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censorship, critical thinking, culture, freedom, personal beliefs, safe spaces, tolerance intolerance
Critical thinking is defined as, “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.”
Are you a critical thinker? Many people aren’t, and yet they don’t even know it.
We are all operating on a series of conscious or subconscious beliefs that we have been taught, absorbed, were exposed to, indoctrinated with, or in some other way influenced to believe, “this is how it is.”
Much of this happens when we are very young, under the age of 5, much too young to understand there may be other beliefs, or that the beliefs we are adopting could in fact be completely off. At the time, there is no ability to filter the beliefs we are exposed to. They simply become our own.
That’s where critical thinking comes in. I am constantly exposing myself to alternate viewpoints and beliefs in an effort to better understand and examine my own. Often the result is a better understanding of my belief and sometimes I will alter my beliefs based on consciously examining them as an adult.
Today, there is a trend in our society that discourages critical thinking. College students are demanding “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” in an effort to avoid being exposed to opposing or alternate beliefs.
Alternate belief systems are being increasingly deemed “unacceptable” by these same people, and they are demanding others conform to their belief system. If they don’t, they reject them as “wrong” or “ignorant” or “a hater” or even demand the person be persecuted or punished for their “unacceptable” (as defined by them) beliefs.
Interestingly these same people often consider themselves “tolerant” and those who don’t agree with them “intolerant.” Ironic?
This line of thinking is exactly the opposite of the principles the United States were founded upon. We’re not a nation of conformity, group think, or censorship. Critical thinking, open debate, and freedom of self expression are all foundational principles to our democracy.
I’d challenge everyone reading this to start examining their personal beliefs, where they came from, how they compare to the beliefs of others, and where they stand up to scrutiny and where they fall short.
If someone says something you strongly react to or immediately oppose, that’s a perfect time to reflect on your reaction, step outside of your beliefs and try to see where the other person is coming from, and consider if perhaps you could learn from their belief rather than just rejecting it outright. Instead of being upset, think of it as an opportunity to grow and to refine who you truly are and what you truly believe.
Every once in awhile, you might just discover a belief you have held since childhood actually doesn’t fit your adult belief systems at all. Other times, you will find them confirmed.
Either way, you aren’t just mindlessly going through life with blinders on. Blinders you didn’t even choose yourself, but ones chosen for you long before you realized you ever even had a choice.
Notes From a Red Pill Girl 
That’s all very nice and well, but I only visit sites like *these* because they agree with my views – helps me articulate them when I need to discuss them IRL.
There’s a time for consolidating your views and a time to challenge them. If you only spend time second guessing, you never invest that time in acting on your beliefs. Also, I avoid certain media because their lies are like poison.
Until something completely new and challenging comes along, I’m sticking to my mental comfort zone 🙂
True happyhw, there’s no sense in exposing oneself to rediculousness. Foolishness is foolishness. Didn’t mean to imply that 🙂
For example. Married women should avoid groups of women who do nothing but husband bash, etc. that kind of toxic cluck fest isn’t good for anyone.
The question “are you a critical thinker” makes the assumption that people think. They don’t. The vast majority of people (well over 90% or them) cannot and do not think. They cannot be persuaded by facts, reason, logic or testimony. They have made up their minds and they do not think. They cannot change their point of view even when they are demonstrably, factually wrong.
The classic example of this is the RP/BP point of view. Anyone who has ever made the effort knows that unless an individual is ready, it is impossible to break someone out of their BP worldview even when the facts demonstrate they are totally, completely, utterly wrong. There are many different similar examples of this, but the RP/BP divergence is one of the best examples of false paradigm that points to the underlying central problem.
Feminism is at root a moral philosophy that was created by the ancient church, contrary to what the Bible actually says, a false moral doctrine that claims men and women are equal and should be held to the same standards of authority and sexual morality. They are not. This false moral doctrine was created to tear down men and usurp their authority in order that the church might gain power at the expense of the husbands and fathers. That was their strategy to overcome the nobility. The idea they did it to empower women is ludicrous, but the fact is, when the church lost its power the false moral doctrine they created became the root of feminism.
Despite the fact they should know better, the various RP points of view all maintain the moral philosophy of equalism. Which is really pretty wild, saying AWALT and then tacitly acknowledging that men and women are equal. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m really talking about sexual morality, authority and responsibility. Women don’t want to be under the authority of men and men do not want the responsibility of authority.
Critical thinking is hard and the foundation of critical thinking is a standard of truth. There is no point to critical thinking when lies are substituted for the truth, because GIGO. Which is a pretty good description of feminism. And no matter how hard one argues against feminism, as long as one accepts the false moral doctrine of equalism, feminism will win.
One area critical thinking can be a big help is in breaking beliefs or patterns that are holding one back.
Foolishness should never be tolerated. But by the same token I’ve seen too many people never even explore an idea far enough to see if it is actually foolish or not. We had one person at work make a suggestion that everyone just blew off and chastised him for. I actually sat down with the person and tried to understand where he was coming from. The thoughts behind it weren’t too bad actually, but still not really appropriate. BUT at least someone took the time to listen, and he wasn’t shut down to the point of never making suggestions again.
The part of critical thinking that I think is extremely lacking, is in people knowing what the right questions to ask are, and being able to quickly identify when those questions aren’t properly answered.
Too many people dance around asking the tough question.
Too many people don’t realize when they’ve been given a faux-answer, or one that answers a question that wasn’t asked.
Agree with The Toad.
Modern life allows one not to think.
Up until the turn of the 20th century (1900) one had to think. What the weather was doing, how to fix that thing around the house, how to diagnose that disease and treat it with folk remedies because the doctor was a day away. People had to think.
Hell even the kids had to be aware of large animals crossing their path going to school.
I learn everything. It made me an okay success but makes me invaluable.
I do not have a degree in what I do. I worked my way up.
See how thinking shaped my career.
1. Liked photography so went to film school. Certified as a cameraman.
2. Minored in journalism cause I like to write.
3. After a year in a warehouse got a job in an HR firm as a researcher because I could write.
4. Studied programming cause I couldnt crunch the numbers fast enough by hand for my research I had to write about.
5. Because of my programming skills assigned to HR projects as support.
6. To translate HR into programs had to learn HR.
7. Cause I was learning pointed out flaws in HR practice as illogical. Client impressed so assigned as consultant.
8. To deal with clients had to learn speaking skills and to manage project learned budget skills.
9. Cause of budget skills Fedex client hires me in head office in HR.
10. Learn logistics so I can run HR projects. Boss changes and acting boss teaches me employee relations. Boss goes back to E R and takes me with her.
11. E R issues mostly at the airport so I have to work there. Out of interest learn ramp operations.
12 Because of ER skills and ramp knowledge made temp ramp manager in an emergency. Cause im responsible get certified in IATA regs and management theory.
13. Cause know both logistics and ramp transferred to combined rural territory as Sr Mgr. Because I am now Sr. have to learn properties management, fleet maintenance.
14. Because of transfer relocate. Job at long term care facility comes up in HR. Beat competiton cause I can double as HR and Ops manager.
15. Cause thrown into a medical facility learned about long term and general medical care so I could understand our clients.
16. Cause I can do HR, ops,medical care and properties promoted to facility manager of 50 million facility.
So now I am in charge of a 50 million 300 bed facility in health care with a community college degree in media arts and journalism in charge of doctors nurses etc. All because I liked taking pictures in high school. And boy does it piss off a lot of lifers but they all respect my confidence.
Im not smart. Im not even lucky. I just am curious aboout the world and bore easily. The cure for boredom….No not Sons of Anarchy or the Walking Stupid. Learn something. Read a book. The sum of human knowledge is on the web including the libraries of the Smithsonian and Congress. For Free. Yet Facebored and Huffington Cats still exist.
And all because I want to learn anything and everything.
Oh and I am also passably fluent in Russian cause I was bored. Duloingo plus getting a skype penpal do wonders.
Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist. was one of the first major leftist writers to publicly denounce Stalinism. He wrote interestingly about the allure and danger of closed intellectual systems:
“A closed sysem has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emoional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself. “
If you cant learn anything new how can you question the wod around you to mame decisions for your life?
If you think and then happen to agree with political, social or religeous dogma…great! But even then challenge what your leaders say. Think. Question.
Think about this. (pun intended)
America has MIT, Harvard, NASA, NSA, Johns Hopkins, Silicon Valley. The incubators of great thougt. Yet the best they could do was donald and hillary?
Doesn’t questioning whether or not you’re a critical thinker make you more of a critical thinker? And I don’t mean asking that question at a superficial level; I mean actually questioning your own thinking abilities to the brink of insanity. I can see why people who legitimately think [or overthink things] have a higher prevalence of depression. This is why we can’t have nice things. xD
Sorry to beat a dead horse, Ms Bloom. But ran across the following link in a blog roll. Kinda goes along with your thoughts from the other night. And why it upsets you so. Worth a read: https://anarchistnotebook.com/2016/10/21/american-betrayal/
@Téa
Critical thinking requires a standard of truth to use as a reference, but it also requires honesty. Rationalization and intellectual dishonesty are both easy and common. Intellectual honesty requires one take into consideration the truth and not just the politically convenient lie.
Once one is sitting out past the 2nd SD in terms of intelligence and looks around at just how brain-dead the vast majority of people are, how intellectually dishonest, how much they desire to believe lies- even when confronted with the truth… that can bring on some depression.
Here’s a critical thinking question for you:
Do you think it’s better to start a war that will kill ~60k-80k people in order to trigger a political change that will result in stability… or claim that it’s immoral knowing that the current instability will result in a widespread war within a decade or so… knowing that war will kill 60 to 80 million?
Mr Toad,
“Once one is sitting out past the 2nd SD in terms of intelligence and looks around at just how brain-dead the vast majority of people are…”
…but I don’t notice that high-IQ people…and especially highly-credential high-IQ people…are particularly immune to intellectual dishonesty.
@David Foster
If you look carefully, one of the things you might notice is that the so-called “high IQ” people are seldom the ones who are highly-credentialed. Those who pursue a high level of credentialism are typically somewhere in the 2nd SD with an IQ somewhere between 115 and 130. Once one looks at the individuals with an 140 and above, one doesn’t find a lot of credentialism.
In terms of intellectual dishonesty, I would have to say that it goes hand in hand with credentialism. In fact, from a historical standpoint, one finds the most intellectual dishonesty from Professional Hair Dressers.
RPG,
Here is a critical thinking exercise: In your post you claim we live in a democracy, but in fact we live in a republic (a democratic republic to be more precise). If you read old news stories they usually refer our country as a republic. Somewhere in the late 80’s to early 90’s that changed and all political journalism now refers to our country as a democracy.
If you go back and read the writings of the founding fathers they are very clear that they wanted to avoid a democracy. That is why they took great pains to create a unique republic that has 3 separate branches of government, etc, etc…
So why do the powers that be always want it referred to as a democracy for the last 20+ years? What is it they want you to do or think?
An extension to that thought. The USA goes all around the world and overthrows governments. One of the excuses that is used is to spread ‘democracy’, but we don’t even live in a democracy. Anyone who studies the history of democracies will quickly learn that it is a poor form of government and democracies do not last long.
Thus the reason our founding fathers created a representative republic.
Lots to think about here, great comments everyone!
Intellectual dishonesty, deceiving oneself and others to make the end justify the means… That could be a whole other post! But yes, all too common.
GoFigure, thanks for clarifying re the republic vs democracy. See, thanks to you I have learned something new and now want to learn more… Or I could have gotten mad that you corrected me, ignored or attacked you for doing so, maybe dragged others into it to back me up, and learned nothing, but that would not be critical thinking! I’d much rather learn more about this new info…
In my experience, people who seek credentialism in order to flaunt those credentials or feel superior are not usually critical thinkers. Or very smart.
People who end up w lots of credentials or vast amounts of self learned knowledge because they are truly curious and interested in the topics and study them for that reason not for status are usually critical thinkers, and often pretty fascinating and humble people.
Now off to read mega’s link… Hopefully it will not keep me up all night fretting 😉 jk. I can handle it… I hope!
Mega, thanks for sharing the link, lots to think about there. I was thinking some of that just today and may write a post in the future.
While reading I noticed this link and wanted to share it here and encourage folks to donate a few bucks (I did, wish I could give more!) to help keep this disabled Vietnam vet in his home: https://www.gofundme.com/veteran-vs-tax-collectors-2v9vnrw
Together we can do much! I hope he reaches his goal.
David Foster@11:19pm,
Tyhank you. I do believe that I have run into that. Now, I can put a name to it.
RPG,
I hope there is a little room in your life for foolishness.
Just remember that those great minds at Harvard helped to develop Obama Care. Until they realized it would apply to them as well:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-harvard-obamacare–gruber-mit-affordable-care-edit-0112-jm-20150109-story.html
My dad went to and graduate from Harvard Business School. The one thing I learned from watching him and every other Harvard graduate I have ever met, is that they think really highly of themselves, and not so much of others.
Entitled pricks.
Excellent post! Personally I’ll always consider the alternative point of view, and sometimes I’ll end up accepting that sometimes different things work for different people (e.g. I have some religious friends who have waited for marriage before having sex, but this wouldn’t work for everyone). I find though that with feminists or left-wing people, if you disagree with them they can’t just agree to disagree- you’re either racist/ sexist/ homophobic etc.
Mr Toad, I agree that there are plenty of credentialed people who aren’t all that super-intelligent. But there *are* people who are quite intelligent, in the sense of being able to handle abstractions well as well as having high verbal ability, yet who are still intellectually closed-minded.
The French writer Andre Maurois asserted that those who are intellectual fad-followers tend to be *intelligent men who are not in any way creative*…and that those who are not capable of formulating a system for themselves tend to throw themselves “voraciously” on those they come across, and to apply them more vigorously than would their inventors.
Extending his thought: Those who tend to be excessively devoted to particular intellectual systems, I think, are those who concretize abstractions..who think that some conceptual model, which may be useful under particular circumstances, is actually something real and tangible. Falling under the sway of abstractions, when one doesn’t really understand how abstractions work, can be dangerous. Whether a person who thinks this way is “intelligent but uncreative” or really not all that intelligent in the first place is, I guess, mainly a matter of definition. But as more and more people find themselves in jobs where they work with symbols, rather than with tangible objects, it becomes increasingly important that people learn to use abstractions in the right way–as servants rather than as masters…and to keep those who misuse abstractions out of policymaking jobs.
Unfortunately, the trends have been in the opposite direction.
A democracy as shown by most of tbe EU is dangerous because it rules by plebecite. It eventually gives way to popularism and the lowest common denominator as shown by the recent elections of Obama, Merkel and the Justin.
A authoritarian state ruled by a benevelent ruler would be the best conceptually as they could make long range decisions for the good of the people ala Toads 50k war vs 50m. But human nature makes dictators of all rulers eventually.
A representative republic with controls, either the us seperation of powers or the canadian multi party parliament are the best midpoints of those extremes.
Really, above a small, I mean under 500 town where people are emotionally invested in each other, all rules break down into politics.
They call it a democracy so they can blame any failures on the “will of the unwashed masses” e.g. the parts of brexit or the eu refugees.
oh and how about the french police protesting because they are overworked in a year long state of emergency caused by tbe refugee…protests.
There is a new post at Spawny’s
https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/wwpd-what-would-putin-do/
Neither are “better”. What is the confidence level for either scenario and what is it based on? How many times have we seen this kind of situation, and it never ends up the way people planned? Especially if external entities get involved? And how can you overlook the fact that one of the 80k killed, might have been the person that changed the future for everyone?
Regardless, both choices are immoral.
The answer is in this video
The other thing about this is we can’t predict the future, or change the past. There is no real way to know if killing X lead to saving Y. It would be great if it were possible but it’s kind of a moot argument.
However ignoring X hoping it won’t lead to Y isn’t good either. Acting early can save lives for sure.
Acting early “might” save lives. Without knowing everyone’s stakeholders or supporters, it could spiral out of control.
278. “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.” – Winston Churchill
“Don’t try to fool me. I’m an intellectual and, as such, am perfectly capable of fooling myself.”
Amen. The secret to amassing educational credentials is to see school as a process in which actually thinking about the subject at hand is an obstacle to be avoided whenever possible.
Rpg, exactly what I meant.
Mgtowhorseman, you say you are not smart, I say that’s either a lie or lack of personal insight on your part. You sound like a typical top-down learning gifted person, who was only exposed to sufficient educational materials by adulthood. I have a 3 year old who is ‘just curious’ and ‘easily bored’. We have plenty of books and a great library around the corner. He was reading fluently in 2 languages by his 2nd birthday and it’s all I can do to keep up with him when talking about space and he will ask “mommy, can I have a glass and some hydrogenfluoride?”. That hunger for information *is* what makes a person smart.
Obviously IQ doesn’t feed hungry mouths, but knowing your own does help in finding people you can connect with. We found a similarly gifted playmate for our kid and they are best friends now, while he is a loner in the playground…. Food for thought?
Good post. It seems pretty clear to me that the vast majority of people today are not critical thinkers. If you reasonably and clearly present an alternative point of view and explain the logic behind it, and that alternative point of view happens to be something outside the mainstream and/or is different from their own narrative, many people become extremely defensively aggressive.
They often refuse to continue any kind of civil discussion, instead resorting to childish name-calling (‘you’re just too stupid to understand’, or ‘sexist’), and personal attacks, rather than actually addressing the argument or issues under discussion.
I see this time and time again.
When I do find the rare intelligent critical thinkers who are able to debate and discuss without violent knee-jerk reactions and name-calling, I cherish them!