Leadership Quote by David Brooks

Brooks is drawing a bright line between explanation as illumination and explanation as camouflage. “To explain the unknown by the known” flatters the Enlightenment instinct: start with what’s testable, measurable, repeatable, and build outward. Then he flips the sentence and tightens the screw. “To explain the known by the unknown” isn’t just bad reasoning; it’s a rhetorical con. You take something ordinary (suffering, love, consciousness, social order) and launder it through a mystery-word - God, destiny, “human nature,” the market, History - that can’t be cross-examined. The move wins arguments by removing them from the arena.

The phrase “theological lunacy” is doing cultural work. It’s not merely anti-religious; it’s a warning about a mental habit that treats ignorance as a credential. Brooks is attacking the prestige of the unfalsifiable: the temptation to slap a sacred label on a gap in understanding and call it depth. In politics, that habit becomes especially useful. Vague invocations of “values,” “tradition,” “real America,” or “the will of the people” can be deployed to explain away concrete facts: policy failures, inequality, climate data, institutional rot. Mystery becomes a shield.

The subtext is a plea for epistemic humility with teeth. Admit what you don’t know, but don’t let not-knowing become a governing principle. The cleverness of the line is its symmetry: it sounds like a calm rule of logic, then lands as an indictment of anyone who prefers metaphysical fog to accountable explanation.