How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

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.

bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action.

just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others.

This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible.

Members who interviewed for some leadership position in the YPU would usually be asked, “Did you ever break someone on the floor?” To “break on the floor,” in the society’s parlance, was to change your mind in the middle of a debate, right there in front of everyone. To break someone on the floor was a signal achievement. But—and here is the really essential thing—the candidate would also be asked, “So, have you ever broken on the floor?” And to this question, Libresco says, “The correct answer was yes.” After all, “It wasn’t very likely that you’d walked into the YPU with the most accurate possible politics, ethics, and metaethics. If you hadn’t had to jettison some of your ideas several years in, we had our doubts about how honestly and deeply you were engaging in debate.”

“the loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer.” Indeed, that fellow true believer might be pretending—which he also suspects you of. For Hoffer, “True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.”

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.

These people, again, are not necessarily like-minded, but they are temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening—and in that sense are wonderfully like-hearted.

Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

Profound

G. K. Chesterton wrote, “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13

we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate; and we lose something of our humanity by dehumanizing our interlocutors.

in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think.

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction—a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument—and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.

Chesterton, however, was by contrast “incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point. That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.

if you cannot imagine circumstances that would cause you to change your mind about something, then you may well be the victim of the power of sunk costs. And genuine (if of course incomplete) self-knowledge can be yours if you meditate on just what it is—what beliefs, what social group—you have invested in so deeply.

Every cult, every closed community, controls information flow in order to keep people on message and on task, undistracted by…well, thinking.

You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup.

The true believer is always concerned, both on her behalf and on that of other members of her ingroup, for mental purity. But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out.

you have to be willing to switch codes. You have to be willing to inquire into someone else’s dialect, even, or especially, when it’s a moral dialect.

The Thinking Person’s Checklist 1. When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables. Get your body involved: your body knows the rhythms to live by, and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm, you’ll have a better chance of thinking. 2. Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.” 3. As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames. 4. Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness. 5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring. 6. Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity. 7. Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over. 8. Patiently, and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnances. 9. Sometimes the “ick factor” is telling; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters. 10. Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to—and what they’re directing your attention away f...