Critical Thinker

1C Agenda Updated for 9-6-18: How to Think Lesson #3: Death of Critical Thinking, Turning Points in "Unfollow," Megan Phelps-Roper

Homework #3 Check

Up and Coming Due Dates:

September 11 Peer Edit for Essay #1; have copies of your first draft for everyone in your team.

September 13 Essay #1 is due on turnitin.

On September 13, the day your typed paper is due on turnitin, there is no other homework due.  We will peruse the second essay options, read Peter Singer's essay "The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle" and watch a Larissa MacFarquhar video "Understanding Extreme Altruism" for the following essay option:

Added Essay Option for Essay #2

Addressing the complexities and moral contradictions contained in Larissa MacFarquhar’s YouTube presentation “Understanding Extreme Altruism” ( a thumbnail sketch of her book Strangers Drowning), develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative as he lays it out in “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle. ” Singer’s Drowning Child analogy is also used in his essay “What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?”

You can also watch Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #2, “Payday.” You have two homework assignments, numbers 4 and 5, due on the next class because there is no homework today.

September 18 Homework #4: Read “This Is Your Brain on Gluten” by James Hamblin and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why author David Perlmutter is engaging in false claims to promote his ideas and bestselling books. Homework #5: Read Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and explain why it is so difficult to lose weight and keep it off. We will also read Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence."

September 20 Homework #6: Read Jason Brennan’s “Can epistocracy, or knowledge-based voting, fix democracy?” and write a 3-paragraph essay that identifies possible objections to Brennan’s thesis.

September 25 Peer Edit for Essay #2.

September 27 Essay #2 is due on turnitin. No homework due today other than Essay #2. In class, we will read David Freedman’s “The War on Stupid People,” and we will support, refute, or complicate Freedman’s contention that we marginalize average people at our own peril, socially, pragmatically, morally, and otherwise. Or we will watch the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #1, “Hard Nox.” 

Essay #2 Due 9-27-18

Minimum of 2 sources for your MLA Works Cited page. 

Option A

In the context of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #2, "Payday," write an argumentative essay that answers the question: Were Scott Tucker and his associates fairly prosecuted or did the government overreach its powers and exact unjust punishment on these allegedly greedy businessmen? Be sure to have a counterargument section. For your sources, you can use the documentary, the Vulture review, and the Atlantic review.

Option B

In the context of James Hamblin’s “This Is Your Brain on Gluten,” write an essay that addresses the claim that David Perlmutter is engaging in flawed critical thinking to persuade his readers to follow overreaching promises about his nutrition regiment. 

Option C

In the context of Alexandra Sifferlin's "The Weight Loss Trap" and Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence," develop a thesis that addresses the claim that going on a diet is too futile and harmful and that we should give up on the idea of dieting altogether.

Option D

In the context of Jason Brennan’s “Can epistocracy, or knowledge-based voting, fix democracy?”, support, defend, or complicate the claim that an epistocracy is superior to democracy as we currently know it.

Option E

Addressing the complexities and moral contradictions contained in Larissa MacFarquhar’s YouTube presentation “Understanding Extreme Altruism” ( a thumbnail sketch of her book Strangers Drowning), develop an argumentative thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates Peter Singer’s Drowning Child Moral Imperative as he lays it out in “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle. ” Singer’s Drowning Child analogy is also used in his essay “What Should a Billionaire Give--and What Should You?”

English 1C Grading Rubric

Peer Edit for Typed Essay (First Draft) 

First Page

 

1. Do you have a salient, distinctive title that is relevant to your topic and thesis?
2. Do you have your name, instructor’s name, the course, and date (in that order) at the top left? 

Format 

1. Are you using 12-point font with Times New Roman?
2. Are your lines double-spaced?
3. Is your font color black?
4. Do you make sure there are no extra spaces between paragraphs (some students erroneously use 4 spaces between paragraphs)
5. Do you use 1-inch margins?
6. Do you use block format for quotes of 4 or more lines in which you indent another inch from the left margin?

Introduction

1. Does your introduction have a compelling hook using an anecdote, a troubling current event, a startling statistic, etc.?
2. Do you avoid pat phrases or clichés? For example, “In today’s society . . .” or “In today’s modern world . . .” or “Since the Dawn of Man . . .”

Thesis

1. Do you have a thesis that articulates your main purpose in clear, specific language?
2. Is your thesis sophisticated in that it makes an assertion that goes beyond the obvious and self-evident?
3. Is your thesis debatable?
4. Do you address your opponents with a concession clause? (While opponents of my proposal to raise the minimum wage to $22 an hour make some compelling points, their argument collapses when we consider _____________, _______________, __________________, and ________________. )
5. Does your thesis have explicit or implicit mapping components that outline the body paragraphs of your essay? 

 

Questions from Your Reader (write on a separate page so you’ll have more room to write)

One. What’s most compelling about the essay so far?

Two. What is most needed for improvement so far?

Three. Something I would like the writer to explain more is . . .

Four. One last comment would be . . .

Five. What is the writer’s thesis?

Six. On a scale of 1-10, how compelling is the thesis and what could make it more compelling?

Seven. On a scale of 1-10, how effective is the title? Could it be improved? How?

Eight. Does the writer have well developed paragraphs with clear topic sentences?

Nine. Does the writer use a diversity of paragraph transitions?

Ten. Does the writer use diverse and appropriate signal phrases?

Sample Thesis Statements for Essay #1

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Sample Thesis for Option A

Megan Phelps-Roper frees herself from the immorality and warped thinking bubble of a hateful religious cult evidencing some of the liberating thinking principles contained in Alan Jacobs' How to Think evidenced by ________________, _________________, __________________, and ________________________.  

While it's true that Megan Phelps-Roper used her moral sense and critical thinking skills to unshackle herself from her hate cult and use Twitter to humanize her fellow human beings, Twitter and other social media platforms for the most part are weaponized misinformation vectors that degrade critical thinking evidenced by _________________, _________________, ____________________, and _________________________. 

 

For every one Megan Phelps-Roper who learns her way to think out of tribalistic garbage, there are millions of people who succumb to the critical thinking breakdown and overall mental dysfunction brought upon by weaponized misinformation, which is the number one feature of the social media takeover of the world. 

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Sample Thesis (followed by clarifying thesis ) for Option B

The moral rot and vile instincts that kill critical thinking in the hateful religious cult that once imprisoned Megan Phelps-Roper can be explained by Alan Jacobs' main ideas in his masterful work How to Think. These main ideas include ____________, _______________, ________________, and _____________

 

Megan Phelps-Roper's evolution from hateful cult tribalist to cosmopolitan humanist illustrates the dangers of ingroup tribalism, which include dehumanization of "Los Otros," cognitive bias, _________________, and __________________. 

 

Having read Alan Jacobs' How to Think, I am incurably depressed because I've learned that even if I try with all my heart, soul, and guts, I may never be a critical thinker, and even if I do improve my critical thinking, I've learned that the majority of mankind chooses to be a bunch of ignorant, mindless, prejudiced, biased slobs wreaking havoc on the planet and making me see the futility of existence. McMahon, your reading material has made me a nihilist. Thanks for nothing. 

How to Think terrifies me because the thinking mechanism described in the book clearly are eroding in this age of social media evidenced by ___________________, __________________, ____________________, and _____________________. 

 

The writer who says "McMahon ruined my life" is grossly misguided and fails to see that learning critical thinking is essential to our self-interest evidenced by correct cause, rejection of either/or fallacy, rejection of instant gratification, and recognition of cognitive biases. 

 

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

Sample Thesis for Option C

Retreating into a false paradise of a hateful religious cult or a utilitarian utopia that sacrifices the innocent is an exercise in surrendering our core moral values and critical thinking skills in the service of convenient willed ignorance, selfish pleasure seeking, and comfort, which in the end become a deal with the Devil.    

 

 

Real Thinking

Having the ability to use ethos (credibility), logos (logic and reasoning), and pathos (strong emotion) to present an argument is a sign of intelligence, craftiness, and commitment to one’s ideas.

To cause someone to “break the floor,” to change their mind in the middle of a debate was considered one of life’s highest achievements.

This is significant because when you change your mind, “you yield a different you.”

Changing your mind, in other words, radically redefines the essence of yourself.

Jacobs makes another important point about a culture that embraces the possibility of “breaking the floor”: Only in a culture where people who disagree aren’t trying to hurt each other but share values can such a changing of the mind take place. A certain trust must be present for people to be in a position to change their mind.

This kind of trust is difficult when everyone is in their own social media silo, absorbed by their smartphone chat groups and ignoring the people who surround them in the physical world. 

 

 

 

 

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

“Unfollow” by Adrian Chen

YouTube video

The Oatmeal: The Backfire Effect

 

 

Review Death of Critical Thinking

One. After the Fact Fallacy: We justify our actions after the fact to delude ourselves that we used careful thought when in fact we acted on compulsion based on our lower instincts.

Two. Gaslighting. We face bullying and manipulation to cloud our judgment and perception of an abusive situation.

Three. Neophobic arrogance (fear of new ideas and change) or bullheaded ignorance: resisting reason and positive change, "breaking the floor" and transforming through the powers of reason.

Four. Inner Ring or ingroup conformity so that we are too loyal to the tribe to see its glaring faults.

Five. Unscrupulous Optimism: Making the false claim that the Right Path is simple and must be followed.

Six. Cognitive Bias: Cherry-picking facts to conform to a pre-existing opinion.

Seven. Grandiose Mythologies explain the world in an inaccurate way, but it doesn't matter because the mythologies of some kind of intoxicating appeal. 

Excerpts from Chen’s Essay:

Turning Point #1 Feelings and Empathy Contradict the Hate Tribe 

Megan Phelps-Roper lives in a hate tribe that is homophobic, among other things. She had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said. 

Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “god hates your feelings.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols. 

Turning Point #2 Adapting to Twitter 

But on Twitter Phelps-Roper found that it was better to take a gentler tone. For one thing, Twitter’s hundred-and-forty-character limit made it hard to fit both a florid insult and a scriptural point. And if she made things personal the conversation was inevitably derailed by a flood of angry tweets. She still preached God’s hate, and still liberally deployed the word “fag,” but she also sprinkled her tweets with cheerful exclamations and emoticons. She became adept at deflecting critics with a wry joke. “So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one user tweeted at her. “More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” she replied. Phelps-Roper told me, “We weren’t supposed to care about what people thought about us, but I did.” As she developed her affable rhetorical style, she justified it with a proverb: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” 

Turning Point #3 Making Friends on Twitter and Becoming Humanized

 

Other Twitter users were fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial who Phelps-Roper seemed to be on Twitter. “I remember just thinking, How can somebody who appreciates good music believe so many hateful things?” Graham Hughes said. In November, 2009, Hughes, then a college student in British Columbia, interviewed Phelps-Roper for a religious-studies class. Afterward, they corresponded frequently on Twitter. When Hughes was hospitalized with a brain infection, Phelps-Roper showed him more concern than many of his real-life friends. “I knew there was a genuine connection between us,” he said.

As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?” 

Turning Point #4 Megan Questions Her Literalism 

Phelps-Roper and Abitbol continued their conversations via e-mail and Twitter’s direct-message function. In Phelps-Roper’s effort to better understand Westboro’s new prophecies, she had bought a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” but she found it more profitable just to ask Abitbol her questions. Here was a real live Orthodox Jew who lived in Israel and was more than happy to enlighten her. During their debates over Scripture, Phelps-Roper sometimes quoted passages from the Old Testament; Abitbol often countered that their meaning differed in the original Hebrew, so Phelps-Roper bought some language-learning software. She figured that, since she would soon be living in Israel awaiting the end of the world, she should learn the language. Abitbol helped her with the vocabulary.

Phelps-Roper still urged Abitbol to repent, but as someone who was concerned about a wayward friend. “I just wish you would obey God and use your considerable platform to warn your audience about the consequences of engaging in conduct that God calls abomination,” she e-mailed Abitbol in October, 2010.

In response, Abitbol kept pressing Phelps-Roper on Westboro’s doctrine. One day, he asked about a Westboro sign that said “death penalty for fags,” referring to a commandment from Leviticus. Abitbol pointed out that Jesus had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Abitbol knew that at least one member of Westboro had committed a sin that Leviticus also deems a capital crime. Phelps-Roper’s oldest brother, Sam, was the product of a relationship that Shirley had had with a man she met while she was in law school, before she married Megan’s father.

Shirley’s sin of fornication was often thrown in the church members’ faces by counterprotesters. Westboro always argued that the difference between Shirley and gay people was that Shirley had repented of her sin, whereas gays marched in pride parades. But Abitbol wrote that if gay people were killed they wouldn’t have the opportunity to repent. 

Turning Point #5 Megan Must Confront Inconsistencies and Double Standards in Her Religious Group 

Phelps-Roper was struck by the double standard, and, as she did whenever she had a question about doctrine, she brought up the issue with her mother. Shirley responded that Romans said gays were “worthy of death,” and that if it was good enough for God it was good enough for Westboro. “It was such a settled point that they’ve been preaching for so long it’s almost like it didn’t mean anything to her,” Phelps-Roper said. Still, she concluded that Westboro was in the wrong. “That was the first time I came to a place where I disagreed, I knew I disagreed, and I didn’t accept the answer that they gave,” she said. Phelps-Roper knew that to press the issue would create problems for her in the church, so she quietly stopped holding the “death penalty for fags” sign. There were plenty of other signs whose message she still believed in wholeheartedly. She also put an end to the conversations with Abitbol.

 

Turning Point #6 Friendship with C.G. Causes Megan to Question Her Church’s Cruelty (Megan’s empathy grows) 

Another online relationship proved more threatening. In February, 2011, Phelps-Roper began to have conversations on Twitter with a user named @F_K_A. His avatar was Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby.” He had learned of Westboro after reading an article about the Anonymous hack. “He sent me a tweet, and initially it was like this angry, nasty tweet,” Phelps-Roper said. But @F_K_A was disarmed by Phelps-Roper’s friendly demeanor. He began to ask her questions about life in Westboro, and, because he was curious instead of condemning, she kept answering them. One day, Phelps-Roper recalled, “I asked him some kind of pointed question about the Bible. He said something like, ‘I can’t answer that, but I have never been beaten in Words with Friends’ ”—the popular online Scrabble knockoff. Phelps-Roper replied, “I can’t boast the same. =)” She put her Words with Friends username at the end of the tweet.

They began to talk about the church using the in-game chat function, free from Twitter’s character limit. @F_K_A told Phelps-Roper to call him C.G. But C.G. remained a mystery. She knew that he was an attorney, but she didn’t know where he lived or how old he was. “He was careful not to reveal anything about himself,” Phelps-Roper said.

Like David Abitbol, C.G. argued against Westboro’s beliefs and practices, but while Abitbol’s arguments were doctrinal C.G. was most critical of Westboro’s cruelty. “We had the same discussion several times when someone would die,” Phelps-Roper said. C.G. urged Phelps-Roper to think of how much hurt it must cause the families of the deceased to see Phelps-Roper and her family rejoicing. Westboro divided people into good and evil, but, Phelps-Roper said, C.G. “always tried to advocate for a third group of people: people who were decent but not religious.” She had heard all these arguments before, but they had never affected her as they did when C.G. made them. “I just really liked him,” she said. “He seemed to genuinely like people and care about people, and that resonated with me.”

Phelps-Roper increasingly found herself turning to Bible passages where tragedy is not met with joy. The Old Testament prophet Elisha, for example, weeps when he foresees disaster for Israel. One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. “Thank God for famine in East Africa!” she wrote. “God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked to their face!” When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church.

 

Turning Point #7 Megan’s Sister Grace Sees a Forbidden Romance Brewing (Megan even has a “love dream”)

 

As Phelps-Roper developed her relationship with C.G., her sister Grace grew suspicious. “Suddenly, her taste in music started changing,” Grace told me. “It annoyed me, because it wasn’t coming from Megan. It was coming from him, this question mark of a person that I don’t get to know about, but she has some kind of thing with.” As young children, Grace and Megan had squabbled constantly, but they had grown close. Grace was seven years younger than Megan, and still in high school at the time. Grace would scroll through Megan’s iPhone, asking about the various messages and e-mails. But soon after Megan started talking to C.G. she stopped letting Grace look at her phone. “I remember thinking, What the heck? What are you hiding?” Grace said.

For young women in Westboro, having romantic interactions with someone outside the church was forbidden. When Phelps-Roper was growing up, one of her cousins had been pushed out of the church for, among other things, getting entangled with boys; other young women had been harshly punished. Phelps-Roper had long assumed that she would likely never get married, since she was related to almost every male in the church. “I was terrified of even thinking about guys,” she said. “It’s not just the physical stuff that can get you in trouble.” She did her best to displace her feelings for C.G. onto the music and books he recommended, which she fervently consumed. “I was in denial,” she said.

Then, on September 30, 2011, she had a dream: It was a beautiful summer day, and she was standing on the driveway of the church. A black car with tinted windows pulled up, and a tall, blond man got out. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was C.G. She walked up to him, and they embraced. She knew her family could see them on the surveillance cameras that line the Block, but she didn’t care. “It was so real, that feeling of wanting to be with him,” Phelps-Roper told me. She woke up fighting back tears. “He was not a good person, according to the church,” she said. “And the fact that I dreamed about him, and the strong feeling of wanting that relationship, represented huge danger to me.” That day, she told C.G. that they couldn’t talk anymore. She deleted her Words with Friends account. C.G. deleted his Twitter account. 

Turning Point #8 Division Brews in the Church 

Phelps-Roper tried to throw herself back into the Westboro community, but the atmosphere had changed while she was distracted by her relationship with C.G. It had started in April, 2011. Her mother seemed mysteriously troubled. After Phelps-Roper pressed her parents, they showed her an e-mail they’d received from her oldest brother, Sam, and Steve Drain, another church member. It accused her mother of lacking humility, saying that she was too zealous in correcting other members’ behavior and had overreached her authority on a number of occasions, Phelps-Roper told me. Reading the e-mail made her sick with fear. When a Westboro member was singled out for bad behavior, it often triggered a harrowing period of discipline. The smallest transgression could spark another round of punishment, until the member either shaped up or was kicked out of the church. 

Turning Point #9 Confusion Turns to Outrage 

Phelps-Roper’s confusion soon turned to outrage. In 2012, she was twenty-six years old, but she was still being treated like a child. Once-minor indignities, like being accompanied by an adult chaperone while eating lunch at a restaurant with other young church members, now seemed unbearable. In April, she was shocked when Westboro expelled a cousin of hers without adhering to the process that the church had always followed, which was derived from the Book of Matthew. Typically, expulsion resulted only after a unanimous decision, but in the cousin’s case she was excluded over other members’ objections. (Drain recalls no objections, and said, “Everything was done decently and in accordance with Scripture.”) “It stopped feeling like this larger-than-life divine institution ordained and led by God, and more like the sniping and sordid activity of men who wanted to be in control,” Phelps-Roper said. 

She resented the increasing authority wielded by Drain. One of the few Westboro members unrelated to Fred Phelps, Drain had visited Topeka in 2000 to film a skeptical documentary about the church, but he soon became convinced of its message. The next year, he and his family joined the church. He’d long pushed for a larger role in Westboro, and after the elders came to power his influence increased. In February, 2012, during the funeral of Whitney Houston, in New Jersey, Drain urged Phelps-Roper and other members to tweet poorly Photoshopped images that depicted them haranguing mourners. The media quickly unravelled the hoax. (Drain told me that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally.)

Phelps-Roper was embarrassed by the debacle. It undermined her own proud claims on Twitter to be spreading God’s truth—and lying violated Scripture. In addition, she now had to have all her media appearances approved by Drain. “It seems like he wants to be Pope Steve and for no one else to do anything without his permission,” she wrote in her journal. “I hate it so much.”

Megan’s doubt engendered by the “death penalty for fags” sign grew. She started to complain to her mother, saying that the elders were not obeying the Bible. They treated her mother and other members with cruelty when the Bible required brotherly love, she said. The elders acted arrogantly and tolerated no dissent, when God demanded meekness and humility. Phelps-Roper was struck by the similarities between her arguments and what C.G. and David Abitbol had always said about the church. “It was like we were finally doing to ourselves what we had done to everyone else,” she said. “Seeing those parallels was really disorienting.”

 

Turning Point #10 Megan and Her Sister Talk About Leaving Their Church

Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”

The next day, she mentioned the possibility of leaving to Grace. Grace was horrified. “It just sounded ridiculous to even suggest it,” Grace told me. “These were the points I brought up: we’re never going to see our families again, we’re going to go to Hell for eternity, and our life will be meaningless.” Megan, still uncertain, agreed. But she plunged into a profound crisis of faith. “It was like flipping a switch,” she said. “So many other thoughts came in that I’d never pursued, and that’s every doubt that I’d ever had, everything that had ever seemed illogical or off.”

When they were together, Megan engaged Grace in interminable theological conversations. When they were apart, Megan detailed her doubts in text messages. One day, she texted Grace, “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?” She added, “Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people? I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no. When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.” Two days later, she texted Grace about Hell: “Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.” Grace replied, “But what if?”

That day, Grace wrote to Megan, “Our belief in God has always curbed everything. Like, pain & sorrow, I mean. Without that we’d only have our belief in each other. But we are human & humans die. What would we have if we didn’t have each other?” For Megan, the answer could be found in other people. “We know what it is to be kind & good to people,” she wrote. “We would just have to find somewhere else, other people to love and care about and help, too.” Grace wrote back, “I don’t want other people.” In truth, Megan didn’t want other people, either; she desperately wanted things in Westboro to go back to the way they had been. But the idea of living among outsiders was no longer unimaginable.

Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.” 

Turning Point #11 Grace’s Affair Forces an Exit 

As the sisters agonized over whether to leave, they befriended an older man in the church and his wife, eventually becoming allies in discontent. For a while, they all planned to leave together. Then the couple’s marriage began to deteriorate, and the husband told Megan and Grace that they were going to divorce. Grace became involved in a brief romantic relationship with the man. After the relationship ended, the wife learned about it, and sent a letter to Megan and Grace’s parents revealing both the relationship and the sisters’ plan to leave.

On Sunday, November 11th, the family had just returned from church when Megan and Grace were called into their parents’ bedroom, where their father began to read the letter out loud. Megan told Grace quietly that they had to leave: “It was like the world was exploding and I didn’t want to be around to see it.” Their mother tried to calm things down. Their parents wanted to talk things over—they seemed to think that the sisters could be persuaded to stay—but Megan and Grace had made up their minds. As Grace packed, their father came into her room and asked what she wanted the church to do differently. “I want you and everyone else to leave with me,” Grace replied. Their parents were stunned, but they didn’t try to force the sisters to stay.

As the sisters packed, their younger brother Zach sat at the piano downstairs, crying and playing hymns, which he hoped might change their mind. Other church members stopped by to say goodbye and to warn the sisters of the consequences of their decision. “The fact that I’m coming face to face with the damage that I was doing to them was even worse than anything else that was happening to me,” Phelps-Roper said. Her parents told her to say goodbye to her grandfather. She walked over to the residence where her grandparents lived, above the church sanctuary. When Megan told them she was leaving, her grandfather looked at her grandmother and said, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time.”

Megan and Grace’s father drove them to a hotel in Topeka, where he had paid for a room, but they were too scared to spend the night alone, so they called the teacher who had agreed to store their boxes. That night, they cried themselves to sleep on couches in his basement. Megan and Grace returned to their house the next day with a U-Haul truck to pick up their remaining possessions. As they walked away for the last time, Shirley called after them, “You know you can always come back.”

Terms to Consider for Your Essay As You Apply Alan Jacobs' Text to Your Analysis

One. Repugnant Cultural Other

Two. Refutation Mode

Three. "Forbidden Knowledge": information that condemns or damns the group you belong to

Four. Deep Emotional Experience and Moral Awakening Important for Change of Mind (not just rational thinking)

Five. Utopian Bargains Damn the Soul

Six. Inner Ring and Ingroup Behavior

Seven. Unscrupulous Optimism: You have an ideology that provides a simple, quick fix for a deeply complicated life problem. Self-help books are full of unscrupulous optimism. So are most extreme political ideologies. 

 

1C Agenda for 9-4-18 Updated: Death of Critical Thinking; Lobster Life to Zero-Sum Game; How to Think Lesson 2

Homework Check:

Team Activity:

Share some stories of people who got unfairly scapegoated or bullied in order to make the bullying group feel stronger with a shared purpose. 

Next Homework:

Finish How to Think and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains that being a critical thinker can be dangerous.

Writing Assignment:

Final Draft on turnitin due 9-13-18

First Draft for Peer Edit due 9-11

Conditions That Foster Critical Thinking

Critical thinking requires the following:

1. a moral point of view
2. fairness to listen to people outside one's tribe
3. willingness to listen to opposing views 
4. being open to changing one's opinion based on better information.

However, as we look at America today, we see the erosion of critical thinking caused by the following:

1. People silo themselves in their social media bubbles.
2. Social media algorithms tailor news and information to your personality profile to cater to your cognitive biases so you see only what you want to see and never have to see anything that challenges your beliefs and opinions.  
3. People are influenced by narcissistic trolls whose misinformation is weaponized over social media. 
4. People don't have critical reading skills to understand difference between an ignorant and informed opinion.
5. People are not taking the moral position to arrive at shared understanding. Shared understanding is no longer a shared moral imperative. Rather, life is a ruthless competition. "I must win. I must destroy my enemy because my enemy is wrong, and I am right." There is no real persuasion behind this thinking, just tribalistic instinct and impulse. This Kill My Enemy approach has been weaponized by trolls and foreign agents who disseminate misinformation on social media. This misinformation is the Number One Role of social media. It is not bring people together and bringing peace to the world. The tech moguls who got rich on Facebook and Twitter and other venues have allowed the trolls to take over. 

The Death of Critical Thinking

Social Media’s Primary Role Has Become a Weaponized Battlefield of Misinformation Resulting in the Death of Critical Thinking

Back in 2010 to 2012, I had the privilege of hiking with a half dozen United States Marines on the Palos Verdes trail every Sunday morning for a two-hour hike. Some of these Marines were my students, and they invited me to have a two-hour hike for strength, conditioning, and therapeutic conversation.

The Marines they liked me because I was their critical thinking professor. I was making critical thinking part of a better democracy, and by making a stronger democracy I was making a stronger America.

That was the narrative of 2010. And I needed to believe in this narrative because I had just had twin girls. My daughters were born into a world with an ever strengthening democracy. Thank you, very much.

The hike was grueling and exhausting, but nothing to the Marines, many who walked 14 hours a day through rugged terrain in Afghanistan and Iraq with with an 80-pound backpack.

Driving home to Torrance all sweaty and exhausted in my car, I’d listen to the “Tech Guy” Leo Laporte on KFI 640 radio praise the ascent of social media, like Twitter, as he saw social media as a force for positive social change in the context of Arab Spring.

Overthrowing dictators in favor of democratic rule such as Arab Spring was evidence that social media would bring peace, freedom, and democracy to the world.

I was listening to Leo Laporte sing Kumbaya over the airwaves, and I was hopeful that he was right: Democracy will blossom all over the world. I was thinking, “Oh, happy day! I’m a critical thinking teacher helping propel democracy in my own small way. I’m on the Winning Team.”

Eight Years Later

So here we are, eight years later: How are things going?

Now over half the world is on social media, all my students have smartphones, and is the world a better place?

Is democracy spreading throughout the planet?

Are Americans of different tribes coming to together for shared understanding?

Are politicians of different persuasions working together for a common goal to make America stronger?

Just the opposite is true. We’re in chaos, we’re divided, and we can’t even agree on what facts are anymore as political pundits speak of “alternative facts” and “alternative realities.”

Instead of peace and understanding, we live in the Age of Gaslighting, bullying people with a twisted version of reality to beat them down and tire them out so they’re too exhausted to question lies and distortions.

What happened?

I didn’t have a clear answer until recently I had the privilege of reading an advanced copy of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.

The singular takeaway from this book is that even though social media has many functions--showing cat videos, posting photos of your kids so grandma can see them, posting selfies of your six-pack torso shot at the gym on Instagram, promoting your brand--the dominant role of social media has become clear: Totalitarian and extremist trolls taken over social media and turned it into a cesspool of weaponized misinformation and authoritarian propaganda.

Totalitarians and extremists throughout the world are using social media to wage war against democracy, and right now they’re winning: That is the very persuasive thesis of LikeWar.

To present their thesis, the authors have done an excellent job of presenting five core principles:

One. The Internet has gone through its evolutionary process and is now in its adult stage to be the “preeminent medium of global communication; half the world is now on social media, so social media is the place where the most clever, ruthless trolls have decided to use misinformation to manipulate the masses. Let there be no mistake about it, more than anything else, social media is a vector for trolls.

Two. Social media is foremost a battlefield with no borders, and instant misinformation attack can happen without notice; faster than bombs, misinformation can affect political opinion, affecting elections and major foreign policy decisions.

Three. We have to think differently about information. Now social media is the dominant mode of information, and trolls use misinformation to wage war against democratic societies.

This misinformation has changed how wars are fought; why use bombs and other weaponry when it’s cheaper and more effective to use weaponized misinformation? A manufactured event or fake news can be more destructive than a torrent of bombs.

As a result, we must look at information differently. Information is no longer people sitting around reading books.

Information is short bursts of digital dissemination, often in the form of weaponized misinformation that sticks. Why does it stick? Because weaponized information is not based on truth; it’s based on simplicity & immediate emotional appeal. Pull people’s emotional heartstrings, and control the narrative, and you win the war.

Most social media information is false. Why? Because algorithmically tailored to people’s cognitive biases so that the information is manufactured, cherry-picked, curated, and patently false.

The American military is deeply concerned about these totalitarian trolls. For example, the United States Army has a Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk where they engage in Social Media Environment and Internet Replication, known as SMEIR; it simulates social media scenarios where misinformation is weaponized and unbridled chaos ensues.

You can cause more chaos with less retaliation and less expense through social media weaponization than you can through traditional warfare.

Four. Social media battles have changed what war means: Elections and battles on the actual field can be won or lost because by controlling the opinions and beliefs of the masses. War and politics have never been so entwined with each other, so say the authors of LikeWar. The number one weapon in this entwinement of war and politics is misinformation.

Five. Finally, there is no escaping this battlefield. We can’t turn back the clock, we can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube; we can’t put the Genie back in the bottle.

Don’t count on the Tech Bros who are making billions of dollars off their social media platforms to protect us. They’ve proven inept in controlling the misinformation flow. In fact, their platforms are allies in this misinformation.

Meanwhile, they’re allowing authoritarian governments to take over social media for the purpose of dismantling democratic governments.

We have to know how this war works; otherwise, the trolls, terrorists, and foreign enemies will take us over. Look how divided our country is. The trolls are already winning. Think about that next time you distract yourself with a cat video.

 

The trolls have pushed us into Lobster Society. 

We are no longer thinking like civil citizens but fighting each other like lobsters for territory at the bottom of the ocean. 

We too often abandon morality when we live under the rule of the Zero-Sum Game. 

 

When we live for Zero-Sum Game, we become lobsters, for better and worse. 

Balance Your Inner Lobster with Your Moral Sense

Adapted from Jordan Peterson Uses Lobster Society to Give Us 5 Essential Life Lessons 

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back 

Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life has a famous chapter comparing lobsters to humans. Peterson’s view of competition is dark and realistic, and it is the basis for his claim that we need to be self-reliant and abandon all naivete about our plight in this world. 

Deeper Meaning 

Peterson's analogy makes us realize what we’re up against in a world of competition, and he makes us identify negative feedback loops that make us prey to predators, and he helps us replace those negative feedback loops with positive ones in order to help us succeed in life.

Life Lesson #1: Our Territory Determines Our Quality of Life

Jordan Peterson observes that lobsters have survived for 350 million years, far longer than dinosaurs and humans, and that their survival instincts can give us some essential life lessons.

Competition for Territory

Like lobsters, we compete for territory because territory (zip code, if you will) determines our quality of life.

The rich live in premium locations and enjoy longest, healthy lives. The poor live in high-stress areas and live shorter, more sickly, more brutal lives.

I live in Torrance, about a mile and a half from the beach, and you can live 7 miles from here in the city of Wilmington, which is close to oil refineries known to produce spikes in asthma, heart disease, and cancer.

If you live a mile or closer to the freeway, you have increased risk for cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

Like lobsters, we compete for where we will live. We compete for territory.

Life Lesson #2: The world we live in a zero-sum game.

Zero-sum game means that if you win the game you will have wealth, resources, good health, and top-ranking social hierarchy.

If you lose in the zero-sum game, you will suffer poverty, deprivation, sickliness and low-ranking status for overwhelming majority. The crisis of being poor is the poor have the worst healthcare, but the poor get struck with the worst diseases.

This is a brutal principle. A winner in some category of life, reproductive success, the arts, business, home ownership in premium coastal locations comes with someone else paying the price.

Luxury Hotel

Someone enjoys staying in a luxury hotel in Hawaii that costs thousands of dollars a night.

Someone cleans the bathroom of that luxury hotel for minimum wage and lives in brutal conditions to make sure that hotel customer has the best and cleanest amenities.

If you get the bad end of the stick, the world doesn’t care because the world’s default setting is to ignore you and assign you zero worth. This brutal condition compels us to take responsibility for our own station in life. If we don’t fight for our territory, like the lobster fights for his, we are doomed.

Life Lesson #3: We exist in a pecking order that affects our serotonin levels.

We are in a constant competition for resources in a fight to win ranking on what Peterson calls a “pecking order” for quality of life and reproductive success.

Pecking order, largely based on income, for humans, determines neurochemistry, which elevates serotonin in lobster victory and elevates octopamine in defeat. These hormones affect body language, either bold and proud or cowering and ashamed.

This body language propels us into a perpetual feedback loop, leading us to Life Lesson #3. 

Life Lesson #4: Our success or failure in life depends on what kind of constant feedback loop we set into motion.

Our social status ranking affects others’ perception of us, and how we see others perceive us affects our hormones, and our hormones, manifest in body language, affect how people perceive us, so that we exist in a constant feedback loop.

High serotonin levels make people attracted to us, which in turn elevate our serotonin levels even more, creating a positive feedback loop.

The converse is also true: Low serotonin levels make us repellent to others, which in turn lowers our serotonin levels even more, creating a negative feedback loop.

Bullied People

Peterson uses example of an adolescent who was bullied and who reacts to life’s challenges based on being a bullying victim. He becomes fragile, whiny, and helpless with low levels of serotonin, making him more vulnerable to further bullying, which reinforces his negative view of the world.

His groveling, defeatist body language, cowering before some catastrophe, sets him up as a victim for future bullies.

Unloved Depressed People

Depressed people feel useless. A lot of depressed people never received love as children. They grow up with low levels of serotonin. They give depressed vibes to others who turn away from the depressed who in turn feel unloved, a perception that makes them even more depressed, and so the negative feedback loop continues.

The can continue to lead a miserable life defined by this negative feedback loop, or they can do something about it by creating a positive feedback loop.

How is this achieved, and do you really want to achieve this? If you do, please listen: 

Principle #5: You Are Responsible for Creating a Positive Feedback Loop

Taking care of yourself, your fitness, your nutrition, your sleep, your limited screen time on social media, your body posture, to name some examples, can create a positive feedback loop. Respecting yourself causes others to respect you, which in turn reinforces your self-respect.  

“People, like lobsters, size each other up” (40), so you need to take care of yourself.

Self-care is the first step in the road to achieving a positive feedback loop.

The Obvious Isn’t the Commonly Practiced

Taking care of yourself may sound obvious, but most people don’t take care of themselves.

Here’s an example: Up to 30% of people never fill their doctors’ prescriptions for their illnesses. Another 50% who do fill their prescriptions don’t follow the instructions.

Most people follow prescription instructions for their pets more than they do themselves.

We can conclude that most people like their pets more than they like themselves.

They may not even be aware of how they abuse and neglect themselves in a sign of zero self-worth.

You have to want to value yourself and you have to show this through self-care.  

Examples of Self-Care

Social Media Excess

By posting too much on social media, you’re advertising your loneliness and neediness. You’re making yourself appear like a weak lobster in the social media universe, and others will avoid you, causing you to feel rejected, ensuing more feelings of loneliness, neediness, and depression, which will create a negative feedback loop.

Defend your honor and your self-respect by cutting back on social media, achieving excellence in your fitness and studies, and creating a positive feedback loop through those pursuits.

Diet and Exercise

Defend your honor and your self-respect by no longer larding your diet with excessive sugars and processed foods and getting “punk fed, which will result in metabolic syndrome, dyspepsia, fatigue, and diabetes, having the cumulative effects of being a Weak Lobster. Instead, eat whole foods and find exercise that you enjoy doing consistently so that you show yourself and others that you care about yourself so that you can create a positive feedback loop.  

College Studies

Defend your honor and your self-respect by “going all in” your college studies instead of approaching college with a sullen, half-hearted, slovenly cowardice that tells yourself and the world that you’re too scared and weak-hearted to be successful.

In the realm of social media, diet, exercise, and college studies, you need to cultivate Lobster Strength and Dignity to protect your territory.

Serotonin Affects Your Personality

Self-care increases your serotonin levels.

Jordan Peterson reminds us that physical and attitudinal changes mentioned in the above examples don’t just hormonally alter our body and change our body language; they change our spirit and psychology in a way that steers us toward success.

Respond to a Challenge; Don’t Brace Yourself for Catastrophe

Making the above changes is the first step in “responding to a challenge rather than bracing for a catastrophe” (40).

Your Posture Changes Your Psychology

Peterson calls his lobster chapter “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back.”

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is not just a physical posture; it is a position you take with your mind to defend your honor and self-respect. Such a posture is the first responsibility: To take charge of how you react to a world rife with challenges, competition, and evil.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back makes you attentive to others so you can read social cues and respond appropriately.

To slouch like a sad sack sends your brain signals deep inside your head so you become oblivious to the outside world around you and clueless you become a victim.

Reject Victim Mentality by Taking Responsibility for Protecting Your Self Interests

Reject the victim mentality and replace the victim with a more heroic version of yourself. This is the essence of Peterson’s message in this chapter.

Review of Lobster Society in the Human World

One. Understand that the world’s default setting is to ignore you, so that you are responsible for carving out your own territory.

Two. Understand you can redirect your negative feedback loop through self-care and create positive feedback loop that will point you to success.

Three. Understand that you can only rely on yourself to create a positive feedback loop. There is no guarantee that you will find a mentor or benevolent human being to guide you.

I never had a mentor, and I had to find my own way, but I do two mentorships at my college.

I do Puente and Project Success. Recently, I’ve mentored a student who got into Berkeley law school, a student who got into Morehouse screen writing program, a student who got a civil engineering job, and a student who got an electrical engineering job.

I give myself zero credit for these students’ success. They saw the stakes that were before them, they rose to the occasion, they fought through adversity, poverty, unsupportive parents, moving from their native country, and even depression.

But they made it because, even though they didn’t know it, they followed the principles of lobster society.

The lobster has survived for 350 million years for a reason: Its instincts are correct because the lobster has a proven track record, so we’d be wise to learn from those instincts.  

Living Like a Lobster Is Only Half the Answer 

The lobster by itself is not a teacher of salvation. The lobster is only part of a healthy human being

Lobster competition in world of social media tribalism and structural inequality has resulted in a loss of balance. 

Knowing that we compete against one another is a brutal reality that we should understand.

A Moral Sense

However, our Inner Lobster needs to be balanced by our Moral Sense, which consists of moral laws, empathy, cooperation, and universal humanitarian values.

When we fail to achieve a balance between our Lobster and our Moral Sense, we endanger ourselves.

Too much Inner Lobster makes us vulnerable to the barbarian throng: “every man for himself,” “dog eat dog,” “fight tooth and claw,” “only strong survive in the jungle,” and so on.

Living in a world ruled by the barbarian throng is a world gone to chaos.

Too Much Morality?

But living too much on the Moral Sense side of the equation makes us weak, passive, and naive to external invaders, predators, and clever enemies. We must have some of the Alpha Lobster’s defensive instincts and swagger to protect ourselves.

So a balance must be achieved for our self-preservation.

In America, the balance is out of whack:

One. Rapid globalization scares the hell out of us.

Two. Rapid automation scares the hell out of us.

Three. Structural inequality making it more and more impossible for regular folks to afford housing, healthcare, and education scare the hell out of us.

Four. White people, especially of an older generation, are scared that America doesn’t look as white as it did when they were young so that racist political demagogues appeal to these white people’s worst instincts.  Racism, including racist hate crimes, are on the rise.

Five. Social media generates news algorithms based on their personality profiles that silo social media users into isolating political bubbles so that they hear only what they want to hear based on cognitive biases.

Six. Americans are more and more divided along political lines to the point that a recent poll shows that more parents fear their children will marry someone of the “wrong political persuasion” over a different religious faith.

Seven. Americans no longer see their fellow Americans as sharing a common goal but as enemies who must be destroyed through trolls on social media or even worse methods resulting in what some are calling a “soft civil war.”

Eight. A lot of social media trolls are connected to Alt-Right racist and nationalist movements, and these trolls, which would be laughed at as a fringe movement just 10 years ago, feel empowered as they see mainstream politicians pushing for their cause.

Nine. National unity and shared purpose has taken a back seat to Zero-Sum Game: winners and losers.

Ten. Critical thinking, civil discussions in the marketplace of ideas, is no longer the priority: It’s now blood sport: Kill your enemy because their loss is your gain.

Lobster society has taken over critical thinking and our Moral Sense.

With the loss of critical thinking, with the loss of national unity, with tooth-and-claw Zero-Sum Game being the top priority, America exists in a state of huge chaos and instability. Hate crimes are on the rise. Racism is more flagrant and outspoken to the degree that one of my African-American students recently had “KKK” spray painted on his car in the parking lot of this college.

We are in trouble.

The Lobster without moral balance is an ugly creature hellbent on destruction.

We need our Inner Lobster, but we need it to be balanced. 

Sample Thesis Statements for Essay #1

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Sample Thesis for Option A

Megan Phelps-Roper frees herself from the immorality and warped thinking bubble of a hateful religious cult evidencing some of the liberating thinking principles contained in Alan Jacobs' How to Think evidenced by ________________, _________________, __________________, and ________________________.  

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Sample Thesis (followed by clarifying thesis ) for Option B

The moral rot and vile instincts that kill critical thinking in the hateful religious cult that once imprisoned Megan Phelps-Roper can be explained by Alan Jacobs' main ideas in his masterful work How to Think. These main ideas include ____________, _______________, ________________, and _____________

 

Megan Phelps-Roper's evolution from hateful cult tribalist to cosmopolitan humanist illustrates the dangers of ingroup tribalism, which include dehumanization of "Los Otros," cognitive bias, _________________, and __________________. 

 

Having read Alan Jacobs' How to Think, I am incurably depressed because I've learned that even if I try with all my heart, soul, and guts, I may never be a critical thinker, and even if I do improve my critical thinking, I've learned that the majority of mankind chooses to be a bunch of ignorant, mindless, prejudiced, biased slobs wreaking havoc on the planet and making me see the futility of existence. McMahon, your reading material has made me a nihilist. Thanks for nothing. 

For every one Megan Phelps-Roper who learns her way to think out of tribalistic garbage, there are millions of people who succumb to the critical thinking breakdown and overall mental dysfunction brought upon by weaponized misinformation, which is the number one feature of the social media takeover of the world. 

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

Sample Thesis for Option C

Retreating into a false paradise of a hateful religious cult or a utilitarian utopia that sacrifices the innocent is an exercise in surrendering our core moral values and critical thinking skills in the service of convenient willed ignorance, selfish pleasure seeking, and comfort, which in the end become a deal with the Devil.    

 

 

Real Thinking

Having the ability to use ethos (credibility), logos (logic and reasoning), and pathos (strong emotion) to present an argument is a sign of intelligence, craftiness, and commitment to one’s ideas.

To cause someone to “break the floor,” to change their mind in the middle of a debate was considered one of life’s highest achievements.

This is significant because when you change your mind, “you yield a different you.”

Changing your mind, in other words, radically redefines the essence of yourself.

Jacobs makes another important point about a culture that embraces the possibility of “breaking the floor”: Only in a culture where people who disagree aren’t trying to hurt each other but share values can such a changing of the mind take place. A certain trust must be present for people to be in a position to change their mind.

This kind of trust is difficult when everyone is in their own social media silo, absorbed by their smartphone chat groups and ignoring the people who surround them in the physical world. 

 

Two. What makes our thoughts almost secondary to the point of being irrelevant?

Jacobs quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, who observes that we experience instantaneous moral intuitions and judgments followed by our explanation of those intuitions. Our “post hoc constructions,” after-the-fact thoughts, rationalize our emotional dispositions.

A variation of the post hoc construction is the sour grapes fallacy. We do something stupid, and then we justify our stupidity by saying that doing the smart thing would not have mattered since life sucks anyway. 

Example of such an argument:

"Yes, you went to college and you make good money as an engineer, and I dropped out of college, and I'm working at the coffee shop. But look at all those taxes you have to pay. And that summer vacation to Maui cost you over five thousand dollars. Bummer, man. And look how complicated your life is. And look at all those hours you have to work a week. And for what? You're always tired. Look at me. I've got energy and lots of free time during the day."

"Yeah, but, dude, I live in a house. You live in a cardboard box."

The speaker never had sound arguments for dropping out of college, but he is hellbent on justifying his semi-poverty while working in a coffee shop.

 

Bind and Blind

These “moral intuitions” both “bind and blind.” We are both binded to our political and religious teams, but we are at the same time blinded by reasonable opposition to our strongly-held views.

Critical Thinking Requirement

To think critically, we must fairly evaluate opposing views, but few people do because narcissism is the default setting that says, "I'm right. Nothing will change my way of thinking. That's it." Jacobs calls this default setting "neophobic": fear of new ideas.

In a critical thinking class, students need a counterargument-rebuttal section to show they've explored opposing views.

Neophobic and Neophilic Dispositions Inform Our Moral Matrix

Our moral intuitions, or “moral matrix,” are directed by our genetic predisposition.

We are either hard-wired to be neophilic (love new things, love change) or neophobic (hate new things, hate change), and this hard-wiring influences our moral intuitions.

The Inner Ring

To explain our “moral matrix” and the way we make emotional decisions followed by rationalizations for our positions, Jacobs prefers the C.S. Lewis metaphor of The Inner Ring.

According to C.S. Lewis, our greatest desire is to be inside The Inner Ring; our greatest fear is to be outside The Inner Ring.

Our desire to belong to the ingroup is so strong, we will be open to corruption in order to conform to its ways.

We all have our own standards for what makes an Inner Ring appealing, but once we’re allowed in we make “post hoc rationalizations” to defend its positions because our desire to belong is greater than our desire to satisfy our inquisitive mind and our demands for integrity.

Other names for Inner Ring:

Tight circle

Clique

The Cool Crowd

The Club

The Tribe

The Banquet (opposite is the Outer Darkness)

 

Our desire to belong to Inner Ring makes us protect its interests. Our loyalty compromises our morality and our critical thinking. 

 

Three. Why is “some form of genuine membership necessary for thinking”?

What we need is a group whom we trust and respect. They can disagree with us, but we must trust and respect their decency and honesty. Only in this environment can we have real thinking.

If your Twitter account is infected with “haters” and liars, then you can’t engage in real thinking on Twitter, as Jacobs learned the hard way.

Connections with groups we trust give us power to resist evil and stupidity.

Four. What is “unscrupulous optimism” and why is it dangerous?

Referring to a term coined by Roger Scruton, Jacobs is writing about the foolishness of taking deeply-rooted complex human problems and finding easy solutions to these problems. These solutions become a new system, the “Clearly Right” path, and all who stand in the way become enemies.

Ingroup members are not allowed to question the Clearly Right Path.

This path is “I-based,” that is to say, it is “good for me and people like me.”

Take for example a heralded writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote a famous essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Coates wrote convincing diagnosis of America’s kleptocracy (system of stealing) and how this kleptocracy stole from the bodies, minds and souls of African-Americans. But Jacobs points out that while he agreed with the essay’s diagnosis, he did not see an adequate prescription for the injustices described, and his friends criticized him for not drinking all of Coates’ Kool-Aid.

Take other programs that need a critical examination before made into official solutions:

1. Free college education
2. Getting rid of grades
3. Universal Basic Income
4. Universal Health Care
5. Driverless Cars
6. Creating civilizations on other planets because Planet Earth is not big enough for the growing population
7. Calvinism: A predestination religion that says some people, the Elect, were chosen to go to heaven before Creation and a larger group of people, the Damned, are predestined to go to hell. Predestination is a simplified way of explaining who gets to heaven and who doesn’t.
8. Universalism: A religion that says everyone, eventually, gets to heaven. Perhaps such an approach is too optimistic?

But membership into the Inner Ring requires you keep your mouth shut if you have any doubts or critical questions.

Arguing against unscrupulous optimism, Jacobs observes we must assert prudence and healthy skepticism against simple solutions for our problems.

Chapter 3 Repulsions: Why you’re not as tolerant of others as you think

Five. What is suspicious ingroup behavior?

Blogger Scott Adams notes that a group of people expressed disgust at the glee some people showed for the death of Osama Bin Laden. But this same group of people were gleeful when Margaret Thatcher died. Their political correctness code compelled them to condemn happiness over Bin Laden’s death while celebrating Thatcher’s. They are blind to their inconsistency because they are tribalists shackled by ingroup behavior.

There is a hatred of the blue and red tribe that is growing so powerful we could find ourselves in a Civil War with physical violence.

We live in a society where it’s socially acceptable to unleash raw hate on people who don’t share our party affiliation.

Ingroup Behavior and Cognitive Bias Makes Us Blind to Our Prejudice

Personal Anecdote

In the early 1980s, I was working in a wine store in Berkeley. At that the time, I was reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks, and I read that Camus dismissed the music of Peter Tchaikovsky as “mediocre,” and wanting to be a faithful Albert Camus disciple I decided that I shared Camus’ disdain for Tchaikovsky’s music.

One afternoon in the wine store, with the classical music station on, there was this riveting piano concerto playing. I didn’t know who the composer was, so I was standing by the speaker with a notebook and pen, so I could write down the composer’s name. All my co-workers were staring at me in amusement because I had become obviously full of so much intense pleasure as I listened to the concerto. When the music ended, the announcer stated that it was the First Piano Concerto by Peter Tchaikovsky, upon which I threw the notepad and pen on the floor and screamed: “Tchaikovsky? I hate Tchaikovsky!” All my co-workers laughed at me.

Ingroup Hate

In the religious realm, Martin Luther and Thomas More, who disagreed on Catholicism and Protestantism, demonized the other as “complete crap.” And their followers used the same language to define each other.

Even those these factions had a lot in common, they hated each other to the bone.

The same is true in communism. There are Marxists and there are Trotskyists and they hate each more than they hate non-communists.

Six. Is there such thing as “life in Rationalia”?

In other words, can we live in a community that is strictly rational, that makes its decisions purely on scientific evidence?

But analysis by itself, harkening back to John Stuart Mill, tires our emotions. We need the nourishment of feeling to balance rational thinking.Why? In part because we don’t learn anything unless there is an emotional context. Learning evidence to stop smoking is one thing. But to see children who lost their parents to lung cancer is more powerful and makes the point that “hits home.”

Further, we need biases and emotional predispositions to survive. When we see dogs baring their teeth and growling, we don’t need to stick around and think about the dog before finding a way to escape the dog. We quickly use biases and cues to “reduce the decision load on the brain.”

There are true prejudices that lead us to safety and false prejudices that create misunderstandings and fog the brain.

Example of Megan Phelps-Roper

Indeed, Roper used rational thinking to leave her hateful religious cult. But the rational thinking happened AFTER she experienced the emotional response of revulsion from her church’s hateful behavior.

Chapter 4: The Money of Fools and The Power of Myth

Seven. What is myth and how does myth affect our thinking?

Referring to Mary Midgley, Jacobs defines myth as powerful symbols that help us interpret the world. “They shape its meaning.”

Without knowing it, we use myths, based on metaphors, that build narratives that describe our life, our identity, and our self.

We choose or inherit our myths.

“The brain is like a computer.”

“Animals are food, not sentient creatures.”

“The Confederate flag represents our family’s noble heritage.”

“The Confederate flag represents a false religion of white supremacy that makes people behave in ways that can only be described as a moral abomination.”

“God chose my particular religious denomination to find the true interpretation of the Bible and we’re going to heaven while the false religions and their people are all going to hell.”

Imposing the Dominant Myth on Culture Is Act of War

When we argue, we should try to arrive at mutual understanding, but too often when we represent our tribe we rely on a myth and we propagate this myth to triumph. Our version of events rules.

Conclusion: The Pleasures and Dangers of Thinking

Eight. What are the dangers of thinking critically?

Sometimes you will change your mind, which can upset your identity and core values and beliefs. This can be a scary, disorienting experience.

Your critical thinking may result in you being exiled from the tribe or ingroup from which you wish to belong.

A lot of students lose bonds with family and friends when they go to college because they begin to engage in critical thinking, which is in conflict with the way they used to be. 

I hear countless stories of students who feel alienated from high school friends, even family members, have they have a "woke" experience that forces them to think critically. 

 

1C Agenda 9-6-18: How to Think Lesson #3: Review Death of Critical Thinking, Turning Points in "Unfollow," Megan Phelps-Roper

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

“Unfollow” by Adrian Chen

YouTube video

The Oatmeal: The Backfire Effect

 

 

Review Death of Critical Thinking

One. After the Fact Fallacy: We justify our actions after the fact to delude ourselves that we used careful thought when in fact we acted on compulsion based on our lower instincts.

Two. Gaslighting. We face bullying and manipulation to cloud our judgment and perception of an abusive situation.

Three. Neophobic arrogance (fear of new ideas and change) or bullheaded ignorance: resisting reason and positive change, "breaking the floor" and transforming through the powers of reason.

Four. Inner Ring or ingroup conformity so that we are too loyal to the tribe to see its glaring faults.

Five. Unscrupulous Optimism: Making the false claim that the Right Path is simple and must be followed.

Six. Cognitive Bias: Cherry-picking facts to conform to a pre-existing opinion.

Seven. Grandiose Mythologies explain the world in an inaccurate way, but it doesn't matter because the mythologies of some kind of intoxicating appeal. 

Excerpts from Chen’s Essay:

Turning Point #1 Feelings and Empathy Contradict the Hate Tribe 

Megan Phelps-Roper lives in a hate tribe that is homophobic, among other things. She had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said. 

Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “god hates your feelings.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols. 

Turning Point #2 Adapting to Twitter 

But on Twitter Phelps-Roper found that it was better to take a gentler tone. For one thing, Twitter’s hundred-and-forty-character limit made it hard to fit both a florid insult and a scriptural point. And if she made things personal the conversation was inevitably derailed by a flood of angry tweets. She still preached God’s hate, and still liberally deployed the word “fag,” but she also sprinkled her tweets with cheerful exclamations and emoticons. She became adept at deflecting critics with a wry joke. “So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one user tweeted at her. “More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” she replied. Phelps-Roper told me, “We weren’t supposed to care about what people thought about us, but I did.” As she developed her affable rhetorical style, she justified it with a proverb: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” 

Turning Point #3 Making Friends on Twitter and Becoming Humanized

 

Other Twitter users were fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial who Phelps-Roper seemed to be on Twitter. “I remember just thinking, How can somebody who appreciates good music believe so many hateful things?” Graham Hughes said. In November, 2009, Hughes, then a college student in British Columbia, interviewed Phelps-Roper for a religious-studies class. Afterward, they corresponded frequently on Twitter. When Hughes was hospitalized with a brain infection, Phelps-Roper showed him more concern than many of his real-life friends. “I knew there was a genuine connection between us,” he said.

As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?” 

Turning Point #4 Megan Questions Her Literalism 

Phelps-Roper and Abitbol continued their conversations via e-mail and Twitter’s direct-message function. In Phelps-Roper’s effort to better understand Westboro’s new prophecies, she had bought a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” but she found it more profitable just to ask Abitbol her questions. Here was a real live Orthodox Jew who lived in Israel and was more than happy to enlighten her. During their debates over Scripture, Phelps-Roper sometimes quoted passages from the Old Testament; Abitbol often countered that their meaning differed in the original Hebrew, so Phelps-Roper bought some language-learning software. She figured that, since she would soon be living in Israel awaiting the end of the world, she should learn the language. Abitbol helped her with the vocabulary.

Phelps-Roper still urged Abitbol to repent, but as someone who was concerned about a wayward friend. “I just wish you would obey God and use your considerable platform to warn your audience about the consequences of engaging in conduct that God calls abomination,” she e-mailed Abitbol in October, 2010.

In response, Abitbol kept pressing Phelps-Roper on Westboro’s doctrine. One day, he asked about a Westboro sign that said “death penalty for fags,” referring to a commandment from Leviticus. Abitbol pointed out that Jesus had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Abitbol knew that at least one member of Westboro had committed a sin that Leviticus also deems a capital crime. Phelps-Roper’s oldest brother, Sam, was the product of a relationship that Shirley had had with a man she met while she was in law school, before she married Megan’s father.

Shirley’s sin of fornication was often thrown in the church members’ faces by counterprotesters. Westboro always argued that the difference between Shirley and gay people was that Shirley had repented of her sin, whereas gays marched in pride parades. But Abitbol wrote that if gay people were killed they wouldn’t have the opportunity to repent. 

Turning Point #5 Megan Must Confront Inconsistencies and Double Standards in Her Religious Group 

Phelps-Roper was struck by the double standard, and, as she did whenever she had a question about doctrine, she brought up the issue with her mother. Shirley responded that Romans said gays were “worthy of death,” and that if it was good enough for God it was good enough for Westboro. “It was such a settled point that they’ve been preaching for so long it’s almost like it didn’t mean anything to her,” Phelps-Roper said. Still, she concluded that Westboro was in the wrong. “That was the first time I came to a place where I disagreed, I knew I disagreed, and I didn’t accept the answer that they gave,” she said. Phelps-Roper knew that to press the issue would create problems for her in the church, so she quietly stopped holding the “death penalty for fags” sign. There were plenty of other signs whose message she still believed in wholeheartedly. She also put an end to the conversations with Abitbol.

 

Turning Point #6 Friendship with C.G. Causes Megan to Question Her Church’s Cruelty (Megan’s empathy grows) 

Another online relationship proved more threatening. In February, 2011, Phelps-Roper began to have conversations on Twitter with a user named @F_K_A. His avatar was Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby.” He had learned of Westboro after reading an article about the Anonymous hack. “He sent me a tweet, and initially it was like this angry, nasty tweet,” Phelps-Roper said. But @F_K_A was disarmed by Phelps-Roper’s friendly demeanor. He began to ask her questions about life in Westboro, and, because he was curious instead of condemning, she kept answering them. One day, Phelps-Roper recalled, “I asked him some kind of pointed question about the Bible. He said something like, ‘I can’t answer that, but I have never been beaten in Words with Friends’ ”—the popular online Scrabble knockoff. Phelps-Roper replied, “I can’t boast the same. =)” She put her Words with Friends username at the end of the tweet.

They began to talk about the church using the in-game chat function, free from Twitter’s character limit. @F_K_A told Phelps-Roper to call him C.G. But C.G. remained a mystery. She knew that he was an attorney, but she didn’t know where he lived or how old he was. “He was careful not to reveal anything about himself,” Phelps-Roper said.

Like David Abitbol, C.G. argued against Westboro’s beliefs and practices, but while Abitbol’s arguments were doctrinal C.G. was most critical of Westboro’s cruelty. “We had the same discussion several times when someone would die,” Phelps-Roper said. C.G. urged Phelps-Roper to think of how much hurt it must cause the families of the deceased to see Phelps-Roper and her family rejoicing. Westboro divided people into good and evil, but, Phelps-Roper said, C.G. “always tried to advocate for a third group of people: people who were decent but not religious.” She had heard all these arguments before, but they had never affected her as they did when C.G. made them. “I just really liked him,” she said. “He seemed to genuinely like people and care about people, and that resonated with me.”

Phelps-Roper increasingly found herself turning to Bible passages where tragedy is not met with joy. The Old Testament prophet Elisha, for example, weeps when he foresees disaster for Israel. One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. “Thank God for famine in East Africa!” she wrote. “God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked to their face!” When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church.

 

Turning Point #7 Megan’s Sister Grace Sees a Forbidden Romance Brewing (Megan even has a “love dream”)

 

As Phelps-Roper developed her relationship with C.G., her sister Grace grew suspicious. “Suddenly, her taste in music started changing,” Grace told me. “It annoyed me, because it wasn’t coming from Megan. It was coming from him, this question mark of a person that I don’t get to know about, but she has some kind of thing with.” As young children, Grace and Megan had squabbled constantly, but they had grown close. Grace was seven years younger than Megan, and still in high school at the time. Grace would scroll through Megan’s iPhone, asking about the various messages and e-mails. But soon after Megan started talking to C.G. she stopped letting Grace look at her phone. “I remember thinking, What the heck? What are you hiding?” Grace said.

For young women in Westboro, having romantic interactions with someone outside the church was forbidden. When Phelps-Roper was growing up, one of her cousins had been pushed out of the church for, among other things, getting entangled with boys; other young women had been harshly punished. Phelps-Roper had long assumed that she would likely never get married, since she was related to almost every male in the church. “I was terrified of even thinking about guys,” she said. “It’s not just the physical stuff that can get you in trouble.” She did her best to displace her feelings for C.G. onto the music and books he recommended, which she fervently consumed. “I was in denial,” she said.

Then, on September 30, 2011, she had a dream: It was a beautiful summer day, and she was standing on the driveway of the church. A black car with tinted windows pulled up, and a tall, blond man got out. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was C.G. She walked up to him, and they embraced. She knew her family could see them on the surveillance cameras that line the Block, but she didn’t care. “It was so real, that feeling of wanting to be with him,” Phelps-Roper told me. She woke up fighting back tears. “He was not a good person, according to the church,” she said. “And the fact that I dreamed about him, and the strong feeling of wanting that relationship, represented huge danger to me.” That day, she told C.G. that they couldn’t talk anymore. She deleted her Words with Friends account. C.G. deleted his Twitter account. 

Turning Point #8 Division Brews in the Church 

Phelps-Roper tried to throw herself back into the Westboro community, but the atmosphere had changed while she was distracted by her relationship with C.G. It had started in April, 2011. Her mother seemed mysteriously troubled. After Phelps-Roper pressed her parents, they showed her an e-mail they’d received from her oldest brother, Sam, and Steve Drain, another church member. It accused her mother of lacking humility, saying that she was too zealous in correcting other members’ behavior and had overreached her authority on a number of occasions, Phelps-Roper told me. Reading the e-mail made her sick with fear. When a Westboro member was singled out for bad behavior, it often triggered a harrowing period of discipline. The smallest transgression could spark another round of punishment, until the member either shaped up or was kicked out of the church. 

Turning Point #9 Confusion Turns to Outrage 

Phelps-Roper’s confusion soon turned to outrage. In 2012, she was twenty-six years old, but she was still being treated like a child. Once-minor indignities, like being accompanied by an adult chaperone while eating lunch at a restaurant with other young church members, now seemed unbearable. In April, she was shocked when Westboro expelled a cousin of hers without adhering to the process that the church had always followed, which was derived from the Book of Matthew. Typically, expulsion resulted only after a unanimous decision, but in the cousin’s case she was excluded over other members’ objections. (Drain recalls no objections, and said, “Everything was done decently and in accordance with Scripture.”) “It stopped feeling like this larger-than-life divine institution ordained and led by God, and more like the sniping and sordid activity of men who wanted to be in control,” Phelps-Roper said. 

She resented the increasing authority wielded by Drain. One of the few Westboro members unrelated to Fred Phelps, Drain had visited Topeka in 2000 to film a skeptical documentary about the church, but he soon became convinced of its message. The next year, he and his family joined the church. He’d long pushed for a larger role in Westboro, and after the elders came to power his influence increased. In February, 2012, during the funeral of Whitney Houston, in New Jersey, Drain urged Phelps-Roper and other members to tweet poorly Photoshopped images that depicted them haranguing mourners. The media quickly unravelled the hoax. (Drain told me that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally.)

Phelps-Roper was embarrassed by the debacle. It undermined her own proud claims on Twitter to be spreading God’s truth—and lying violated Scripture. In addition, she now had to have all her media appearances approved by Drain. “It seems like he wants to be Pope Steve and for no one else to do anything without his permission,” she wrote in her journal. “I hate it so much.”

Megan’s doubt engendered by the “death penalty for fags” sign grew. She started to complain to her mother, saying that the elders were not obeying the Bible. They treated her mother and other members with cruelty when the Bible required brotherly love, she said. The elders acted arrogantly and tolerated no dissent, when God demanded meekness and humility. Phelps-Roper was struck by the similarities between her arguments and what C.G. and David Abitbol had always said about the church. “It was like we were finally doing to ourselves what we had done to everyone else,” she said. “Seeing those parallels was really disorienting.”

 

Turning Point #10 Megan and Her Sister Talk About Leaving Their Church

Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”

The next day, she mentioned the possibility of leaving to Grace. Grace was horrified. “It just sounded ridiculous to even suggest it,” Grace told me. “These were the points I brought up: we’re never going to see our families again, we’re going to go to Hell for eternity, and our life will be meaningless.” Megan, still uncertain, agreed. But she plunged into a profound crisis of faith. “It was like flipping a switch,” she said. “So many other thoughts came in that I’d never pursued, and that’s every doubt that I’d ever had, everything that had ever seemed illogical or off.”

When they were together, Megan engaged Grace in interminable theological conversations. When they were apart, Megan detailed her doubts in text messages. One day, she texted Grace, “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?” She added, “Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people? I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no. When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.” Two days later, she texted Grace about Hell: “Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.” Grace replied, “But what if?”

That day, Grace wrote to Megan, “Our belief in God has always curbed everything. Like, pain & sorrow, I mean. Without that we’d only have our belief in each other. But we are human & humans die. What would we have if we didn’t have each other?” For Megan, the answer could be found in other people. “We know what it is to be kind & good to people,” she wrote. “We would just have to find somewhere else, other people to love and care about and help, too.” Grace wrote back, “I don’t want other people.” In truth, Megan didn’t want other people, either; she desperately wanted things in Westboro to go back to the way they had been. But the idea of living among outsiders was no longer unimaginable.

Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.”

 

Turning Point #11 Grace’s Affair Forces an Exit

 

As the sisters agonized over whether to leave, they befriended an older man in the church and his wife, eventually becoming allies in discontent. For a while, they all planned to leave together. Then the couple’s marriage began to deteriorate, and the husband told Megan and Grace that they were going to divorce. Grace became involved in a brief romantic relationship with the man. After the relationship ended, the wife learned about it, and sent a letter to Megan and Grace’s parents revealing both the relationship and the sisters’ plan to leave.

On Sunday, November 11th, the family had just returned from church when Megan and Grace were called into their parents’ bedroom, where their father began to read the letter out loud. Megan told Grace quietly that they had to leave: “It was like the world was exploding and I didn’t want to be around to see it.” Their mother tried to calm things down. Their parents wanted to talk things over—they seemed to think that the sisters could be persuaded to stay—but Megan and Grace had made up their minds. As Grace packed, their father came into her room and asked what she wanted the church to do differently. “I want you and everyone else to leave with me,” Grace replied. Their parents were stunned, but they didn’t try to force the sisters to stay.

As the sisters packed, their younger brother Zach sat at the piano downstairs, crying and playing hymns, which he hoped might change their mind. Other church members stopped by to say goodbye and to warn the sisters of the consequences of their decision. “The fact that I’m coming face to face with the damage that I was doing to them was even worse than anything else that was happening to me,” Phelps-Roper said. Her parents told her to say goodbye to her grandfather. She walked over to the residence where her grandparents lived, above the church sanctuary. When Megan told them she was leaving, her grandfather looked at her grandmother and said, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time.”

Megan and Grace’s father drove them to a hotel in Topeka, where he had paid for a room, but they were too scared to spend the night alone, so they called the teacher who had agreed to store their boxes. That night, they cried themselves to sleep on couches in his basement. Megan and Grace returned to their house the next day with a U-Haul truck to pick up their remaining possessions. As they walked away for the last time, Shirley called after them, “You know you can always come back.”

Terms to Consider for Your Essay As You Apply Alan Jacobs' Text to Your Analysis

One. Repugnant Cultural Other

Two. Refutation Mode

Three. "Forbidden Knowledge"

Four. Deep Emotional Experience and Moral Awakening Important for Change of Mind (not just rational thinking)

Five. Utopian Bargains Damn the Soul

Six. Inner Ring and Ingroup Behavior

Seven. Unscrupulous Optimism

Eight. Myth Making

 

1C Agenda 9-4-18: How to Think Lesson #2: Ethose, Pathos, Logos; How Good People Can be Led to Do Bad Things

Homework Check:

Read How to Think, up to page 50 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why we are bad at thinking.

Team Activity:

Share some stories of people who got unfairly scapegoated or bullied in order to make the bullying group feel stronger with a shared purpose. 

Next Homework:

Finish How to Think and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains that being a critical thinker can be dangerous.

 

Lesson Two

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Chapter 2: Attractions: How Good People Can be Led to Do Bad Things

One. What matters at the Yale Political Union?

Thinking well is not the priority. Winning is. Why? Because the world is a zero-sum game.

How is winning accomplished in the realm of critical thinking? Winning people over through the power of persuasion and “being won over.” 

To win is a competition, but competition is not always moral. The need to dominate others springs from the war instinct. It's a form of human aggression. It's our Inner Lobster.

 

Real Thinking

Having the ability to use ethos (credibility), logos (logic and reasoning), and pathos (strong emotion) to present an argument is a sign of intelligence, craftiness, and commitment to one’s ideas.

To cause someone to “break the floor,” to change their mind in the middle of a debate was considered one of life’s highest achievements.

This is significant because when you change your mind, “you yield a different you.”

Changing your mind, in other words, radically redefines the essence of yourself.

Jacobs makes another important point about a culture that embraces the possibility of “breaking the floor”: Only in a culture where people who disagree aren’t trying to hurt each other but share values can such a changing of the mind take place. A certain trust must be present for people to be in a position to change their mind.

This kind of trust is difficult when everyone is in their own social media silo, absorbed by their smartphone chat groups and ignoring the people who surround them in the physical world. 

 

Two. What makes our thoughts almost secondary to the point of being irrelevant?

Jacobs quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, who observes that we experience instantaneous moral intuitions and judgments followed by our explanation of those intuitions. Our “post hoc constructions,” after-the-fact thoughts, rationalize our emotional dispositions.

A variation of the post hoc construction is the sour grapes fallacy. We do something stupid, and then we justify our stupidity by saying that doing the smart thing would not have mattered since life sucks anyway. 

Example of such an argument:

"Yes, you went to college and you make good money as an engineer, and I dropped out of college, and I'm working at the coffee shop. But look at all those taxes you have to pay. And that summer vacation to Maui cost you over five thousand dollars. Bummer, man. And look how complicated your life is. And look at all those hours you have to work a week. And for what? You're always tired. Look at me. I've got energy and lots of free time during the day."

"Yeah, but, dude, I live in a house. You live in a cardboard box."

The speaker never had sound arguments for dropping out of college, but he is hellbent on justifying his semi-poverty while working in a coffee shop.

 

Bind and Blind

These “moral intuitions” both “bind and blind.” We are both binded to our political and religious teams, but we are at the same time blinded by reasonable opposition to our strongly-held views.

Critical Thinking Requirement

To think critically, we must fairly evaluate opposing views, but few people do because narcissism is the default setting that says, "I'm right. Nothing will change my way of thinking. That's it." Jacobs calls this default setting "neophobic": fear of new ideas.

In a critical thinking class, students need a counterargument-rebuttal section to show they've explored opposing views.

Neophobic and Neophilic Dispositions Inform Our Moral Matrix

Our moral intuitions, or “moral matrix,” are directed by our genetic predisposition.

We are either hard-wired to be neophilic (love new things, love change) or neophobic (hate new things, hate change), and this hard-wiring influences our moral intuitions.

The Inner Ring

To explain our “moral matrix” and the way we make emotional decisions followed by rationalizations for our positions, Jacobs prefers the C.S. Lewis metaphor of The Inner Ring.

According to C.S. Lewis, our greatest desire is to be inside The Inner Ring; our greatest fear is to be outside The Inner Ring.

Our desire to belong to the ingroup is so strong, we will be open to corruption in order to conform to its ways.

We all have our own standards for what makes an Inner Ring appealing, but once we’re allowed in we make “post hoc rationalizations” to defend its positions because our desire to belong is greater than our desire to satisfy our inquisitive mind and our demands for integrity.

Other names for Inner Ring:

Tight circle

Clique

The Cool Crowd

The Club

The Tribe

The Banquet (opposite is the Outer Darkness)

 

Our desire to belong to Inner Ring makes us protect its interests. Our loyalty compromises our morality and our critical thinking. 

 

Three. Why is “some form of genuine membership necessary for thinking”?

What we need is a group whom we trust and respect. They can disagree with us, but we must trust and respect their decency and honesty. Only in this environment can we have real thinking.

If your Twitter account is infected with “haters” and liars, then you can’t engage in real thinking on Twitter, as Jacobs learned the hard way.

Connections with groups we trust give us power to resist evil and stupidity.

Four. What is “unscrupulous optimism” and why is it dangerous?

Referring to a term coined by Roger Scruton, Jacobs is writing about the foolishness of taking deeply-rooted complex human problems and finding easy solutions to these problems. These solutions become a new system, the “Clearly Right” path, and all who stand in the way become enemies.

Ingroup members are not allowed to question the Clearly Right Path.

This path is “I-based,” that is to say, it is “good for me and people like me.”

Take for example a heralded writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote a famous essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Coates wrote convincing diagnosis of America’s kleptocracy (system of stealing) and how this kleptocracy stole from the bodies, minds and souls of African-Americans. But Jacobs points out that while he agreed with the essay’s diagnosis, he did not see an adequate prescription for the injustices described, and his friends criticized him for not drinking all of Coates’ Kool-Aid.

Take other programs that need a critical examination before made into official solutions:

1. Free college education
2. Getting rid of grades
3. Universal Basic Income
4. Universal Health Care
5. Driverless Cars
6. Creating civilizations on other planets because Planet Earth is not big enough for the growing population
7. Calvinism: A predestination religion that says some people, the Elect, were chosen to go to heaven before Creation and a larger group of people, the Damned, are predestined to go to hell. Predestination is a simplified way of explaining who gets to heaven and who doesn’t.
8. Universalism: A religion that says everyone, eventually, gets to heaven. Perhaps such an approach is too optimistic?

But membership into the Inner Ring requires you keep your mouth shut if you have any doubts or critical questions.

Arguing against unscrupulous optimism, Jacobs observes we must assert prudence and healthy skepticism against simple solutions for our problems.

Chapter 3 Repulsions: Why you’re not as tolerant of others as you think

Five. What is suspicious ingroup behavior?

Blogger Scott Adams notes that a group of people expressed disgust at the glee some people showed for the death of Osama Bin Laden. But this same group of people were gleeful when Margaret Thatcher died. Their political correctness code compelled them to condemn happiness over Bin Laden’s death while celebrating Thatcher’s. They are blind to their inconsistency because they are tribalists shackled by ingroup behavior.

There is a hatred of the blue and red tribe that is growing so powerful we could find ourselves in a Civil War with physical violence.

We live in a society where it’s socially acceptable to unleash raw hate on people who don’t share our party affiliation.

Ingroup Behavior and Cognitive Bias Makes Us Blind to Our Prejudice

Personal Anecdote

In the early 1980s, I was working in a wine store in Berkeley. At that the time, I was reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks, and I read that Camus dismissed the music of Peter Tchaikovsky as “mediocre,” and wanting to be a faithful Albert Camus disciple I decided that I shared Camus’ disdain for Tchaikovsky’s music.

One afternoon in the wine store, with the classical music station on, there was this riveting piano concerto playing. I didn’t know who the composer was, so I was standing by the speaker with a notebook and pen, so I could write down the composer’s name. All my co-workers were staring at me in amusement because I had become obviously full of so much intense pleasure as I listened to the concerto. When the music ended, the announcer stated that it was the First Piano Concerto by Peter Tchaikovsky, upon which I threw the notepad and pen on the floor and screamed: “Tchaikovsky? I hate Tchaikovsky!” All my co-workers laughed at me.

Ingroup Hate

In the religious realm, Martin Luther and Thomas More, who disagreed on Catholicism and Protestantism, demonized the other as “complete crap.” And their followers used the same language to define each other.

Even those these factions had a lot in common, they hated each other to the bone.

The same is true in communism. There are Marxists and there are Trotskyists and they hate each more than they hate non-communists.

Six. Is there such thing as “life in Rationalia”?

In other words, can we live in a community that is strictly rational, that makes its decisions purely on scientific evidence?

But analysis by itself, harkening back to John Stuart Mill, tires our emotions. We need the nourishment of feeling to balance rational thinking.Why? In part because we don’t learn anything unless there is an emotional context. Learning evidence to stop smoking is one thing. But to see children who lost their parents to lung cancer is more powerful and makes the point that “hits home.”

Further, we need biases and emotional predispositions to survive. When we see dogs baring their teeth and growling, we don’t need to stick around and think about the dog before finding a way to escape the dog. We quickly use biases and cues to “reduce the decision load on the brain.”

There are true prejudices that lead us to safety and false prejudices that create misunderstandings and fog the brain.

Example of Megan Phelps-Roper

Indeed, Roper used rational thinking to leave her hateful religious cult. But the rational thinking happened AFTER she experienced the emotional response of revulsion from her church’s hateful behavior.

Chapter 4: The Money of Fools and The Power of Myth

Seven. What is myth and how does myth affect our thinking?

Referring to Mary Midgley, Jacobs defines myth as powerful symbols that help us interpret the world. “They shape its meaning.”

Without knowing it, we use myths, based on metaphors, that build narratives that describe our life, our identity, and our self.

We choose or inherit our myths.

“The brain is like a computer.”

“Animals are food, not sentient creatures.”

“The Confederate flag represents our family’s noble heritage.”

“The Confederate flag represents a false religion of white supremacy that makes people behave in ways that can only be described as a moral abomination.”

“God chose my particular religious denomination to find the true interpretation of the Bible and we’re going to heaven while the false religions and their people are all going to hell.”

Imposing the Dominant Myth on Culture Is Act of War

When we argue, we should try to arrive at mutual understanding, but too often when we represent our tribe we rely on a myth and we propagate this myth to triumph. Our version of events rules.

Conclusion: The Pleasures and Dangers of Thinking

Eight. What are the dangers of thinking critically?

Sometimes you will change your mind, which can upset your identity and core values and beliefs. This can be a scary, disorienting experience.

Your critical thinking may result in you being exiled from the tribe or ingroup from which you wish to belong.

A lot of students lose bonds with family and friends when they go to college because they begin to engage in critical thinking, which is in conflict with the way they used to be. 

I hear countless stories of students who feel alienated from high school friends, even family members, have they have a "woke" experience that forces them to think critically. 

 

1C Agenda 8-30-18: How to Think Lesson #1: Balancing Our Inner Lobster with a Moral Sense

During Homework Check, Group Activity:

Get into teams and write about hostile disagreements you've seen on social media. What do these disagreements say about breakdown of critical thinking skills in America?

 

Writing Assignment:

Final Draft on turnitin due 9-13-18

First Draft for Peer Edit due 9-11

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

"The Cognitive Biases: Tricking Your Brain"

 

Balance Your Inner Lobster with Your Moral Sense

Jordan Peterson Uses Lobster Society to Give Us 5 Essential Life Lessons

From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back

 

Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life has a famous chapter comparing lobsters to humans. Peterson’s view of competition is dark and realistic, and it is the basis for his claim that we need to be self-reliant and abandon all naivete about our plight in this world.

 

Deeper Meaning

 

Peterson's analogy makes us realize what we’re up against in a world of competition, and he makes us identify negative feedback loops that make us prey to predators, and he helps us replace those negative feedback loops with positive ones in order to help us succeed in life.

Life Lesson #1: Our Territory Determines Our Quality of Life

Jordan Peterson observes that lobsters have survived for 350 million years, far longer than dinosaurs and humans, and that their survival instincts can give us some essential life lessons.

Competition for Territory

Like lobsters, we compete for territory because territory (zip code, if you will) determines our quality of life.

The rich live in premium locations and enjoy longest, healthy lives. The poor live in high-stress areas and live shorter, more sickly, more brutal lives.

I live in Torrance, about a mile and a half from the beach, and you can live 7 miles from here in the city of Wilmington, which is close to oil refineries known to produce spikes in asthma, heart disease, and cancer.

If you live a mile or closer to the freeway, you have increased risk for cancer, heart disease, and dementia.

Like lobsters, we compete for where we will live. We compete for territory.

Life Lesson #2: The world we live in a zero-sum game.

Zero-sum game means that victory, wealth, resources, good health, and top-ranking social hierarchy for a tiny amount of people results in defeat, poverty, deprivation, sickliness and low-ranking status for overwhelming majority.

This is a brutal principle. A winner in some category of life, reproductive success, the arts, business, home ownership in premium coastal locations comes with someone else paying the price.

Someone enjoys staying in a luxury hotel in Hawaii that costs thousands of dollars a night.

Someone cleans the bathroom of that luxury hotel for minimum wage and lives in brutal conditions to make sure that hotel customer has the best and cleanest amenities.

If you get the bad end of the stick, the world doesn’t care because the world’s default setting is to ignore you and assign you zero worth. This brutal condition compels us to take responsibility for our own station in life. If we don’t fight for our territory, like the lobster fights for his, we are doomed.

Life Lesson #3: We exist in a pecking order that affects our serotonin levels.

We are in a constant competition for resources in a fight to win ranking on what Peterson calls a “pecking order” for quality of life and reproductive success.

Pecking order, largely based on income, for humans, determines neurochemistry, which elevates serotonin in lobster victory and elevates octopamine in defeat. These hormones affect body language, either bold and proud or cowering and ashamed.

Life Lesson #4: Our success or failure in life depends on what kind of constant feedback loop we set into motion.

Our social status ranking affects others’ perception of us, and how we see others perceive us affects our hormones, and our hormones, manifest in body language, affect how people perceive us, so that we exist in a constant feedback loop.

High serotonin levels make people attracted to us, which in turn elevate our serotonin levels even more, creating a positive feedback loop.

The converse is also true: Low serotonin levels make us repellent to others, which in turn lowers our serotonin levels even more, creating a negative feedback loop.

Bullied People

Peterson uses example of an adolescent who was bullied and who reacts to life’s challenges based on being a bullying victim. He becomes fragile, whiny, and helpless with low levels of serotonin, making him more vulnerable to further bullying, which reinforces his negative view of the world.

His groveling, defeatist body language, cowering before some catastrophe, sets him up as a victim for future bullies.

Unloved Depressed People

Depressed people feel useless. A lot of depressed people never received love as children. They grow up with low levels of serotonin. They give depressed vibes to others who turn away from the depressed who in turn feel unloved, a perception that makes them even more depressed, and so the negative feedback loop continues.

The can continue to lead a miserable life defined by this negative feedback loop, or they can do something about it by creating a positive feedback loop.

How is this achieved, and do you really want to achieve this? If you do, please listen:

 

Principle #5: You Are Responsible for Creating a Positive Feedback Loop

Taking care of yourself, your fitness, your nutrition, your sleep, your limited screen time on social media, your body posture, to name some examples, can create a positive feedback loop. Respecting yourself causes others to respect you, which in turn reinforces your self-respect.  

“People, like lobsters, size each other up” (40), so you need to take care of yourself.

Self-care is the first step in the road to achieving a positive feedback loop.

The Obvious Isn’t the Commonly Practiced

Taking care of yourself may sound obvious, but most people don’t take care of themselves.

Here’s an example: Up to 30% of people never fill their doctors’ prescriptions for their illnesses. Another 50% who do fill their prescriptions don’t follow the instructions.

Most people follow prescription instructions for their pets more than they do themselves.

We can conclude that most people like their pets more than they like themselves.

They may not even be aware of how they abuse and neglect themselves in a sign of zero self-worth.

You have to want to value yourself and you have to show this through self-care.  

Examples of Self-Care

Social Media Excess

By posting too much on social media, you’re advertising your loneliness and neediness. You’re making yourself appear like a weak lobster in the social media universe, and others will avoid you, causing you to feel rejected, ensuing more feelings of loneliness, neediness, and depression, which will create a negative feedback loop.

Defend your honor and your self-respect by cutting back on social media, achieving excellence in your fitness and studies, and creating a positive feedback loop through those pursuits.

Diet and Exercise

Defend your honor and your self-respect by no longer larding your diet with excessive sugars and processed foods and getting “punk fed, which will result in metabolic syndrome, dyspepsia, fatigue, and diabetes, having the cumulative effects of being a Weak Lobster. Instead, eat whole foods and find exercise that you enjoy doing consistently so that you show yourself and others that you care about yourself so that you can create a positive feedback loop.  

College Studies

Defend your honor and your self-respect by “going all in” your college studies instead of approaching college with a sullen, half-hearted, slovenly cowardice that tells yourself and the world that you’re too scared and weak-hearted to be successful.

In the realm of social media, diet, exercise, and college studies, you need to cultivate Lobster Strength and Dignity to protect your territory.

Serotonin Affects Your Personality

Self-care increases your serotonin levels.

Jordan Peterson reminds us that physical and attitudinal changes mentioned in the above examples don’t just hormonally alter our body and change our body language; they change our spirit and psychology in a way that steers us toward success.

Respond to a Challenge; Don’t Brace Yourself for Catastrophe

Making the above changes is the first step in “responding to a challenge rather than bracing for a catastrophe” (40).

Your Posture Changes Your Psychology

Peterson calls his lobster chapter “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back.”

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is not just a physical posture; it is a position you take with your mind to defend your honor and self-respect. Such a posture is the first responsibility: To take charge of how you react to a world rife with challenges, competition, and evil.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back makes you attentive to others so you can read social cues and respond appropriately.

To slouch like a sad sack sends your brain signals deep inside your head so you become oblivious to the outside world around you and clueless you become a victim.

Reject Victim Mentality by Taking Responsibility for Protecting Your Self Interests

Reject the victim mentality and replace the victim with a more heroic version of yourself. This is the essence of Peterson’s message in this chapter.

Review

One. Understand that the world’s default setting is to ignore you, so that you are responsible for carving out your own territory.

Two. Understand you can redirect your negative feedback loop through self-care and create positive feedback loop that will point you to success.

Three. Understand that you can only rely on yourself to create a positive feedback loop. There is no guarantee that you will find a mentor or benevolent human being to guide you.

I never had a mentor, and I had to find my own way, but I do two mentorships at my college.

I do Puente and Project Success. Recently, I’ve mentored a student who got into Berkeley law school, a student who got into Morehouse screen writing program, a student who got a civil engineering job, and a student who got an electrical engineering job.

I give myself zero credit for these students’ success. They saw the stakes that were before them, they rose to the occasion, they fought through adversity, poverty, unsupportive parents, moving from their native country, and even depression.

But they made it because, even though they didn’t know it, they followed the principles of lobster society.

The lobster has survived for 350 million years for a reason: Its instincts are correct because the lobster has a proven track record, so we’d be wise to learn from those instincts.  

 

However, the Lobster By Itself Is Not a Teacher of Salvation. The Lobster Is Only Part of a Healthy Human Being

Lobster Competition in World of Social Media Tribalism and Structural Inequality Has Resulted in a Loss of Balance

 

Knowing that we compete against one another is a brutal reality that we should understand.

However, our Inner Lobster needs to be balanced by our Moral Sense, which consists of moral laws, empathy, cooperation, and universal humanitarian values.

When we fail to achieve a balance between our Lobster and our Moral Sense, we endanger ourselves.

Too much Inner Lobster makes us vulnerable to the barbarian throng: “every man for himself,” “dog eat dog,” “fight tooth and claw,” “only strong survive in the jungle,” and so on.

Too much on the Moral Sense side of the equation makes us weak, passive, and naive to external invaders, predators, and clever enemies. We must have some of the Alpha Lobster’s defensive instincts and swagger to protect ourselves.

So a balance must be achieved for our self-preservation.

In America, the balance is out of whack:

One. Rapid globalization scares the hell out of us.

Two. Rapid automation scares the hell out of us.

Three. Structural inequality making it more and more impossible for regular folks to afford housing, healthcare, and education scare the hell out of us.

Four. White people, especially of an older generation, are scared that America doesn’t look as white as it did when they were young so that racist political demagogues appeal to these white people’s worst instincts.  

Five. Social media generates news algorithms based on their personality profiles that silo social media users into isolating political bubbles so that they hear only what they want to hear based on cognitive biases.

Six. Americans are more and more divided along political lines to the point that a recent poll shows that more parents fear their children will marry someone of the “wrong political persuasion” over a different religious faith.

Seven. Americans no longer see their fellow Americans as sharing a common goal but as enemies who must be destroyed through trolls on social media or even worse methods resulting in what some are calling a “soft civil war.”

Eight. A lot of social media trolls are connected to Alt-Right racist and nationalist movements, and these trolls, which would be laughed at as a fringe movement just 10 years ago, feel empowered as they see mainstream politicians pushing for their cause.

Nine. National unity and shared purpose has taken a back seat to Zero-Sum Game: winners and losers.

Ten. Critical thinking, civil discussions in the marketplace of ideas, is no longer the priority: It’s now blood support: Kill your enemy because their loss is your gain.

Lobster society has taken over critical thinking and our Moral Sense.

With the loss of critical thinking, with the loss of national unity, with tooth-and-claw Zero-Sum Game being the top priority, America exists in a state of huge chaos and instability. Hate crimes are on the rise. Racism is more flagrant and outspoken to the degree that one of my African-American students recently had “KKK” spray painted on his car in the parking lot of this college.

We are in trouble.

The Lobster without moral balance is an ugly creature hellbent on destruction.

We need our Inner Lobster, but we need it to be balanced.

Introduction: Why we’re worse at thinking than we think

One. Why are books about thinking so depressing?

People can't think evidenced by an onslaught of books written about faulty thinking, human delusion, logical fallacies, bias, etc.

People most eager to express their opinions do so in a state of ignorance to the point they are not even aware that they don't know how to form informed views. They cannot think, but they are not willing to combine humility and effort to learn to do so. 

Worse, there are hordes of people who are indifferent to truth, who live in a world of nihilism (life has no meaning) where everything is relative and one "truth" is just as "valid" as another and any moral argument can be countered with an equally compelling opposing moral argument so that one says "everyone is entitled to their own opinion."

Worse, thanks to social media and a host of other factors, we tend to be tribalistic in our "thinking," letting our tribe dictate our opinions. We care more about siding with a tribe than actually thinking. 

Because they all show how thinking is larded with errors, and “they provide an astonishingly detailed and wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—the infinitely varied paths we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting It Wrong.”

Jacobs lists the names of these erroneous types of thinking:

Anchoring

Availability cascades

Confirmation bias

Dunning-Kruger effect

Endowment effect

Framing effects

Group attribution errors

Halo effects

Ingroup and outgroup homogeneity biases

Recency illusions

We're Discouraged by the Long List

Jacobs writes: “What a chronicle of ineptitude, arrogance, sheer dumbassery.”

We're Repulsed by Arrogant "Fixers" of the Problem

Jacobs is particularly offended by smug frauds: “Still worse, those who believe that they are impeccably thoughtful turn out to be some of the worst offenders against good sense.”

Jacobs is “dizzy” from all the fallacious thinking. He wants us to think correctly, but what does that mean?

Two. What is thinking? Or to use Jacobs' words, what is "correct" thinking?

 

Our Cortex (thinking) Vs. Our Inner Reptile (instinct)

In his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs uses the example of someone who agonizes over what car to buy. After the purchase, the husband argues with the wife about his choice. She says he should have bought the one that first appealed to him. 

He did not think about buying a car, using his cortex, the powers of logic and reason, to arrive at his decision. Rather, he relied on his Inner Reptile, his instinct and desire, to choose a car.

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.”

Acting on impulse and instinct is not thinking. Buying a car because it appeals to your reptilian senses is not thinking.

Why Most People Don’t Think

One. Most of us don’t deliberate. We act on impulse and intuition. We act on the desires of our Inner Reptile.

Two. Most of us conform to expectations to find acceptance rather than think for ourselves.

Three. Many of us our indifferent to thinking and truth, but are on the zombie default setting in which we are consumers of meaningless information and stimulation from some screen or other. We can't be bothered with facts or critical thinking skills because we are so absorbed by the zombie mode of existence.

Academic life compromises thinking.

In the ideal, going to college should be a journey of independent, critical thinking. But getting good grades is the goal, and getting good grades is based on conformity, that is, pleasing your professors.

Too many professors repel critical thinking; instead their egos demand that you give them an ego massage by regurgitating their worldview. Your history, English, philosophy, or sociology paper is not a reflection of your critical thinking, but your attempt to tell the professor what you believe he or she wants to hear.

Professors too often want to impress each other or gain the approval of each. This, too, encourages conformity and hoop-jumping but not independent thought.

As a Christian man, and a professor, Alan Jacobs notices the effects of bias in academia, which tends to be nonreligious:

Academics have a prejudiced notion of religious people--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define Alan Jacobs.

And Jacobs sees in his religious community that a lot of people have a prejudiced notion of academics--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define the professors.

Three. Most of us seek agreement with the ingroup or the in-crowd rather than think critically.

We want to be part of the ingroup so we demonize, unfairly, the ingroup’s hated outgroups without knowing specific details about those outgroups.

Jacobs quotes Marilynne Robinson who writes that in the way we disdain Puritans “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.”

Our instinct is not to think clearly; our instinct is to have consensus, to show allegiance to a tribe. We can call this Groupthink.

Groupthink is not thinking. It is conforming to the group's collective thoughts; it is the degradation of thinking.

For example, I had a student from Los Angeles who told me she grew up during the O.J. Simpson Trial. She and her friends believed O.J. was guilty, but they never discussed it with their families or the larger community because the popular notion was that O.J. was innocent, not because he was necessarily innocent, per se, but because proclaiming his innocence was a way of getting revenge on the LAPD, which had abused her community for decades.

Our Tendency to Define the Repugnant Cultural Other (RCO) affects our thinking.

We tend to gather in bubbles of like-minded people. We bond in part by demonizing outgroups deemed repulsive and repugnant. Borrowing from the writings of Susan Friend Harding, Jacobs refers to the Repugnant Cultural Other, a group so demonic that we must, as a sign of allegiance to our bubble, hate the RCO without knowing its details. We just see this vague abstraction, this preconceived stereotype, and we deliver hate toward the RCO accordingly.

America is divided by bubbles committed to demonizing the RCO, especially in politics.

Secular academics and evangelicals are each other’s RCO.

Red and Blue states are each other’s RCO.

Rural and urban areas are each other’s RCO.

“Gun people” and “Anti-Gun people” are each other’s RCO.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are people’s RCO. 

Jacobs writes: “This is a profoundly unhealthy situation” because we lose commonality with others; we lose sympathy and empathy with others; we lose the idea that we are neighbors; we lose sight that we may share common ground in shared love of TV shows, concerns for our children, concerns for the middle class, etcetera.

Jacobs observes: “The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called ‘the war of every man against every man.’”

However, let us stop and make an important point: Critical thinking doesn’t mean that all RCOs are worthy of our understanding or sympathy. The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville with their Bath-And-Beyond tiki torches are truly RCOs.

There are true, bona fide “deplorables,” to use a term made popular in recent times.

Four. Most of us are content to live in Refutation Mode, where we repel all contradictory and different opinions. We prefer our bubble.

Five. Most of us are indifferent to what thinking is and would prefer to live a life of mindless habit.

Six. Most of us find that even when we attempt in earnest to think, our conclusions are twisted by prejudices and biases that we are reluctant to acknowledge or even be aware of.

Our Biases Don’t Die Easily

Jacobs cites Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, who addresses the central question about thinking: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?”

Kahneman concludes after decades of research that quality thinking can be achieved but only with sustained great effort.

I would make an analogy to dieting: You can lose weight and keep the pounds off but only by maintaining consistent diligence. Only a tiny percentage of people can do this. Most of us go off our diet.

This is scary to contemplate. We’re talking about the human race, the majority of which is doomed to be slaves to impulse, instinct, and base appetites. Why take a critical thinking class except to take in this terrifying state of affairs?

To underscore this point, we can look to another Kahneman quote: “a considerable part of our thinking apparatus, the part that generates our immediate intuitions, ‘is not readily educable. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.’ This is not encouraging.”

Seven. Thinking, the kind of critical thinking that goes against the grain of our default settings for bias and acceptance, requires great effort and cannot be sustained for long periods.

Eight. Even people who devote their lives to thinking--writers, philosophers, theologians and the like--find that their thinking is crippled by bias, arrogance, and self-righteousness.

Nine. To be a good thinker requires humility, a deep suspicion of one’s convictions and how one has arrived at those convictions, and the courage to be honestly self-critical. Very few people have these characteristics.

Ten. You would think that universities, colleges, and academia in general would be hospitable sanctuaries encouraging the flourishing of free thought, but more often than not the opposite is true: universities encourage conformity to expectations and reward compliance to hollow stereotypes of “good professors” rather than reward critical thinking.

Critical Thinking Is Not the Norm

Critical thinking therefore is not the norm; critical thinking is an anomaly.

Therefore, the whole conversation about thinking is really a conversation about whether humans are slaves to impulse or masters of their own actions, agents of free will.

A nihilistic and pessimistic worldview posits that we are helpless slaves to our appetites.

A more optimistic worldview posits that we can cultivate reason, become self-possessed, and become agents of free will.

Three. How does Jacobs’ book on thinking differ from most others?

Most books on thinking, Jacobs observes, focus on science, when it might be more helpful to look at thinking as an art.

Jacobs writes: “There are certain humanistic traditions, some of them quite ancient, that can come to our aid when we’re trying to think about thinking, and to get better at it.”

As an art form, thinking can be looked at as a rider, the thinker, riding an elephant, a metaphor for intuition. Jacobs wants to help the rider control the elephant even though the rider and the elephant, our logic and inner intuition and instinct, have minds of their own.

My immediate reaction is that 1% of the population will be drawn to reading a book such as Jacobs’ and that that 1% is motivated to think better, but most people could care less.

Four. What is Jacobs’ argument about thinking?

He writes, “In particular I’m going to argue that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as ‘overcoming bias.’ 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. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of the familiar, comforting habits; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?”

Many might think, in my words: “This whole thinking thing is too hard, it’s too slow, and it’s too painful. The hell with thinking.”

Five. How do we begin to become better thinkers?

You cannot address thinking directly, Jacobs argues. You improve thinking by working on your moral core. Good thinking springs from strong moral character.

Just like Viktor Frankl said you cannot pursue happiness directly. Happiness is the natural byproduct of finding purpose in your life.

In the same way, good thinking comes from cultivating a moral character.

For example, being honest about the errors of your ways is a moral quality, and this moral quality improves critical thinking.

Chapter One: Beginning to Think

One. What was the turning point in Megan Phelps-Roper’s relationship with her church?

She stayed with the church and cut off connections with her non-religious Twitter friend; however, she would not picket with hateful signs. She drew a line in the sand with her church. And this line was the beginning of her journey away from the church. It was the beginning of her religious apostasy of that particularly type of religious faith.

She was thinking that while she still wanted to belong to her church, her church’s position to encourage death and hell for the non-religious was crossing the line of decency. Though she could not admit it to herself at the time, she identified immorality in the group that was part of her chief identity.

Roper had come across what Jacobs called “forbidden knowledge,” information that condemns the group you belong in.

Roper will exit the identity, belonging, and safety of her church and family because her independent thinking as judged her world as an unworthy, morally bankrupt place. The seeds have been planted. It’s just a matter of time before she exits.

In Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a utopia is based on cruelty to a helpless child. Most people accept the cruelty as necessary for the happiness of everyone else, but some people, upon being aware of the cruelty, see living in the Utopia as a deal with the devil, so they leave the Utopian city without any assurance of finding a new home. They simply know that their moral sense dictates that they must leave.

Alan Jacobs compares these morally courageous people to Megan Phelps-Roper who leaves the Westboro church.

Two. Why, according to Jacobs, is it a myth that “we think for ourselves”?

Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro church in part because she was engaged with outsiders, thinkers who weren’t confined to the church’s propaganda.

Jacobs points out that thinking is social; it’s built on social interaction.

During social interaction, we reject people we don’t want to be like, and we gravitate and imitate people we do want to be like.

More and more, Roper wanted to be less like the hateful members of her religious cult and more like the people she met on Twitter.

When people we care about who once shared our beliefs go on a different path, Jacobs writes, we say, “So and So has had a bad influence and was probably reading horrible stuff.” Why? Because we believe that we arrive at our “truths” through good means and that people who disagree with us surely arrived at their conclusions through inferior information. These biases contribute to our delusional thinking.

Three. What is the myth of rational thinking?

That we make decisions without emotion, that we are completely dispassionate, that we are completely objective.

In using John Stuart Mill’s breakdown as an example, Jacobs observes that analysis by itself is too dry to feed the soul. We need music, or in Mill’s case, poetry, or some other emotional outlet to be fully-realized human beings. The intellect can only take us so far.

Jacobs wants to examine the cultivation of feelings and how this cultivation affects our thinking.

To achieve meaning, we must have character, and strong character can only be achieved by a synthesis of the intellect and deep feeling.

The feelings side of your being should feed the analytical side. Your powers of analysis cannot exist without feelings.

Art, politics, culture, activism, ideology--all these things are the product of both analysis and feeling present in a strong moral character. “The whole person must be engaged.”

Four. What error in rational thinking do Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Frank make?

Famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain was more successful throwing free-throws underhanded, or “sissy” style, but he returned to the conventional method. For Gladwell, this is irrational, but only from Gladwell’s point of view. Gladwell doesn’t see that rational for him is not rational for Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain wants to impress as many women as possible, so throwing in a masculine way, is from the basketball player’s view, rational.

Chamberlain is looking for a “relational good.”

Likewise, Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, is blind to the relational goods the people of Kansas seek when they vote for what Frank calls issues that are not in their best interests.

Frank doesn’t see that most Kansans don’t just vote on economic interests; they vote on social and moral interests. However, Jacobs points out that these interests can be misguided.

Jacobs’ main point is that rational thinking is limited and not always rational or in one’s best interests.

 

Avoid Binary Thinking

You want to avoid being a binary thinker who breaks everything down into either/or. 

Binary thinking makes you either for or against something in absolute terms.

You are either pro-guns or anti-guns. 

You are either pro-life or anti-life.

You are either pro-immigration or anti-immigration.

You are either pro-food stamps or anti-food stamps.

You are either pro-death penalty or anti-death penalty. 

You are either pro-free speech on campus or anti-free speech on campus. 

You either maintain a 3.75 GPA or you are a loser.

Binary Thinking Isn't About Thinking. It's About Allegiance to a Tribe. 

In other words, binary thinking is a form of tribalism. It fails to account for restrictions or exceptions that make one's position relative on a spectrum, not an absolute point.

Free Speech on Campus

For example, when it comes to free speech on campus, I am for it to a degree. If a group wants to spew racist epithets and engage in racist iconocraphy that mocks other students, I am opposed to this behavior because I don't see racist propaganda as speech at all. I see it as an assault on others. 

I'm against assault. So when people use "free speech" as a vehicle to exercise racist assault, I am against free speech on campus. I have restrictions and exceptions. 

I am not a free speech absolutist. 

Death Penalty

By and large, I'm against the death penalty because there is a 5% chance that the person is innocent and a disproportion of people on death row are people of color. So the death penalty is not a color-blind form of justice.

However, there are some crimes that we know who did it beyond a shadow of a doubt, we have good reason to believe the person will kill again, even if kept in prison, and the crime is so egregious we as a society are better off executing the criminal. 

Therefore, while I generally oppose the death penalty, I'm not absolute in my opposition. I see exceptions. 

Exceptions are about careful, critical thinking. Absolutism is about allegiance to your tribe.

Once you start giving a granular analysis of a position and abandoning your absolute positions, the people in your tribe will expel you because you're no longer "towing the company line." 

Tribalism is not about thinking. It's about emotion.

Critical thinking is about leaving the tribe in exchange for informed opinion. 

What is informed opinion?

Aren't All Opinions Alike?

Some people say after reading an essay, “Well, it’s just an opinion.” But are all opinions alike? 

The answer is no. 

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 America when a woman says yes to a man's date proposal, the man, Louis C.K. tells us, will shake his fist like a tennis champion and scream, "Yeah!" We admire this behavior because we grow up seeing it. 

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. 

Considered opinions are practiced by Vulcans, according to Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy. Sadly, Vulcans are a tiny percentage of the population. 

Troll opinions based on fake news are held by Hooligans. 

No opinions at all are held by the mindless shoppers, known as Hobbits. 

There are many fake 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.

Poor people "choose" to be poor.

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. 

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).

 

Signal Phrases:

About 80% of your essay should be your writing and 20% should be quoted, paraphrased, and summarized material.

Sample List of Signal Phrases

4 Steps of MLA In-Text Citations

You need to do four things when you quote, paraphrase, or summarize from a text.

Step One: The first thing you need to do is introduce the material with a signal phrase. 

Make sure to use a variety of signal phrases to introduce quotations and paraphrases.

Verbs in Signal Phrases

According to . . . (very common)

Ha Jin writes . . . (very common)

Panbin laments . . .

Alan Jacobs proposes that we . . .

Alan Jacobs asserts that . . .

We read in How to Think that . . . 

In How to Think, Alan Jacobs observes that . . . 

Signal Phrase Templates

In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”

As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”

 Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”

 “…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”

 “…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.

Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument:  “…”

Step Two: The quote, paraphrase, or summary you use.

Step Three: The parenthetical citation, which comes after the cited material. 

Kwon points out that the Fourth Amendment does not give employees any protections from employers’ “unreasonable searches and seizures” (6).

In the cultural website One-Way Street, Richard Prouty observes that Lasdun's "men exist in a fixed point of the universe, but they have no agency" (para. 7).

Step Four: Analyze your cited material. The analysis should be of a greater length than the cited material. Show how the cited material supports your thesis.  

Example Set 1

Example Set 2

Final Draft on turnitin due 9-13-18

First Draft for Peer Edit due 9-11

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

The Backfire Effect from The Oatmeal

 

 

How to Think Lesson #3: Applying Book to Adrian Chen's "Unfollow"

Homework #3: Finish How to Think and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains that being a critical thinker can be dangerous.

 

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

“Unfollow” by Adrian Chen

YouTube video

The Oatmeal: The Backfire Effect

Excerpts from Chen’s Essay:

Turning Point #1 Feelings

 

But Phelps-Roper had loved Murphy in “Clueless,” and she felt an unexpected pang—not quite sadness, but something close—over her death. As she continued scrolling through Twitter, she saw that it was full of people mourning Murphy. The contrast between the grief on Twitter and the buoyant mood in the basement unsettled her. She couldn’t bring herself to post a tweet thanking God for Murphy’s death. “I felt like I would be such a jackass to go on and post something like that,” she said.

 

Her hesitance reflected a growing concern for the feelings of people outside Westboro. Church members disdained human feelings as something that people worshipped instead of the Bible. They even had a sign: “god hates your feelings.” They disregarded people’s feelings in order to break their idols.

 

Turning Point #2 Adapting to Twitter

 

But on Twitter Phelps-Roper found that it was better to take a gentler tone. For one thing, Twitter’s hundred-and-forty-character limit made it hard to fit both a florid insult and a scriptural point. And if she made things personal the conversation was inevitably derailed by a flood of angry tweets. She still preached God’s hate, and still liberally deployed the word “fag,” but she also sprinkled her tweets with cheerful exclamations and emoticons. She became adept at deflecting critics with a wry joke. “So, when do you drink the Kool-aid?” one user tweeted at her. “More of a Sunkist lemonade drinker, myself. =)” she replied. Phelps-Roper told me, “We weren’t supposed to care about what people thought about us, but I did.” As she developed her affable rhetorical style, she justified it with a proverb: “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”

 

Turning Point #3 Making Friends on Twitter and Becoming Humanized

 

Other Twitter users were fascinated by the dissonance between Westboro’s loathsome reputation and the goofy, pop-culture-obsessed millennial who Phelps-Roper seemed to be on Twitter. “I remember just thinking, How can somebody who appreciates good music believe so many hateful things?” Graham Hughes said. In November, 2009, Hughes, then a college student in British Columbia, interviewed Phelps-Roper for a religious-studies class. Afterward, they corresponded frequently on Twitter. When Hughes was hospitalized with a brain infection, Phelps-Roper showed him more concern than many of his real-life friends. “I knew there was a genuine connection between us,” he said.

As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”

 

Turning Point #4 Megan Questions Her Literalism

 

Phelps-Roper and Abitbol continued their conversations via e-mail and Twitter’s direct-message function. In Phelps-Roper’s effort to better understand Westboro’s new prophecies, she had bought a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” but she found it more profitable just to ask Abitbol her questions. Here was a real live Orthodox Jew who lived in Israel and was more than happy to enlighten her. During their debates over Scripture, Phelps-Roper sometimes quoted passages from the Old Testament; Abitbol often countered that their meaning differed in the original Hebrew, so Phelps-Roper bought some language-learning software. She figured that, since she would soon be living in Israel awaiting the end of the world, she should learn the language. Abitbol helped her with the vocabulary.

Phelps-Roper still urged Abitbol to repent, but as someone who was concerned about a wayward friend. “I just wish you would obey God and use your considerable platform to warn your audience about the consequences of engaging in conduct that God calls abomination,” she e-mailed Abitbol in October, 2010.

In response, Abitbol kept pressing Phelps-Roper on Westboro’s doctrine. One day, he asked about a Westboro sign that said “death penalty for fags,” referring to a commandment from Leviticus. Abitbol pointed out that Jesus had said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” Abitbol knew that at least one member of Westboro had committed a sin that Leviticus also deems a capital crime. Phelps-Roper’s oldest brother, Sam, was the product of a relationship that Shirley had had with a man she met while she was in law school, before she married Megan’s father.

Shirley’s sin of fornication was often thrown in the church members’ faces by counterprotesters. Westboro always argued that the difference between Shirley and gay people was that Shirley had repented of her sin, whereas gays marched in pride parades. But Abitbol wrote that if gay people were killed they wouldn’t have the opportunity to repent.

 

Turning Point #5 Megan Must Confront Inconsistencies and Double Standards in Her Religious Group

 

Phelps-Roper was struck by the double standard, and, as she did whenever she had a question about doctrine, she brought up the issue with her mother. Shirley responded that Romans said gays were “worthy of death,” and that if it was good enough for God it was good enough for Westboro. “It was such a settled point that they’ve been preaching for so long it’s almost like it didn’t mean anything to her,” Phelps-Roper said. Still, she concluded that Westboro was in the wrong. “That was the first time I came to a place where I disagreed, I knew I disagreed, and I didn’t accept the answer that they gave,” she said. Phelps-Roper knew that to press the issue would create problems for her in the church, so she quietly stopped holding the “death penalty for fags” sign. There were plenty of other signs whose message she still believed in wholeheartedly. She also put an end to the conversations with Abitbol.

 

Turning Point #6 Friendship with C.G. Causes Megan to Question Her Church’s Cruelty (Megan’s empathy grows)

 

Another online relationship proved more threatening. In February, 2011, Phelps-Roper began to have conversations on Twitter with a user named @F_K_A. His avatar was Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby.” He had learned of Westboro after reading an article about the Anonymous hack. “He sent me a tweet, and initially it was like this angry, nasty tweet,” Phelps-Roper said. But @F_K_A was disarmed by Phelps-Roper’s friendly demeanor. He began to ask her questions about life in Westboro, and, because he was curious instead of condemning, she kept answering them. One day, Phelps-Roper recalled, “I asked him some kind of pointed question about the Bible. He said something like, ‘I can’t answer that, but I have never been beaten in Words with Friends’ ”—the popular online Scrabble knockoff. Phelps-Roper replied, “I can’t boast the same. =)” She put her Words with Friends username at the end of the tweet.

They began to talk about the church using the in-game chat function, free from Twitter’s character limit. @F_K_A told Phelps-Roper to call him C.G. But C.G. remained a mystery. She knew that he was an attorney, but she didn’t know where he lived or how old he was. “He was careful not to reveal anything about himself,” Phelps-Roper said.

Like David Abitbol, C.G. argued against Westboro’s beliefs and practices, but while Abitbol’s arguments were doctrinal C.G. was most critical of Westboro’s cruelty. “We had the same discussion several times when someone would die,” Phelps-Roper said. C.G. urged Phelps-Roper to think of how much hurt it must cause the families of the deceased to see Phelps-Roper and her family rejoicing. Westboro divided people into good and evil, but, Phelps-Roper said, C.G. “always tried to advocate for a third group of people: people who were decent but not religious.” She had heard all these arguments before, but they had never affected her as they did when C.G. made them. “I just really liked him,” she said. “He seemed to genuinely like people and care about people, and that resonated with me.”

Phelps-Roper increasingly found herself turning to Bible passages where tragedy is not met with joy. The Old Testament prophet Elisha, for example, weeps when he foresees disaster for Israel. One day in July, 2011, Phelps-Roper was on Twitter when she came across a link to a series of photographs about a famine in Somalia. The first image was of a tiny malnourished child. She burst into tears at her desk. Her mother asked what was wrong, and Phelps-Roper showed her the gallery. Her mother quickly composed a triumphant blog post about the famine. “Thank God for famine in East Africa!” she wrote. “God is longsuffering and patient, but he repays the wicked to their face!” When Brittany Murphy died, Phelps-Roper had seen the disparity between her reaction and that of the rest of the church as a sign that something was wrong with her. Now the contradiction of her mother’s glee and her own sadness made her wonder if something was wrong with the church.

 

Turning Point #7 Megan’s Sister Grace Sees a Forbidden Romance Brewing (Megan even has a “love dream”)

 

As Phelps-Roper developed her relationship with C.G., her sister Grace grew suspicious. “Suddenly, her taste in music started changing,” Grace told me. “It annoyed me, because it wasn’t coming from Megan. It was coming from him, this question mark of a person that I don’t get to know about, but she has some kind of thing with.” As young children, Grace and Megan had squabbled constantly, but they had grown close. Grace was seven years younger than Megan, and still in high school at the time. Grace would scroll through Megan’s iPhone, asking about the various messages and e-mails. But soon after Megan started talking to C.G. she stopped letting Grace look at her phone. “I remember thinking, What the heck? What are you hiding?” Grace said.

For young women in Westboro, having romantic interactions with someone outside the church was forbidden. When Phelps-Roper was growing up, one of her cousins had been pushed out of the church for, among other things, getting entangled with boys; other young women had been harshly punished. Phelps-Roper had long assumed that she would likely never get married, since she was related to almost every male in the church. “I was terrified of even thinking about guys,” she said. “It’s not just the physical stuff that can get you in trouble.” She did her best to displace her feelings for C.G. onto the music and books he recommended, which she fervently consumed. “I was in denial,” she said.

Then, on September 30, 2011, she had a dream: It was a beautiful summer day, and she was standing on the driveway of the church. A black car with tinted windows pulled up, and a tall, blond man got out. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew it was C.G. She walked up to him, and they embraced. She knew her family could see them on the surveillance cameras that line the Block, but she didn’t care. “It was so real, that feeling of wanting to be with him,” Phelps-Roper told me. She woke up fighting back tears. “He was not a good person, according to the church,” she said. “And the fact that I dreamed about him, and the strong feeling of wanting that relationship, represented huge danger to me.” That day, she told C.G. that they couldn’t talk anymore. She deleted her Words with Friends account. C.G. deleted his Twitter account.

 

Turning Point #8 Division Brews in the Church

 

Phelps-Roper tried to throw herself back into the Westboro community, but the atmosphere had changed while she was distracted by her relationship with C.G. It had started in April, 2011. Her mother seemed mysteriously troubled. After Phelps-Roper pressed her parents, they showed her an e-mail they’d received from her oldest brother, Sam, and Steve Drain, another church member. It accused her mother of lacking humility, saying that she was too zealous in correcting other members’ behavior and had overreached her authority on a number of occasions, Phelps-Roper told me. Reading the e-mail made her sick with fear. When a Westboro member was singled out for bad behavior, it often triggered a harrowing period of discipline. The smallest transgression could spark another round of punishment, until the member either shaped up or was kicked out of the church.

 

Turning Point #9 Confusion Turns to Outrage

 

Phelps-Roper’s confusion soon turned to outrage. In 2012, she was twenty-six years old, but she was still being treated like a child. Once-minor indignities, like being accompanied by an adult chaperone while eating lunch at a restaurant with other young church members, now seemed unbearable. In April, she was shocked when Westboro expelled a cousin of hers without adhering to the process that the church had always followed, which was derived from the Book of Matthew. Typically, expulsion resulted only after a unanimous decision, but in the cousin’s case she was excluded over other members’ objections. (Drain recalls no objections, and said, “Everything was done decently and in accordance with Scripture.”) “It stopped feeling like this larger-than-life divine institution ordained and led by God, and more like the sniping and sordid activity of men who wanted to be in control,” Phelps-Roper said.

 

She resented the increasing authority wielded by Drain. One of the few Westboro members unrelated to Fred Phelps, Drain had visited Topeka in 2000 to film a skeptical documentary about the church, but he soon became convinced of its message. The next year, he and his family joined the church. He’d long pushed for a larger role in Westboro, and after the elders came to power his influence increased. In February, 2012, during the funeral of Whitney Houston, in New Jersey, Drain urged Phelps-Roper and other members to tweet poorly Photoshopped images that depicted them haranguing mourners. The media quickly unravelled the hoax. (Drain told me that the fake picket was never meant to be taken literally.)

Phelps-Roper was embarrassed by the debacle. It undermined her own proud claims on Twitter to be spreading God’s truth—and lying violated Scripture. In addition, she now had to have all her media appearances approved by Drain. “It seems like he wants to be Pope Steve and for no one else to do anything without his permission,” she wrote in her journal. “I hate it so much.”

Megan’s doubt engendered by the “death penalty for fags” sign grew. She started to complain to her mother, saying that the elders were not obeying the Bible. They treated her mother and other members with cruelty when the Bible required brotherly love, she said. The elders acted arrogantly and tolerated no dissent, when God demanded meekness and humility. Phelps-Roper was struck by the similarities between her arguments and what C.G. and David Abitbol had always said about the church. “It was like we were finally doing to ourselves what we had done to everyone else,” she said. “Seeing those parallels was really disorienting.”

 

Turning Point #10 Megan and Her Sister Talk About Leaving Their Church

Phelps-Roper first considered leaving the church on July 4, 2012. She and Grace were in the basement of another Westboro family’s house, painting the walls. The song “Just One,” by the indie folk group Blind Pilot—a band that C.G. had recommended—played on the stereo. The lyrics seemed to reflect her dilemma perfectly: “And will I break and will I bow / if I cannot let it go?” Then came the chorus: “I can’t believe we get just one.” She suddenly thought, What if Westboro had been wrong about everything? What if she was spending her one life hurting people, picking fights with the entire world, for nothing? “It was, like, just the fact that I thought about it, I had to leave right then,” she said. “I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin.”

The next day, she mentioned the possibility of leaving to Grace. Grace was horrified. “It just sounded ridiculous to even suggest it,” Grace told me. “These were the points I brought up: we’re never going to see our families again, we’re going to go to Hell for eternity, and our life will be meaningless.” Megan, still uncertain, agreed. But she plunged into a profound crisis of faith. “It was like flipping a switch,” she said. “So many other thoughts came in that I’d never pursued, and that’s every doubt that I’d ever had, everything that had ever seemed illogical or off.”

When they were together, Megan engaged Grace in interminable theological conversations. When they were apart, Megan detailed her doubts in text messages. One day, she texted Grace, “What if the God of the Bible isn’t the God of creation? We don’t believe that the Koran has the truth about God. Is it just because we were told forever that this is How Things Are?” She added, “Does it really make you happy when you hear about people dying or starving or being maimed? Do you really want to ask God to hurt people? I ask myself these questions. I think the answer is no. When I’m not scared of the answer, I know the answer is no.” Two days later, she texted Grace about Hell: “Why do we think it’s real? It’s starting to seem made up to scare people into doing what they say.” Grace replied, “But what if?”

That day, Grace wrote to Megan, “Our belief in God has always curbed everything. Like, pain & sorrow, I mean. Without that we’d only have our belief in each other. But we are human & humans die. What would we have if we didn’t have each other?” For Megan, the answer could be found in other people. “We know what it is to be kind & good to people,” she wrote. “We would just have to find somewhere else, other people to love and care about and help, too.” Grace wrote back, “I don’t want other people.” In truth, Megan didn’t want other people, either; she desperately wanted things in Westboro to go back to the way they had been. But the idea of living among outsiders was no longer unimaginable.

Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.”

 

Turning Point #11 Grace’s Affair Forces an Exit

 

As the sisters agonized over whether to leave, they befriended an older man in the church and his wife, eventually becoming allies in discontent. For a while, they all planned to leave together. Then the couple’s marriage began to deteriorate, and the husband told Megan and Grace that they were going to divorce. Grace became involved in a brief romantic relationship with the man. After the relationship ended, the wife learned about it, and sent a letter to Megan and Grace’s parents revealing both the relationship and the sisters’ plan to leave.

On Sunday, November 11th, the family had just returned from church when Megan and Grace were called into their parents’ bedroom, where their father began to read the letter out loud. Megan told Grace quietly that they had to leave: “It was like the world was exploding and I didn’t want to be around to see it.” Their mother tried to calm things down. Their parents wanted to talk things over—they seemed to think that the sisters could be persuaded to stay—but Megan and Grace had made up their minds. As Grace packed, their father came into her room and asked what she wanted the church to do differently. “I want you and everyone else to leave with me,” Grace replied. Their parents were stunned, but they didn’t try to force the sisters to stay.

As the sisters packed, their younger brother Zach sat at the piano downstairs, crying and playing hymns, which he hoped might change their mind. Other church members stopped by to say goodbye and to warn the sisters of the consequences of their decision. “The fact that I’m coming face to face with the damage that I was doing to them was even worse than anything else that was happening to me,” Phelps-Roper said. Her parents told her to say goodbye to her grandfather. She walked over to the residence where her grandparents lived, above the church sanctuary. When Megan told them she was leaving, her grandfather looked at her grandmother and said, “Well, I thought we had a jewel this time.”

Megan and Grace’s father drove them to a hotel in Topeka, where he had paid for a room, but they were too scared to spend the night alone, so they called the teacher who had agreed to store their boxes. That night, they cried themselves to sleep on couches in his basement. Megan and Grace returned to their house the next day with a U-Haul truck to pick up their remaining possessions. As they walked away for the last time, Shirley called after them, “You know you can always come back.”

Terms to Consider for Your Essay As You Apply Alan Jacobs' Text to Your Analysis

One. Repugnant Cultural Other

Two. Refutation Mode

Three. "Forbidden Knowledge"

Four. Deep Emotional Experience and Moral Awakening Important for Change of Mind (not just rational thinking)

Five. Utopian Bargains Damn the Soul

Six. Inner Ring and Ingroup Behavior

Seven. Unscrupulous Optimism

Eight. Myth Making

How to Think Lesson #2: Gaslighting, Winning Vs. Truth, To Yield a Different You, Review Death of Critical Thinking

Homework #2: Read How to Think, up to page 125 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why ingroup behavior is so dangerous.

Lesson Two

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

 

Winning an Argument Vs. Finding the Truth

The instinct to be right is based on two noxious human impulses:

One, narcissism, the grandiose elevation of the self accompanied by utter contempt for everyone else

Two, tribalism, being so desperate for belonging that one slavishly conforms to the in-group and butt-kisses one's way up the in-group's status ladder while blindly accepting the in-group's egregious moral flaws

If the need to be right is energized by the two above instincts, we can safely conclude that the need to be right is a morally and spiritually bankrupt enterprise. 

It is a condition of moral rot, and sadly it accounts for our country's tribalism, divisiveness, and fragmentation. 

Social media and smartphone absorption only do more, on an exponential level, to encourage narcissism and tribalism.

Social media is all about, in David Brooks' words, "The Big Me," curating one's existence in a grandiose manner.

Further, we insulate ourselves in social media tribes that echo our pre-existing beliefs and biases so that we work to become popular in our tribe while demonizing competing tribes because their denigration and extinction is a sign of our triumph, our victory.

This is the state of America today. 

We no longer hunger to find the truth. Rather, we hunger to intensify our narcissism and our tribalism. Such a state results in the breakdown of critical thinking skills and basic morality and decency. 

We don't use critical thinking to argue. We rely on bully tactics such as gaslighting. 

Gaslighting is manipulating and bullying people to make them question their reality, to make their world upside down. What is up is down and what is down is up. Eventually, the victim becomes the criminal and the criminal becomes the victim. 

In a world of gaslighting, fighting to survive, consumerism, and spending huge chunks of time on one's smartphone or some screen or other, one cannot see the truth.

Indifference to Truth Replaced by Worship of Power: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt: indifference to truth leads to death of democracy and rise of totalitarianism:

 

• In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. [...] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Factors That Lead to Indifference to Truth

Brain becomes numb from onslaught of trolls (gaslighters), Orwellian propaganda, and tribalism.

Fighting for survival is enough one can do.

Gaslighting

 

 

 

Winning Over Truth Results in Death of Critical Thinking

Chapter 2: Attractions: How Good People Can be Led to Do Bad Things

One. What matters at the Yale Political Union?

Winning people over through the power of persuasion and “being won over.”

Having the ability to use ethos (credibility), logos (logic and reasoning), and pathos (strong emotion) to present an argument is a sign of intelligence, craftiness, and commitment to one’s ideas.

To cause someone to “break the floor,” to change their mind in the middle of a debate was considered one of life’s highest achievements.

This is significant because when you change your mind, “you yield a different you.”

Changing your mind, in other words, radically redefines the essence of yourself.

To "break the floor" requires an open mind, humility, and confidence in one's judgment, a kind of confidence that allows one to change one's mind when deemed necessary. 

"Such and such changed my life."

Such and such could be a professor, a parent, a brother, a sister, a song, a movie, a book, a speaker, etc.

I was close to 250 pounds on December 17th, 2017, talking to a complete stranger about my weight. He said, "You have to make a choice. Enjoy being two hundred and fifty pounds and deal with your health issues, or learn to discipline yourself to enjoy being a lighter bodyweight." 

The conversation yielded a different me.  

Such a transformation must be possible in a healthy society. A diseased, unhealthy society, in contrast, encourages stagnation, sticking to the tribe. 

Jacobs makes another important point about a culture that embraces the possibility of “breaking the floor”: Only in a culture where people who disagree aren’t trying to hurt each other but share values can such a changing of the mind take place. A certain trust must be present for people to be in a position to change their mind.

4 Causes of Resistance to "Breaking the Floor"

One. Arrogance

Two. Bullheaded Ignorance 

Three. Indifference to truth because one is too preoccupied with mindless consumerism

Four. Hostility to truth because one is satisfied with conforming to one's tribal status quo. 

4 Healthy Conditions for "Breaking the Floor"

One. Having critical thinking skills that allows one to analyze reasonable evidence and sound arguments from both sides of an issue

Two. A kind of humility that compels one to find the truth rather than "being right"

Three. A desire for truth that is greater than conforming to one's tribal status quo

Four. Having a hunger for change as opposed to being mired in self-satisfied complacency

 

Two. What makes our thoughts almost secondary to the point of being irrelevant?

Jacobs quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, who observes that we experience instantaneous moral intuitions and judgments followed by our explanation of those intuitions. Our “post hoc constructions,” after-the-fact thoughts, rationalize our emotional dispositions.

For example, someone drops out of college and then justifies after the fact their life working at a coffee shop to their friend, a college graduate now working as an engineer.

Two Friends, an Engineer and a College Dropout, Discuss Their Lives After the Fact

The engineer visits his friend, a college dropout at the coffee shop where the dropout works.

 

Serving his friend coffee, the college dropout says, "Dude, your life is so stressful as an engineer. Look at all the taxes you have to pay. And look at all those long hours you have to work. I feel sorry for you, man."

"At least I have a house."

"But, dude, you've got to pay property taxes, earthquake insurance, home repairs, termite fumigations, plumbing, cable, Internet. Your life sucks, bro."

"Dude, you're thirty years old being yelled at all day in a coffee shop and you're living in your grandma's garage. You're basically homeless."

"I chose this life, bro. I've got time to workout, to binge-watch shows on Netflix, to make artisanal crafted beer in my grandma's garage. My girlfriend is the assistant manager at TJ Max. Life's good, bro."

"If your life is so amazing, how come you've been wearing the same work shirt every day for the last two months and haven't had a shower since last August? You smell like a dead donkey."

 

**********

Alan Jacobs is saying we don't think, per se. Rather, we rationalize what we do AFTER THE FACT. We make our decisions on impulse or laziness or compulsion or whatever, and then we wear rose-colored glasses to delude ourselves into believing we act in our best self-interests.

Bind and Blind

These “moral intuitions” both “bind and blind.” We are both binded to our political and religious teams, but we are at the same time blinded by reasonable opposition to our strongly-held views.

Neophobic and Neophilic Dispositions Inform Our Moral Matrix

Our moral intuitions, or “moral matrix,” are directed by our genetic predisposition.

We are either hard-wired to be neophilic (love new things, love change) or neophobic (hate new things, hate change), and this hard-wiring influences our moral intuitions.

The Inner Ring

To explain our “moral matrix” and the way we make emotional decisions followed by rationalizations for our positions, Jacobs prefers the C.S. Lewis metaphor of The Inner Ring.

According to C.S. Lewis, our greatest desire is to be inside The Inner Ring; our greatest fear is to be outside The Inner Ring.

Our desire to belong to the ingroup is so strong, we will be open to corruption in order to conform to its ways.

We all have our own standards for what makes an Inner Ring appealing, but once we’re allowed in we make “post hoc rationalizations” to defend its positions because our desire to belong is greater than our desire to satisfy our inquisitive mind and our demands for integrity.

Three. Why is “some form of genuine membership necessary for thinking”?

What we need is a group whom we trust and respect. They can disagree with us, but we must trust and respect their decency and honesty. Only in this environment can we have real thinking.

If your Twitter account is infected with “haters” and liars, then you can’t engage in real thinking on Twitter, as Jacobs learned the hard way.

Connections with groups we trust give us power to resist evil and stupidity.

Four. What is “unscrupulous optimism” and why is it dangerous?

Referring to a term coined by Roger Scruton, Jacobs is writing about the foolishness of taking deeply-rooted complex human problems and finding easy solutions to these problems. These solutions become a new system, the “Clearly Right” path, and all who stand in the way become enemies.

Ingroup members are not allowed to question the Clearly Right Path.

This path is “I-based,” that is to say, it is “good for me and people like me.”

Take for example a heralded writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote a famous essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Coates wrote convincing diagnosis of America’s kleptocracy (system of stealing) and how this kleptocracy stole from the bodies, minds and souls of African-Americans. But Jacobs points out that while he agreed with the essay’s diagnosis, he did not see an adequate prescription for the injustices described, and his friends criticized him for not drinking all of Coates’ Kool-Aid.

Take other programs that need a critical examination before made into official solutions:

1. Free college education
2. Getting rid of grades
3. Universal Basic Income
4. Universal Health Care
5. Driverless Cars
6. Creating civilizations on other planets because Planet Earth is not big enough for the growing population
7. Calvinism: A predestination religion that says some people, the Elect, were chosen to go to heaven before Creation and a larger group of people, the Damned, are predestined to go to hell. Predestination is a simplified way of explaining who gets to heaven and who doesn’t.
8. Universalism: A religion that says everyone, eventually, gets to heaven. Perhaps such an approach is too optimistic?

But membership into the Inner Ring requires you keep your mouth shut if you have any doubts or critical questions.

Arguing against unscrupulous optimism, Jacobs observes we must assert prudence and healthy skepticism against simple solutions for our problems.

Chapter 3 Repulsions: Why you’re not as tolerant of others as you think

Five. What is suspicious ingroup behavior?

Blogger Scott Adams notes that a group of people expressed disgust at the glee some people showed for the death of Osama Bin Laden. But this same group of people were gleeful when Margaret Thatcher died. Their political correctness code compelled them to condemn happiness over Bin Laden’s death while celebrating Thatcher’s. They are blind to their inconsistency because they are tribalists shackled by ingroup behavior.

There is a hatred of the blue and red tribe that is growing so powerful we could find ourselves in a Civil War with physical violence.

We live in a society where it’s socially acceptable to unleash raw hate on people who don’t share our party affiliation.

Ingroup Behavior Makes Us Blind to Our Prejudice

Personal Anecdote

In the early 1980s, I was working in a wine store in Berkeley. At that the time, I was reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks, and I read that Camus dismissed the music of Peter Tchaikovsky as “mediocre,” and wanting to be a faithful Albert Camus disciple I decided that I shared Camus’ disdain for Tchaikovsky’s music.

One afternoon in the wine store, with the classical music station on, there was this riveting piano concerto playing. I didn’t know who the composer was, so I was standing by the speaker with a notebook and pen, so I could write down the composer’s name. All my co-workers were staring at me in amusement because I had become obviously full of so much intense pleasure as I listened to the concerto. When the music ended, the announcer stated that it was the First Piano Concerto by Peter Tchaikovsky, upon which I threw the notepad and pen on the floor and screamed: “Tchaikovsky? I hate Tchaikovsky!” All my co-workers laughed at me.

Ingroup Hate

In the religious realm, Martin Luther and Thomas More, who disagreed on Catholicism and Protestantism, demonized the other as “complete crap.” And their followers used the same language to define each other.

Even those these factions had a lot in common, they hated each other to the bone.

The same is true in communism. There are Marxists and there are Trotskyists and they hate each more than they hate non-communists.

Six. Is there such thing as “life in Rationalia”?

In other words, can we live in a community that is strictly rational, that makes its decisions purely on scientific evidence?

But analysis by itself, harkening back to John Stuart Mill, tires our emotions. We need the nourishment of feeling to balance rational thinking.Why? In part because we don’t learn anything unless there is an emotional context. Learning evidence to stop smoking is one thing. But to see children who lost their parents to lung cancer is more powerful and makes the point that “hits home.”

Further, we need biases and emotional predispositions to survive. When we see dogs baring their teeth and growling, we don’t need to stick around and think about the dog before finding a way to escape the dog. We quickly use biases and cues to “reduce the decision load on the brain.”

We often call these biases cognitive bias. 

There are true prejudices that lead us to safety and false prejudices that create misunderstandings and fog the brain.

Example of Megan Phelps-Roper

Indeed, Roper used rational thinking to leave her hateful religious cult. But the rational thinking happened AFTER she experienced the emotional response of revulsion from her church’s hateful behavior.

Chapter 4: The Money of Fools and The Power of Myth

Seven. What is myth and how does myth affect our thinking?

Referring to Mary Midgley, Jacobs defines myth as powerful symbols that help us interpret the world. “They shape its meaning.”

Without knowing it, we use myths, based on metaphors, that build narratives that describe our life, our identity, and our self.

We choose or inherit our myths.

“The brain is like a computer.”

“Animals are food, not sentient creatures.”

“The Confederate flag represents our family’s noble heritage.”

“The Confederate flag represents a false religion of white supremacy that makes people behave in ways that can only be described as a moral abomination.”

“God chose my particular religious denomination to find the true interpretation of the Bible and we’re going to heaven while the false religions and their people are all going to hell.”

Imposing the Dominant Myth on Culture Is Act of War

When we argue, we should try to arrive at mutual understanding, but too often when we represent our tribe we rely on a myth and we propagate this myth to triumph. Our version of events rules.

Conclusion: The Pleasures and Dangers of Thinking

Eight. What are the dangers of thinking critically?

Sometimes you will change your mind, which can upset your identity and core values and beliefs. This can be a scary, disorienting experience.

Your critical thinking may result in you being exiled from the tribe or ingroup from which you wish to belong.

Review Today's Themes in Light of Essay Option A

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

The assignment above requires that we look at the anti-thinking biases that Megan Phelps-Roper faces. We can find them in the essay "Unfollow" as they relate to Alan Jacobs' book How to Think.

Death of Critical Thinking

One. After the Fact Fallacy: We justify our actions after the fact to delude ourselves that we used careful thought when in fact we acted on compulsion based on our lower instincts.

Two. Gaslighting. We face bullying and manipulation to cloud our judgment and perception of an abusive situation.

Three. Neophobic arrogance (fear of new ideas and change) or bullheaded ignorance: resisting reason and positive change, "breaking the floor" and transforming through the powers of reason.

Four. Inner Ring or ingroup conformity so that we are too loyal to the tribe to see its glaring faults.

Five. Unscrupulous Optimism: Making the false claim that the Right Path is simple and must be followed.

Six. Cognitive Bias: Cherry-picking facts to conform to a pre-existing opinion.

Seven. Grandiose Mythologies explain the world in an inaccurate way, but it doesn't matter because the mythologies of some kind of intoxicating appeal. 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Jacobs' How to Think, Lesson #1

How to Think Lesson Plans

How to Think by Alan Jacobs

Writing Assignment

Option A

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option B

In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.

Option C

In the context of How to Think, write a 1,000-word essay that compares the moral courage of Megan Phelps-Roper to the people who leave Utopia in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

Introduction: Why we’re worse at thinking than we think

One. Why are books about thinking so depressing?

Because they all show how thinking is larded with errors, and “they provide an astonishingly detailed and wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—the infinitely varied paths we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting It Wrong.”

Jacobs lists the names of these erroneous types of thinking:

Anchoring

Availability cascades

Confirmation bias

Dunning-Kruger effect

Endowment effect

Framing effects

Group attribution errors

Halo effects

Ingroup and outgroup homogeneity biases

Recency illusions

Jacobs writes: “What a chronicle of ineptitude, arrogance, sheer dumbassery.”

Jacobs is particularly offended by smug frauds: “Still worse, those who believe that they are impeccably thoughtful turn out to be some of the worst offenders against good sense.”

Jacobs is “dizzy” from all the fallacious thinking. He wants us to think correctly, but what does that mean?

Two. What is thinking?

In his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs uses the example of someone who agonizes over what car to buy. After the purchase, the husband argues with the wife about his choice. She says he should have bought the one that first appealed to him.

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.”

Acting on impulse and instinct is not thinking. Buying a car because it appeals to your reptilian senses is not thinking.

Why Most People Don’t Think

One. Most of us don’t deliberate. We act on impulse and intuition.

Two. Most of us conform to expectations to find acceptance rather than think for ourselves.

Academic life compromises thinking.

Getting good grades is the goal, and getting good grades is based on conformity, that is, pleasing your professors.

Professors too often want to impress each other or gain the approval of each. This, too, encourages conformity and hoop-jumping but not independent thought.

As a Christian man, and a professor, Alan Jacobs notices the effects of bias in academia:

Academics have a prejudiced notion of religious people--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define Alan Jacobs.

And Jacobs sees in his religious community that a lot of people have a prejudiced notion of academics--”those people”--a certain stereotype that doesn’t accurately define the professors.

Three. Most of us seek agreement with the ingroup or the in-crowd rather than think critically.

We want to be part of the ingroup so we demonize, unfairly, the ingroup’s hated outgroups without knowing specific details about those outgroups.

Jacobs quotes Marilynne Robinson who writes that in the way we disdain Puritans “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.”

Our instinct is not to think clearly; our instinct is to have consensus, to show allegiance to a tribe. We can call this Groupthink.

Groupthink is not thinking. It is the degradation of thinking.

For example, I had a student from Los Angeles who told me she grew up during the O.J. Simpson Trial. She and her friends believed O.J. was guilty, but they never discussed it with their families or the larger community because the popular notion was that O.J. was innocent, not because he was necessarily innocent, per se, but because proclaiming his innocence was a way of getting revenge on the LAPD, which had abused her community for decades.

Our Tendency to Define the Repugnant Cultural Other affects our thinking.

We tend to gather in bubbles of like-minded people. We bond in part by demonizing outgroups deemed repulsive and repugnant. Borrowing from the writings of Susan Friend Harding, Jacobs refers to the Repugnant Cultural Other, a group so demonic that we must, as a sign of allegiance to our bubble, hate the RCO without knowing its details. We just see this vague abstraction, this preconceived stereotype, and we deliver hate toward the RCO accordingly.

America is divided by bubbles committed to demonizing the RCO, especially in politics.

Secular academics and evangelicals are each other’s RCO.

Red and Blue states are each other’s RCO.

Rural and urban areas are each other’s RCO.

“Gun people” and “Anti-Gun people” are each other’s RCO.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are people’s RCO.

 

Jacobs writes: “This is a profoundly unhealthy situation” because we lose commonality with others; we lose sympathy and empathy with others; we lose the idea that we are neighbors; we lose sight that we may share common ground in shared love of TV shows, concerns for our children, concerns for the middle class, etcetera.

Jacobs observes: “The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called ‘the war of every man against every man.’”

However, let us stop and make an important point: Critical thinking doesn’t mean that all RCOs are worthy of our understanding or sympathy. The white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville with their Bath-And-Beyond tiki torches are truly RCOs.

There are true, bona fide “deplorables,” to use a term made popular in recent times.

Four. Most of us are content to live in Refutation Mode, where we repel all contradictory and different opinions. We prefer our bubble.

Five. Most of us are indifferent to what thinking is and would prefer to live a life of mindless habit.

Six. Most of us find that even when we attempt in earnest to think, our conclusions are twisted by prejudices and biases that we are reluctant to acknowledge or even be aware of.

Our Biases Don’t Die Easily

Jacobs cites Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, who addresses the central question about thinking: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?”

Kahneman concludes after decades of research that quality thinking can be achieved but only with sustained great effort.

I would make an analogy to dieting: You can lose weight and keep the pounds off but only by maintaining consistent diligence. Only a tiny percentage of people can do this. Most of us go off our diet.

This is scary to contemplate. We’re talking about the human race, the majority of which is doomed to be slaves to impulse, instinct, and base appetites. Why take a critical thinking class except to take in this terrifying state of affairs?

To underscore this point, we can look to another Kahneman quote: “a considerable part of our thinking apparatus, the part that generates our immediate intuitions, ‘is not readily educable. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.’ This is not encouraging.”

Seven. Thinking, the kind of critical thinking that goes against the grain of our default settings for bias and acceptance, requires great effort and cannot be sustained for long periods.

Eight. Even people who devote their lives to thinking--writers, philosophers, theologians and the like--find that their thinking is crippled by bias, arrogance, and self-righteousness.

Nine. To be a good thinker requires humility, a deep suspicion of one’s convictions and how one has arrived at those convictions, and the courage to be honestly self-critical. Very few people have these characteristics.

Ten. You would think that universities, colleges, and academia in general would be hospitable sanctuaries encouraging the flourishing of free thought, but more often than not the opposite is true: universities encourage conformity to expectations and reward compliance to hollow stereotypes of “good professors” rather than reward critical thinking.

Critical Thinking Is Not the Norm

Critical thinking therefore is not the norm; critical thinking is an anomaly.

Therefore, the whole conversation about thinking is really a conversation about whether humans are slaves to impulse or masters of their own actions, agents of free will.

A nihilistic and pessimistic worldview posits that we are helpless slaves to our appetites.

A more optimistic worldview posits that we can cultivate reason, become self-possessed, and become agents of free will.

Three. How does Jacobs’ book on thinking differ from most others?

Most books on thinking, Jacobs observes, focus on science, when it might be more helpful to look at thinking as an art.

Jacobs writes: “There are certain humanistic traditions, some of them quite ancient, that can come to our aid when we’re trying to think about thinking, and to get better at it.”

As an art form, thinking can be looked at as a rider, the thinker, riding an elephant, a metaphor for intuition. Jacobs wants to help the rider control the elephant even though the rider and the elephant, our logic and inner intuition and instinct, have minds of their own.

My immediate reaction is that 1% of the population will be drawn to reading a book such as Jacobs’ and that that 1% is motivated to think better, but most people could care less.

Four. What is Jacobs’ argument about thinking?

He writes, “In particular I’m going to argue that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as ‘overcoming bias.’ 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. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of the familiar, comforting habits; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?”

Many might think, in my words: “This whole thinking thing is too hard, it’s too slow, and it’s too painful. The hell with thinking.”

Five. How do we begin to become better thinkers?

You cannot address thinking directly, Jacobs argues. You improve thinking by working on your moral core. Good thinking springs from strong moral character.

Just like Viktor Frankl said you cannot pursue happiness directly. Happiness is the natural byproduct of finding purpose in your life.

In the same way, good thinking comes from cultivating a moral character.

For example, being honest about the errors of your ways is a moral quality, and this moral quality improves critical thinking.

Chapter One: Beginning to Think

One. What was the turning point in Megan Phelps-Roper’s relationship with her church?

She stayed with the church and cut off connections with her non-religious Twitter friend; however, she would not picket with hateful signs. She drew a line in the sand with her church. And this line was the beginning of her journey away from the church. It was the beginning of her religious apostasy of that particularly type of religious faith.

She was thinking that while she still wanted to belong to her church, her church’s position to encourage death and hell for the non-religious was crossing the line of decency. Though she could not admit it to herself at the time, she identified immorality in the group that was part of her chief identity.

Roper had come across what Jacobs called “forbidden knowledge,” information that condemns the group you belong in.

Roper will exit the identity, belonging, and safety of her church and family because her independent thinking as judged her world as an unworthy, morally bankrupt place. The seeds have been planted. It’s just a matter of time before she exits.

In Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a utopia is based on cruelty to a helpless child. Most people accept the cruelty as necessary for the happiness of everyone else, but some people, upon being aware of the cruelty, see living in the Utopia as a deal with the devil, so they leave the Utopian city without any assurance of finding a new home. They simply know that their moral sense dictates that they must leave.

Alan Jacobs compares these morally courageous people to Megan Phelps-Roper who leaves the Westboro church.

Two. Why, according to Jacobs, is it a myth that “we think for ourselves”?

Megan Phelps-Roper left the Westboro church in part because she was engaged with outsiders, thinkers who weren’t confined to the church’s propaganda.

Jacobs points out that thinking is social; it’s built on social interaction.

During social interaction, we reject people we don’t want to be like, and we gravitate and imitate people we do want to be like.

More and more, Roper wanted to be less like the hateful members of her religious cult and more like the people she met on Twitter.

When people we care about who once shared our beliefs go on a different path, Jacobs writes, we say, “So and So has had a bad influence and was probably reading horrible stuff.” Why? Because we believe that we arrive at our “truths” through good means and that people who disagree with us surely arrived at their conclusions through inferior information. These biases contribute to our delusional thinking.

Three. What is the myth of rational thinking?

That we make decisions without emotion, that we are completely dispassionate, that we are completely objective.

In using John Stuart Mill’s breakdown as an example, Jacobs observes that analysis by itself is too dry to feed the soul. We need music, or in Mill’s case, poetry, or some other emotional outlet to be fully-realized human beings. The intellect can only take us so far.

Jacobs wants to examine the cultivation of feelings and how this cultivation affects our thinking.

To achieve meaning, we must have character, and strong character can only be achieved by a synthesis of the intellect and deep feeling.

The feelings side of your being should feed the analytical side. Your powers of analysis cannot exist without feelings.

Art, politics, culture, activism, ideology--all these things are the product of both analysis and feeling present in a strong moral character. “The whole person must be engaged.”

Four. What error in rational thinking do Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Frank make?

Famous basketball player Wilt Chamberlain was more successful throwing free-throws underhanded, or “sissy” style, but he returned to the conventional method. For Gladwell, this is irrational, but only from Gladwell’s point of view. Gladwell doesn’t see that rational for him is not rational for Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain wants to impress as many women as possible, so throwing in a masculine way, is from the basketball player’s view, rational.

Chamberlain is looking for a “relational good.”

Likewise, Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, is blind to the relational goods the people of Kansas seek when they vote for what Frank calls issues that are not in their best interests.

Frank doesn’t see that most Kansans don’t just vote on economic interests; they vote on social and moral interests. However, Jacobs points out that these interests can be misguided.

Jacobs’ main point is that rational thinking is limited and not always rational or in one’s best interests.