It’s sad but true: Most people prefer to wallow in ignorance. Most people prefer a simple, stressless solution to complex problems. Most people embrace simple solutions even though they know on some level, usually in their deep heart’s core, that the simple solution is likely to be wrong.
Terrorism is a vast, complex problem. Terrorism is unlikely to have a simple solution. There is no way that your buying a gas mask for $450 is going to solve the terrorism problem. Not for you, not for anyone. Yet hundreds of gas masks were sold in New York and even in Houston on September 12, the day after the attacks. That was a pity. The further pity was that what many people bought was not a gas mask at all but something that looked like a kid’s toy. Pretty ironic. A fake gas mask becomes a fake solution to a complex problem.
Why do simple answers attract so many people to error?
p. 17 Simple answers attract us for several reasons. People who are cautious and tentative are likely to be unimpressive. Moderate statements and highly qualified long explanations seem to indicate weakness and indecision. Bold and forthright assertions (even when wrong) suggest strength and vigor. Hence, the simple and the simplistic carry more weight, much more weight than they should. Conversely, complex and sophisticated answers carry less weight than they should.
Principle: People with eerie self-assurance and freedom from doubt are likely wrong.
Lesson: Be suspicious of people who are sure that they are right.
Then there is the people problem mentioned above: Most people don’t know how to think. And those who do know how to think tend to avoid the activity because it is too much work. More importantly, those who do think are often not in the mood because many of them are in jail. Or they have been publicly disgraced, fired, persecuted, or otherwise punished for previous episodes of thinking. Take, for instance, Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, or Enron whistle-blower Sherron S. Watkins. These great people did some serious thinking and tried to tell others about it. But many people so informed reacted adversely and resorted to violence. Socrates had to drink the hemlock. Jesus got crucified. Galileo was exiled from Pisa and placed under arrest for having “held and taught” that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Some Enron whistle-blowers got fired and collected no severance pay.
Conclusion: Thinking can be dangerous.
Yes, thinking can be dangerous—to those who do the thinking and to the people, organizations, institutions, and ideas that are thought about. Thinking can challenge the powers that be in the established order and question traditional beliefs.
No wonder thinkers tend to keep their thoughts to themselves. Real thinkers soon learn not to cause trouble, not to ask embarrassing questions, not to create ill will, else they might experience bad vibes, incite riot, or topple governments, the way they know they can when, and if, they really get down to thinking.
p. 18 Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. It sees a man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence; yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe.
—Bertrand Russell[3]
What did Bertrand Russell mean? He meant exactly what he said. But the quotation from him that I like even better is: “Many people would sooner die than think—in fact, they do.”
Principle: In the short run clear thinking might cause trouble. In the long run, clear thinking is usually beneficial.
Dang it! No question about it: Thinking can cause a pile of trouble. But it can also create wonders. The crackpot may turn out to be the trailblazer. The genius usually starts his career as a dissident minority of one, and many a leading statesman spent much of his earlier life in a jail or prison camp only to emerge as a kind of Prometheus bearing rich gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and change.
But I digress. With one last point, let’s get back to the reasons that the general public likes simple answers to complex questions. It’s difficult to understand and explain complex propositions. It is especially difficult to explain complex issues to the inattentive and to the stupid. Most real thinkers have trouble communicating their thinking effectively, not because they are poor communicators (although some are), but because the people they are talking to, for various reasons, are unreceptive.
Let’s face it, genuine scholarship is one of the highest successes that our race can achieve. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts and turnings. He can then do what he wants. But if he could communicate his findings as they are known to himself, he would long ago have civilized the human race. Thus, real scholars have failed. True scholarship is often incommunicable.
Principle: Pseudoscholars like ourselves control the future of the world.
p. 19 Most of us, like me, are pseudoscholars, not real scholars. We can’t take the trouble to be thorough , even though it is we, the pseudoscholars, who control the church and state, the educational systems, the press, and the economy, and when you get down to it, the future of ourselves and (directly and indirectly) the future of the world.
The good news is that, given the current state of genuine scholarship, pseudoscholarship fits the bill, satisfies the need, and helps us get along quite well in this imperfect world. Pseudoscholarship fits the bill because it is enough. It is sufficient. But we have to work even at pseudoscholarship because it is work.
So the trouble is not only with the people in general but also with ourselves. Men at some time are masters of their fates; at other times, they are not. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. Yes, we tend to be lazy. We tend to go along. We tend to miss the point. We tend to make snap judgments and decisions. We tend to be underlings. And we tend to suffer the consequences.
Yes, simple laziness and a tendency to follow the herd, a general reluctance to adopt anything new or different, prevent progress and stop lots of thinking. Simple laziness prevents thinking, at least initially, until reality crashes down on our heads. After which we must think, and then maybe—often—it is too late.
Principle: Most people tend to take the easy way.
Rather than develop a method of dealing reasonably or wrestle with the problem, most people give in before the fight begins. They acquiesce. Having acquiesced, they will suffer. They will suffer, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Don’t be one of them.
Principle: Most incorrect, illogical, false, erroneous, unreasonable, and defective thinking is due to mental laziness.
From which follows:
Lesson: Avoid mental laziness. Work at thinking.
Cure yourself of mental laziness by resolving here and now to force yourself to think. Resolve here and now that you are going to force p. 20 yourself to continue reading this little book because you know, despite the pain that it will cause (and it will cause pain), that eventually it will do you good, probably lots and lots of good.
Keep thinking. Keep working on your thinking.
It will be difficult, especially at first. But keep doing it. Keep thinking. After a while, you will find that thinking is fun. After a while, you will get the hang of it, just as you got the hang of driving a car or using a fork or brushing your teeth. After a while, you will enjoy it, especially the freedom, just as you experienced the fun and freedom of driving. Just as you experienced the convenience of eating with a fork or having clean teeth. And, after a while, you will enjoy being as insufferable at the dinner table as I am. After a while, like me, you will be able to contradict almost everything that people say, pointing out to them with relish that ideas they hold as their sacred cows are nothing but unmitigated rubbish.
Ah! Sacred cows—I love them. Sacred cows make the best burgers. Delic
ious!
Thinking, like everything else, is an art. In order to do it well you must, especially in the beginning, make it hurt like hell. Things will improve. Later, you will find that the more you do it, the more you think, the easier it will get. The more you think, the better will be the results. Because it’s fun and profitable, overcome the mental inertia and think.
Besides the pleasure of showing off and showing up others, you will also notice that correct thinking can keep you out of trouble, make you more efficient, and help you develop and maintain your continued prosperity. With practice, you will be amazed how helpful thinking can be. Thinking will confer a gigantic advantage on you in your personal and business life, the likes of which you never imagined. The main reason for this distinctive advantage, sad to say, is that others around you, in fact, most people around you, do not think. They are just wandering in the void, muddling through the mental fog, hoping to make it from beginning to end on a wing and a prayer. They leave their destiny to chance or to the will of others instead of to their own design.
Finally, a warning: Watch out for TV and the mass media. They are your enemies. They are the enemies of clear thinking. Often, they are the enemies of any thinking at all.
Principle: TV and the mass media tend to make people dumb.
p. 21 Why is that?
Besides the confusing mix of hype and hope, most of the ideas out there in the public domain are simple and therefore likely wrong. The reason for this sad state of affairs is straightforward: Simple ideas are easily remembered, easily explained, and easily disseminated—all those things that TV audiences seem to want and need.
Don’t forget we present our society as being one of free initiatives, individualism, and idealism, when in reality those are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial culture of an essentially bureaucratic nature and motivated by a materialism that is only slightly mitigated by truly humanistic concerns. TV is mainly owned and operated and (through advertising revenues) controlled by big business, the American corporation, that routinely lies to us about the quality of its products and sometimes (as with WorldCom, Dynergy, Adelphia, Tyco, CMS Energy, Reliant Resources, Enron, and Global Crossing) about the soundness of its own business practices.
So watch out!
People who wish to influence you, who want to drive your opinions—whether teachers, advertisers, corporations or, God help us, politicians—those people, the image makers, adjust what they have to say to the intellectual level of their audience. And the larger the audience, the lower the level. That’s why you get your news chopped up into sound bites, reduced to its simplest elements, which, in turn, are spun into headlines and slogans, designed to be easily digestible pellets of information—and often misinformation.
Thomas Jefferson said that the man who doesn’t read the newspapers knows more than the man who does. The man who doesn’t read the papers doesn’t have his head crammed with misinformation. If Jefferson thought that about newspapers, what would he have said about TV? Mark Twain, who held a similar opinion, said that it wasn’t what he knew that hurt but all those things he knew that weren’t true. Jefferson and Twain would have agreed with Buddha, who expressed the same idea in his Noble Truths: There is suffering. Suffering has a cause. The cause of suffering is misapprehension (by which Buddha meant misinformation leading to misconception).
There’s the problem. What’s the solution? Enter clear thinking.
Clear thinking tells you, better than any other tool, what is likely to be true and what is likely to be false. Clear thinking is a tool that helps us think correctly. Clear thinking even supplies the tools to decode p. 22 hidden messages so that you get to the truth. Clear thinking tells you when they are handing you rubbish.
My hope is that this little handbook of clear thinking and practical logic will speed you along the correct path to a safer, happier life by introducing you to the much-neglected art of reasonable thinking. My hope is that this little handbook will give you the tools to know the truth. My hope is that this book will give you a chance of adding a very large item to your stock of mental delights. My hope is that you will, along the way, have some fun as I did when I was learning this discipline.
Increasingly, civilization is in a race between straight thinking and disaster. If we don’t straighten our crooked thinking soon, we will crash. If we don’t start thinking right, God help us.
Review
Time spent in review is never wasted. Neuroscientists have discovered that review fixes our memories by increasing the probability of reactivating previously activated neuronal networks. Repeated reactivation results in actual structural changes in the brain that facilitate recall. Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Therefore (here you should be able to generate your own conclusion from the above mentioned premises).
Exercises
1. Reread all the main points in this chapter. When you have done so give yourself a check here __.
2. Reread all the main points in this chapter aloud. When done, give yourself a check here __. Rereading aloud fixes the memory better than silent rereading. Rereading on separate days fixes the memory better than rereading twice the same day. The more you reread, the more you will fix the memory. But don’t overdo it. Four times should be quite enough. You don’t want to acquire the reputation of being a drudge.
3. Tell why logic isn’t half as important as love. Give yourself a check mark if you think you are right __. Hint: The answer to this question is not in this book, but it is in your heart. By p. 23 quoting Oscar Wilde, the book merely asserted that logic wasn’t half as important as love; it never explained why, and it certainly did not prove it. Unsupported assertions, those for which no evidence is given, are, strictly speaking, irrational. Why such statements are irrational will be covered subsequently.
4. Explain why waiting for it to rain beer is a waste of time. Give yourself a check mark if you think you are right __.
5. What factors preclude simple answers to complex problems? Give yourself a check mark if you think you are right __.
6. What is the cause of most incorrect, illogical, false, and defective thinking? Give yourself a check mark if you think you are right __.
7. Check your answers to the questions above by rereading the appropriate sections of the text. If you got most of them correct, stop here and reward yourself in some way. A simple pleasure at this point will serve to fix the memories. Rewards for work well done help the brain function effectively.
8. Apply what you have learned from this chapter in your everyday life. Psychologists tell us that unless we can immediately put newly learned thinking strategies to work, we are less likely to adopt the strategies as a lifelong means of thinking critically about what we see and hear. Try to find at least three examples of simplistic thinking in today’s newspaper or in the things people tell you today. Explain why the thinking is simplistic and how it reveals an underlying tendency to mental laziness. See if you can uncover the reason for the simplistic thinking that you have detected. Usually the media deceive us because they are deceived themselves. At times the media deceive us because they want to sell us their product, which is news. Since the news that sells best is bad news, it is bad news that generally predominates in the papers, on the radio, and on TV. Remember that the world is filled with Chicken Littles running around yelling that the sky is falling. Those warnings are noise. Treat them as such. Chicken Little is, in fact, effective because most of us, myself included, are all a little chicken. It’s hard, but it’s reasonable to take courage and forget 98 percent of the gloom and doom. To help reinforce this point, go to the library and look over last year’s newspapers. Better still, look over the year before’s newspapers. Note how much of what you read when viewed by hindsight is just plain p. 24 hokum made up by people who, out of fear or lack of information, constantly misestimate situations. How many fears du jour do you see? What are the latest reasons that mankind is doomed? How often have you heard these th
ings before? Global warming? Or is it global cooling? AIDS? The ozone hole? Y2K? Y2K+1? Organized crime and drugs? Sex scandals in the White House? Do any of these usual worries as applied to your own life amount to a hill of beans? Alas, in an age of sound bites, thinking becomes a lost art, and attention spans shrink while the soul suffers. If you don’t think so, then move to Switzerland, the country where nothing seems to happen and where they seem to worry about everything. When you have uncovered in your quest at least three forms of defective thinking because of oversimplification, give yourself three check marks here ___.
Now give yourself a rest somewhere nice before you go on to the next chapter, which discusses the error in thinking known as overgeneralization.
Notes
1. At present, the sea is called the Gulf of Mexico. It could have been called the Gulf of Florida. Its existence does not depend on its name.
2. Hamlet 3.1.
3. Bertrand Russell, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, ed. Lester E. Denonn and Robert E. Egner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 411.
1 – Overgeneralization
p. 25 This chapter, by far the hardest in this book, introduces the concept of generalization and its overextension, overgeneralization. The ideas are few but important. Be prepared to think and spend some time mastering the concepts. Otherwise, quit right now. If you don’t have a passion about where you are going and what you want to be, give up. You have no chance of making it. You are reading the wrong book. Go watch TV.
On the other hand, if you work at it, by the end of the chapter, you should have a knowledge of inductive and deductive logic and an understanding of the roles those two methods of thinking play in arriving at the truth. Along the way, you will learn that general knowledge (as opposed to particular knowledge) is tentative. And, more importantly, you will learn why general knowledge is tentative.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 2