The War on Intuition

When did we start distrusting our internal compass?

Intuition has been quietly discredited.

In the modern West, it is routinely framed as soft, irrational, unreliable—a relic of pre-Enlightenment thinking, a feminine indulgence, a vague "gut feeling" to be double-checked against data or dismissed entirely. We're taught to distrust it, outsource it, or explain it away.

This isn’t just a cultural quirk. It’s the result of centuries of intellectual, political, and technological forces that have gradually pushed intuition to the margins of legitimacy. In its place, we’ve installed systems of measurement, logic, objectivity, and optimization—tools designed to replace perception with procedure.

But we are beginning to feel the cost of this displacement.

Because intuition is not a mood. It’s not a luxury. It is a form of intelligence—deep, contextual, embodied. And in an age of algorithmic thinking, performative knowledge, and epistemic overload, its quiet power may be more essential than ever.

Intuition Is Older Than Thought

Before the scientific method. Before the printing press. Before mass literacy. There was intuition.

It guided navigators by stars, midwives by touch, hunters by wind and track. It shaped decisions in environments too complex or immediate for analytical reasoning. It was not magic, but a different kind of logic—non-verbal, pattern-based, somatic.

Intuition is fast, but not reckless. It's relational, not random. It is a way the nervous system integrates experience, memory, and perception into insight—often before conscious language can catch up.

You know more than you can say.
Your body knows before your mind explains.
That is intuition.

So When Did We Start Distrusting It?

The marginalization of intuition has many roots. One is the Enlightenment's elevation of reason above all other ways of knowing. In pursuit of universal truths, Western science devalued subjectivity, embodiment, and emotion—framing them as obstacles to objectivity.

In the same period, European colonialism systematically dismissed the intuitive and relational knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples—labeling them “primitive” or “superstitious.” What could not be measured, categorized, or extracted was made invisible.

Later, industrialization reinforced this pattern. Efficiency demanded standardization. Decision-making was moved from humans to systems. Intuition was too slow, too personal, too difficult to replicate at scale.

The final blow came with the rise of digital logic—algorithms, automation, and predictive analytics. Why trust a gut feeling when the data dashboard has a heat map?

We learned to measure everything but meaning.

The Feminization—and Weaponization—of Intuition

Another reason intuition has been distrusted is because it has been historically coded as feminine.

In patriarchal epistemology, feminine-coded knowledge—instinct, feeling, inner sense—has long been framed as weak or irrational. Women were “hysterical,” “emotional,” “unreliable.” Intuition became associated with “women’s ways of knowing,” and was therefore excluded from domains of authority: science, finance, governance.

This wasn’t just sexist. It was strategic. It was part of a broader cultural suppression of non-linear, relational, and embodied wisdom—a suppression that served the expansion of control-based, mechanistic thinking.

The war on intuition is also a war on the parts of ourselves that are sensitive, ancestral, pre-verbal, and deeply alive.

Why the System Can’t Afford Intuition

Intuition disrupts.

It doesn’t follow scripts. It resists metrics. It sees patterns that haven’t been formalized yet. It threatens systems that depend on predictability, submission, and external validation.

If you trust your intuition:

• You’re harder to manipulate.
• You move slower, with discernment.
• You don’t need every opinion to make sense before you act.
• You withdraw from systems that require you to betray your gut.

This is dangerous in a society where speed, scale, and conformity are rewarded. A culture of endless optimization requires you to ignore the signals telling you to rest, question, stop, or leave.

Which is why intuition isn’t just personal. It’s political.

Reclaiming the Internal Compass

To reclaim intuition is not to romanticize mysticism or abandon reason. It’s to rebalance.

It means recognizing that reason and intuition are not opposites. They are complementary faculties.

• Reason is powerful when you have time and clarity.
• Intuition is essential when you don’t.

It also means practicing discernment—learning how to recognize the voice of intuition versus the voice of anxiety, projection, or fear.

This requires slowing down. Paying attention. Listening to the body. Noticing what contracts and what expands. Honoring hunches not as guarantees, but as invitations to notice more closely.

Over time, intuition becomes less about occasional insights and more about a way of perceiving the world—attuned, relational, pattern-sensitive.

Conclusion: The Quiet Return

We are in a moment of epistemic fatigue. The data is overwhelming. The narratives are conflicting. The systems we were taught to trust are showing their cracks.

In this landscape, intuition is quietly returning—not as dogma, but as deep perception.

We see it in the resurgence of ancestral knowledge, somatic healing, symbolic thinking, and dream work. Not because people want to regress—but because they sense that something vital was lost in the rush toward abstraction.

We are beginning to remember that insight does not always come in the form of arguments or spreadsheets. Sometimes, it comes as a sense. A knowing. A pause. A pull. A pattern recognized but not yet explained.

Sometimes, the wisest move is the one you can’t yet defend—only feel.

And sometimes, the most intelligent thing you can do is listen to what doesn’t need to be said to be known.