What Is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking Defined
In the general sense, critical thinking is employing the habit of using your skeptical thinking tools to take common, often lazy assumptions people carry with them and to deconstruct those assumptions.
Without critical thinking, we are little more than mindless consumers, obedient children to the dictates of consumerism and marketing.
Examples
Christopher Columbus "discovered" America.
A "healthy fruit drink" with some Edenic image on the label might just be death in a bottle.
Being a vegetarian is healthy.
One. What distinguishes critical thinking from plain thinking?
Critical thinking is not
Idle daydreaming
Half absorbing data nuggets and images on the Internet or some other screen
Mindless acceptance of mythologized narratives like the story of "how Columbus discovered America."
In contrast, critical thinking is about deconstructing mythologies to see the truth behind the mythic curtain.
Critical thinking is
Searching for hidden assumptions and implicit ideas
Deconstructing common beliefs, mythologies and assumptions
Questioning our best laid out thoughts
Rethinking our deepest beliefs
The word critical comes from the Greek word krinein, meaning to separate, to choose; we are in essence separating the wheat, the good stuff, from the chaff, the bad stuff.
Perhaps more importantly, critical thinking is not just being skeptical of our opponents’ ideas but our own ideas as well.
A critical thinker sees ideas as being more tentative than absolute. By tentative, those ideas are constantly being tested. Critical thinking, to borrow from a cliché, is more about the journey than the destination.
Critical thinking objects to clichés because they dull the mind. On the other hand, clichés sometimes speak a truth better than another method, so, dammit, we sometimes have to live with the cliché.
What is the twofold activity of critical thinking?
We rely on analysis and evaluation.
Analysis if finding parts of the problem and then separating them, trying to see how things fit together.
Evaluation is judging the merit of our claims and assumptions and the weight of the evidence in their favor.
We Must Choose Between the Blue and the Red Pill
Critical thinking is, to borrow a metaphor from the 1999 film The Matrix, taking the red pill over the blue pill, which means you choose to be a critical thinker, not an obedient, mindless consumer living in a “fabricated reality.”
Most people opt for bread and circus, cheap food and cheap entertainment to distract them as they slog through life like zombies.
Most people choose to be mindless consumers because they feel it's "just easier."
Human Nature and the Path of Least Resistance
It’s human nature to choose the path of least resistance, but the easiest path isn’t always the best. Too often the easiest path is a form of settling with mediocrity.
Fallacy of Happiness
Happiness does not result from the easy life or settling into what one sees as the easy life.
The easy life is death as evidenced by my neighbors with the two TVs in their living room who haven’t spoken a word to each other in twenty years.
Real Happiness
We are hard-wired to be happy when we’re flourishing at a task or project that occupies our interests, our creative energies, and our sense of life purpose.
Without a purpose, we are likely to live a life of mindless consumerism and conformity and in the process we allow our critical thinking faculties to deteriorate.
You go to college to find a life purpose on a macro level.
On a micro level, you go to college to find a desirable job and enjoy high social status.
The danger of boxing yourself into the micro level is that you can lose sight of your purpose in life. Without a purpose, you will often succumb to mindless consumerism.
The Ten Signs That You’re Living in the Mindless Habits and Consumerism of the Bed Pill:
One. Grazing like a cow on the Internet, social media, and Facebook as you skim little data bites of information and your brain shrinks because you’re training it to have less and less attention span. Sitting at your computer and skimming words and multitasking kill your brain, actually changing its receptors so that you are become incapable of dissecting a long chunk of words and annotating them to see the rhetorical strategies and validity, or not, of the messages you’re reading.
Grazing like a cow on the Internet makes you a grazer, not a reader. You have to ask yourself: Would you rather have a grazing brain or a reading brain?
Two. Channel surfing in front of a TV as you sit in a comatose state kills brain cells and puts you in a state of inertia similar to the inertia you suffer from grazing on the Internet.
Three. Mindless eating of processed food, or gorging at all-you-can-eat buffets and fast food and microwave and sugary coffee drinks so that all the blood gorges your stomach and your brain is empty.
Mindless eating impedes you from even remembering what you’ve eaten on any given day. You couldn’t even approximate a calorie count or food inventory if you tried.
Another liability of mindless eating is that too often the processed food you eat lacks nutrients, so that you can get fat on its excess calories while growing more and more malnourished.
This malnourishment spreads to your brain, which becomes so fatigued you find it easier to surrender to the blind ignorance of the blue pill.
Four. Texting back and forth with your friends about nothing except gossip so that your brain is full of chatter and you don’t know who you are. That this texting is about nothing substantive and is a compulsion and an addiction speaks to a kind of pathological behavior born from feelings of insecurity, isolation, and an irrational need for the validation of others.
Five. Moving through the mall like a zombie and spending money kills brain cells. You’ve become exactly what consumer society wants you to become: a mall slave beholden to the whims and caprices of consumer culture.
Just as you can be a mall slave, you can be an Internet slave, slogging through a matrix of consumer internet images as your eyes become more and more lifeless.
Six. You blindly accept the narratives from the mainstream news and media, which are in collaboration with their advertisers. You become an obedient news consumer with no real narrative or real news analysis. You have no informed opinions or historical context to test the alleged truth of the news bites you’re receiving.
To have informed opinions, you need historical literacy, financial literacy, food literacy, to name a few.
Example of Financial Literacy
I had a student in the late 1990s spend “only” 5k on a Ford Explorer with over 100K miles on the odometer. But what’s really bad is his APR was over 21%. He didn’t know what APR is.
Lacking in literacy is not so bad because we all start from somewhere, including Ground Zero, but being apathetic or indifferent to that deficit is.
Seven. Being trapped in a cycle of immature relationships, which start out with exciting drama and then settle into boredom, discontent, and fatigue, compelling you to break up with the person and start the excitement-boredom cycle all over again and you don’t even question the mindless repetition and futility of this exercise in phony romance.
Eight. Spending your money on things you can’t afford so people you don’t know or even like might think you’re cool kills prevents you from knowing who you really are.
Nine. You’re drifting through life with little to no connection to others or your self and you have no sense of purpose, other than to gain earning power so you can buy stuff, “power tokens,” and keep up with all the “consumer opportunities” that keep blossoming around you. Drifting alone life in your mindless habits and addictions, you are in what some people call “zombie mode.”
Ten. Zombie mode is a state of sleep walking alternated by bouts of anxiety and fear resulting from being so disconnected. This fear and sense of being a fragmented and broken human being compel you to seek validation and approval from other fragmented and broken people. In the digital age, spending too much time on social media often evidences this addiction to validation. As M.I.T. professor Sherry Turkle says, “We use others as spare parts to fix our fragile selves.” A person taking the blue pill is unaware that he or she is relying on people in this regard.
The Ignorant State Described Above: Jahiliyyah and the Blue Pill
Taking the blue pill is to be a prisoner inside the giant cave of ignorance, what in Arabic is called the Jahiliyyah (jahill-e-eye-a, which comes from jahala, to be ignorant), and confronting a reality that contradicts the mythologies we assumed to be true when we took the blue pill.
What causes some people to transition from the blue to the red pill?
One. Going to college and learning the language of critical thinking:
There was a girl who in her freshman year of college learned what it means to be passive-aggressive in a definition essay of that word. She went to a cave and found a cave troll and used him as a puppet to torment her father.
Two. Spontaneous Epiphany can cause you to change the red pill for the blue pill:
A girl wakes up in her car and wants a normal life.
A young man goes with his buddy to the unemployment office and realizes he can’t follow his buddy’s footsteps.
A girl wakes up one morning and says, “Oh my God, my boyfriend is the devil. Why have I been planning my whole future with him?”
A girl wakes up one morning and says, “Oh my God, my boyfriend is so handsome and he loves me with all his heart. But he’s not that smart and I don’t love him as much as he loves me. I need to leave him.”
A thirty-five-year old man lives in his mother’s basement. He is sitting in his robe at his computer eating Hot Pockets and Pop Tarts. It’s four thirty P.M. and he hasn’t done a thing all day. He says, “Oh my God, I’m wasting my life.”
Moments of Metacognition
These moments can be the beginning of metacognition, which is learning to stand back and think about the misguided and inadequate ways we often think about our life.
Critical Thinking Is Having Informed Opinions
One.
Critical Thinking is learning to cultivate informed opinions and to purge yourself of uninformed or misguided opinions.
Opinions are not all equal thereby refuting the cliche that "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion."
In the world of critical thinking informed opinions are superior to ignorant opinions.
For example, if someone loves the Confederate flag and Civil War re-enactments that glorify the Confederate Army, that love is based on ignorance.
Knowledge of the Confederate flag and army informs us that the Confederacy is an ideology of White Supremacy, a sick religion justifying the aggrandizement of one race and the exploitation of another. Therefore, the Confederate flag and all that it represents is an abomination.
There is no informed opinion that can defend the Confederate flag. There is no, "Is all about personal preference."
In the world of critical thinking we judge ideas based on standards, detailed information, and historical context.
Judgments are made.
Welcome to the world of critical thinking.
6 Types of Opinions
Why do we read and write essays? They're just someone's opinions. Aren't all opinions alike?"
Some people say after reading an essay, “Well, it’s just an opinion.” But are all opinions alike?
Robert Atwan in his American Now textbook writes six major types of opinions.
As you will see, some are more appropriate for the kind of critical thinking an essay deserves than others.
One. Inherited opinions: These are opinions that are imprinted on us during our childhood. They come from “family, culture, traditions, customs, regions, social institutions, or religion.”
People’s views on religion, race, education, and humanity come from their family.
Inherited opinions come from cultural and social norms.
In some cultures, it's okay to tell others your income. It's a taboo in America.
We are averse to eating dogs in America because eating dogs is contrary to America’s cultural and social norms. However, other countries eat dogs without any stigma.
We are also averse to eating insects in America when in some countries grubs are a delicacy.
We think it's normal to slaughter trees every year as part of our celebration of Christmas.
We eat until we're so stuffed we cannot walk in America; in contrast, in Japan they follow the rule of hara hachi bu, which means they stop at 80% fullness.
Peanut butter in America represents Mom's Love; in France and Brazil, however, peanut butter is trash and an insult to place in front of someone.
In America, we put dry cereal into a bowl and then pour milk over it. That is not practiced in a lot of other countries.
In California during the drought crisis, households are using less water with the exception of rich households who are using MORE water.
Why? Because for the rich the inherited opinion is "I'm rich. I need more stuff. I DESERVE more stuff. I can't let my five million dollar house have a dead lawn. The rest of you poor folk can suffer but not me!"
We soak up these types of opinions through a sort of osmosis and a lot of these beliefs are unconscious.
Two. Involuntary opinions: These are the opinions that result from direct indoctrination and inculcation (learning through repetition). If we grow up in a family that teaches us that eating pork is evil, then we won’t eat at other people’s homes that serve that porcine dish.
Or we may, as a result if our religious training, abjure rated R movies.
Or we may have strong feelings, one way or another, regarding gay marriage based on the doctrines we’ve learned over time.
We may have strong feelings about immigration policy based on what we learn from our family, friends, and institutions.
We may have strong feelings about the police and the prison system based on what we learn from family, friends, and institutions.
Three. Adaptive opinions: We adapt opinions to help us conform to groups we wish to belong to. We are often so eager to belong to this or that group that we sacrifice our critical thinking skills and engage in Groupthink to please the majority.
A student from China back in the 1940s or 1950s was raised in the country. He went to a city school and the richest boy made a sculpture of a butterfly. Everyone loved the butterfly but my student. He explained that a butterfly had 4 wings, not 2. He was sent to the "dunce corner" for the whole day.
He should have kept his mouth shut or pretended that butterflies have 2 wings. That's an example of Groupthink.
Atwan writes that “Adaptive opinions are often weakly held and readily changed . . . But over time they can become habitual and turn into convictions.”
For example, it’s easy for one to be against guns in Santa Monica. However, those views might be less “adaptive” in rural parts of Kentucky or Tennessee.
It's easy to be a vegan in Southern California, but you'll have more challenges being a vegan in certain parts of Texas, Kansas, and the Carolinas where barbecue is king.
Four. Concealed opinions. Sometimes we have strong opinions that are contrary to the group we belong to so we keep our mouths shut to avoid persecution. You might not want to proclaim your atheism, for example, if you were attending a Christian college.
Five. Linked opinions. Atwan writes, “Unlike adaptive opinions, which are usually stimulated by convenience and an incentive to conform, these are opinions we derived from an enthusiastic and dedicated affiliation with certain groups, institutions, or parties.”
For example, the modern “Tea Party” people or self-proclaimed Patriots embrace a series of linked opinions: Obama is not American. Obama is a socialist. Obama is helping terrorists get across the boarder. Terrorists helped elect Obama. Obama wants to strip Americans of their right to own guns so that the government and/or terrorists can move in and take Americans’ freedoms.
As you can see, all these opinions are linked to each other. Believing in one of the above opinions encourages belief in the other.
Six. Considered opinions. Atwan writes, “These are opinions we have formed as a result of firsthand experience, reading, discussion and debate, or independent thinking and reasoning. These opinions are formed from direct knowledge and often from exposure and considering other opinions.”
Often considered opinions result in examining mythologies or fake narratives that are drilled down our throats and we deconstruct these false narratives so that we can see the truth behind them.
Rule Number 1 in Critical Thinking is that informed or considered opinions are superior to other types of opinions.
Rule Number 2 in Critical Thinking is we must learn to discern between a real and mythical narrative.
There are many fake or mythical narratives:
Columbus “discovering” America.
The European pilgrims “sharing” with the American Indians.
White slave owners “blessing” Africans with Christianity.
The pharmaceutical industry making our health job one.
Mexican workers in America "stealing" jobs from Americans when in fact time and time again Americans won't do the jobs Mexicans are doing (like in Alabama).
Poor people "choose" to be poor. A lot of poor people work three jobs and have no medical insurance.
Poor people deserve to be poor because they're bad, morally flawed human beings.
Obese people got fat from being morally flawed such as being selfish and gluttonous. In fact, poverty is the highest risk factor for obesity.
Developing critical thinking skills means being able to pick apart a false narrative and examine the true narrative behind it.
Some would define literacy as developing critical thinking skills and that failure to do so is to remain a mindless consumer, an obedient child to the parental authorities of market trends and advertising.
It's your choice: You can either swallow the blue pill (blissful ignorance) or the red pill (uncomfortable, often painful truth).
Three. Critical thinking is being alone.
Critical thinking requires solitude in general and solitary reading specifically. You need to quote Sherry Turkle and Louis C.K. You can’t use other people as “spare parts to fix your fragmented self,” as Sherry Turkle says. You have to be alone to connect with yourself before you connect with others. You have to be able to have solitude to sustain focus and critical thought.
Four. Critical thinking repels hype, the bipolar disorder of mass consumerism with the consumer hangover.
Consumerism is based on a sort of bipolar disorder, hype and the promise of ecstasy followed by the crash of disappointment and the hedonic treadmill: acclimating to pleasure to the point of numbness.
Five. Critical thinking repels propaganda, chicanery, and other forms of fallacious thinking.
Examples of propaganda are downplaying historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust or using stereotypes to demonize races during political elections or using scare tactics to persuade an audience to support someone championing this or that agenda.
Six. Critical thinking repels binary arguments in favor of nuanced ones. See page 6 of From Inquiry to Academic Writing. Real arguments are not binary (either/or); rather, sophisticated arguments explore the gray area, nuance, and complexity. Any argument that is cut and dry is not worthy arguing about. The death penalty, for example, is full of compelling evidence on the pros and cons.
Seven. Critical thinking explores opposing views (and does not live in its own brain loop of fanboys).
If you’re a critical thinker, you stave off bullheaded ignorance by exploring your opponents’ views because your credibility depends on it. Additionally, you have intellectual curiosity and humility, which compel you to not be complacent with your positions.
Eight. Critical thinking is metacognition or The Third Eye, which addresses mindless bad habits (student essay about boyfriend who was a proxy for her hostility against her father).
As we said earlier, some people, either through going to college or some kind of spontaneous epiphany or simply life’s responsibilities and demands, are forced to evaluate their self-destructive behavior and proceed accordingly.
Nine. Critical thinking doesn’t focus on the trees at the expense of the forest. You can give things a macro look.
For example, you don’t major in something for money if that major and career make you miserable and depressed in the long-term.
Ten. Critical thinking repels pride.
You can’t say to yourself, “I’m a critical thinker and people who aren’t like me are cave trolls.”
You have to have certain amount of humility to be a critical thinker because a critical thinker always reminds himself of two things:
One. How much stuff out there I don’t know.
Two. How dumb I’ve been in the past and how dumb I can be at any given second under the right circumstances.
Eleven. Critical thinking is the accumulating of a vocabulary to give specific qualities to the sophisticated ideas you are pursuing.
You may need to know the following words and terms (a very partial list to be a critical thinker):
Schadenfreude
Make your audience drink your Kool-Aid: Make them believe in whatever it is you’re selling.
Evidence and proof: proof is absolute and conclusive; evidence is neither.
Ad Hominem
Straw Man
Proxy (story of the student who used her boyfriend as a proxy to spite her father)
Passive-aggressive
Canard: an unfounded story that turns out to be B.S.
Meme (imitated behavior that spreads through culture like selfies, photographing one’s restaurant meal and posting on social media, etc.)
Trope is a cultural stereotype that gains popularity in a culture; for example, on TV the bumbling father is a trope, as is the conniving teenage cheerleader and the effete and demure high school English teacher.
Effete means lacking masculinity.
Demure means modest and overly shy.
Elitist
Populist
Oligarchy (small group controls the country)
Corpitocracy (corporations control the country)
Hobbesian: the worldview that people are barbarians and brutes that can only be controlled by absolute authority.
Sturgeon’s Law
Rabelaisian (from French writer Rabelais): grotesque, unrestrained, exaggerated humor
Hedonism: the worship of pleasure as the highest life experience
Nihilist: one who believes in no meaning, no write or wrong, literally nothing.
Moral Absolutist
Moral Relativist
Narcissist
Twelve. When you become a critical thinker, you’ll find, from observing other people who have undergone a rigorous education, that you will be joining a new tribe, so to speak, and that there will be some distance between you and some family members and friends.
Old bonds will be broken. Some people can’t handle this, and they go back to their non-critical thinking ways in order that they can belong to their old tribal allegiances. I’ve taught dozens upon dozens of personal narratives about people’s educational journey, and this painful break between family and friends is a recurring theme.
To add to the pain of breaking ties, there is envy, which can be explained with the analogy of a bucket of crabs.
Non-critical thinkers know deep down that their ignorant state is a form of bondage and they want you to keep them company in their misery.
Clearly, you are better served at becoming a critical thinker and getting the hell out of that crab bucket.
Conclusion
Ignorance is not your friend.
Conformity to the fashion trends is not your friend.
Staying ignorant so as to not offend family and friends is not in your best interests.
And don’t tell family and friends: “I’m educated now; you’re not, so we have to part ways.” That’s obnoxious.
I had a friend who never went to college and as I got more serious in my studies, I never criticized him or explicitly told him we couldn’t be friends anymore; we simply grew apart.
It’s in your best interests, financially, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, etc., to become a critical thinker.
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