What Is the Point of Critical Thinking?

Yesterday in my Critical Thinking class, we answered the question: What is the point of critical thinking? I argued that “critical thinking” is a playbook with rules of engagement. We don’t lie, cheat, misrepresent, obfuscate, omit, manipulate, mythologize, or demagogue, and there are principles to help us avoid these deliberate or unwitting traps. A strong society is built on this playbook. By adhering to “the rules” of critical thinking, we are fair players or good actors, and that is what makes society strong and free. In contrast, there are the ghoulish trolls who have ascended in various social media platforms over the last decade. They have a reckless disregard for any playbook. They inundate us with conspiracies to create chaos, wear us out, confuse us, and make us give up in despair; they have no moral bottom and will gleefully exact cruelty on anyone who doesn’t belong to their tribe, they are disdainful of peer-reviewed evidence and embrace the revisionist fairy tales from grifters from which they build their identities. Such trolls were marginalized decades ago, but now they have risen in media and politics, and they serve as accelerants to chaos and polarization. My students agreed that they would rather live in a society of fair players who follow the rules of engagement, that they choose friends and romantic partners whose personalities lean toward being critical thinkers rather than trolls, but that they worry the trolls are winning. They see chaos all around them and they hope that by furthering their education they can find some level of protection for themselves.