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This is what thinking is: not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence; it’s grasping, as best you can and with all available and relevant senses, what is, and it’s also speculating, as carefully and responsibly as you can, about what might be. And it’s knowing when not to go it alone, and whom you should ask for help.
For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking.
“it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”
People who like accusing others of Puritanism have a fairly serious investment, then, in knowing as little as possible about actual Puritans. They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.
Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”
If you want to think, then you are going to have to shrink that “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.
“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”
The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.
To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.
To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.
Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.
“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.”
“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”
“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”
The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.
“outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.”
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13
But here’s the salient point: poker players and stock investors who don’t learn to control their instinctive deference to sunk costs go broke. They lose all their money and can’t play poker or invest in stocks anymore. By contrast, the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostly, sustained by habits and social structures that prevent him from paying the full price for his error.
“A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”
“Well, any friends you lose because you change your mind weren’t real friends in the first place,”
What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are.
