#2041 Another Look Under the Hood
Where do you spend your time? What do you read? What do you watch? Who do you listen to/follow? Who do you surround yourself with?
If you’re reading this blog, I don’t figure you are a dolt, spending endless hours sitting on the couch watching, eating Froot Loops, with The Housewives blaring from your TV.
However, choice, beyond the aforementioned doltishness, needs to be conscious and proactive.
We all identify in various ways: Republicans, democrats, vegetarians, athletes, intellectuals, introverts, Christians, Buddhists, homebodies, various ethnicities, and tribal affiliations.
We like to identify because it offers a package of individual principles wrapped together to form a picture without having to peel back our every thought. Association with various groups is a very human thing to do and valuable – as long as you continue to challenge beliefs and do your own critical thinking.
Sometimes in belonging we can outsource critical thinking and march, lemming-like, in a direction we haven’t entirely mapped out.
I’m seeing this more today than I have in the past. I think it is because of the availability of vehicles to do our thinking for us. After all, inherent in the title “Influencer” is that you will be influenced by them, and AI is meant as a tool, not a puppet master.
We see it in affiliations as well. Being a vegetarian implies more than a dietary discipline; it suggests membership to a group with shared beliefs beyond tofu and juicing. And that’s OK if, in fact, you want to wear that identity along with your food choice.
My point is to challenge EVERYTHING. To look at our affiliations and check to see that they aren’t indoctrinations. To know that we can be a part of a group that shares some common beliefs but that we won’t wave a pitchfork and shout when they burn a witch at the stake.
The best way to do this is to get out among folks that aren’t just like you and listen. If I’m a republican it’s easy to dismiss a Mamdani follower without hearing what, exactly, they believe.
The impediment to knowledge is just that. Daniel Boorstin said it like this: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge”
This outsourcing of critical thinking is worse today because it is packaged in soundbites and lacks the footnotes that might give it credibility.
When I was a kid, there was a popular expression that said, “Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.” That was meant to be an indictment of gossip and editorializing depicted as factual news – not a bad caution.
It is the same today but super-sized, which is why this idea of challenging one’s own beliefs means even more. It is easier than ever to find supporting opinions; hell, you don’t even have to look; they’re dealt up to you, personally, at every turn.
Going back to the Mamdani-republican conversation, for it to be beneficial, there must be mutual respect and the acceptance that there are beliefs you have not learned enough about (or have inaccurate knowledge of) that have merit. You don’t have to agree wholesale but be open enough to look for the merits rather than swatting the entire philosophy aside because it questions your own.
I was not raised in the way my parents were, and my kids are not raising their kids the way they were raised. My beliefs around child rearing were based on my own stored standard, the entirety of my experience with my kids and others during their childhood and adolescence. My beliefs didn’t change at all once my kids went out on their own. I never examined them. Then something happened: my kids had kids and began raising them differently than what I thought was right!
I could dig my heels in and say “These kids don’t know what they’re doing”, dismissing them because they are different than me and challenge what I know to be true. But because they’re my kids, and I respect them and think they’re pretty smart, instead, I asked open questions with the sincere desire to understand.
In the end, I have not traded my child-raising philosophy for theirs, but I have learned a lot and adjusted some of my thinking.
My child-rearing beliefs were sacrosanct. What’s more important than knowing you did your absolute best and believed strongly in the way you ushered your kids through their formative years?
Back then, had you exposed me to some of the newer parenting beliefs, I would have dismissed them as foo-foo. But when they were presented by people I respected, I opened up to examine what I thought and how this might change some of that.
It’s like that with your leadership style, interpersonal skills, work ethic, political, ethnic, religious, tribal beliefs and affiliations. It’s great to be associated and to share common ground with others, but remember that subordinating critical thinking to the dogma of any group or person diminishes you.
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