalism. Corey Robin's intro theory course tweet is relevant.

To be fair we have primary sources to check, and the Enlightenment really was pretty persuasive before the French Revolution, although there were actually two, one of which was less identified with the state (the Spinozan-Scottish one).

I'm pro-reason, but an important part of doing that right is understanding the circumstances under which life-aligned Rationalism gets coopted or replaced by power-aligned Rationalism