I don't really care, when surfing, whether a wave is an emergent property or not, or whether the wave is an end in itself or not. I just want a wave.

Democratically-governed societies in a modern high-complexity environment need people with decent levels of rationality. If your pedagogy to teach rational thought is through exploration of scenarios, consequences, and so on, leaving the rational part of it implicit, and it works--great! Introducing algebraic concepts ("what number would it be if....") long before actually formalizing algebra can be a good pedagogical technique too.

But we need the thing, whether it's emergent or not, because we keep coming up with weird situations for which a rational approach is the answer: it is a name given to a general-purpose capacity that we wouldn't need if we didn't keep inventing smartphones, pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, reposting videos from 2014 and saying it's Gaza now, having some knowledge about but not much footage from Sudan, and so on.

But we do have all those things, so we need the general-purpose capacity.