In which Wolf takes you on a scenic tour of some of the bizarre and desolate ways bad thinking manifests.
In which Wolf takes you on a scenic tour of some of the bizarre and desolate ways bad thinking manifests.
Released April 6, 2021
Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku said, "The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe." Each of us possesses one of these remarkable devices. Together our human societies are made up of millions or hundreds of millions of these devices operating simultaneously. There are currently about 7.9 billion people living on Earth.
What could go wrong?
Prejudice, ideology, bias, distortion, mindlessness: bad thinking is everywhere. The world needs heroes to lead the way to better, higher, more valuable ways of thinking. These ways are timeless, and never more needed than right now. Some claim that these timeless ways of thinking are now dangerous. To them I reply: BEWARE OF WOLF.
Depending on what you think of as "human", and depending what you call a "generation," humans have been around on Earth for roughly 10,000 generations. But whether you think humans evolved, or whether we were put here by other means isn't what's important here: what we can agree on is that humans are different from pretty much every other form of life on Earth. And while pretty much every form of life is on some level concerned with its survival and the continuation of its species, humans have our own unique problems; many of them directly concerned with the operation of our super complex brains. Our minds perceive, process, learn, recall, become motivated, and act. All of these steps feed back on each other in often chaotic and unpredictable ways. This is what makes us unique individuals, each able to contribute to the world in unique ways. And it turns out a lot can, and does, go wrong with our minds at every step. Our minds aren't a single process but a multitude of processes happening simultaneously. To simply go on living, a lot of these processes have to be functioning more or less correctly. But to live well, and even better over time, we need to engage in activities that are uniquely human: self-examination, mindfulness, self-education, and practice at higher and higher levels. We do this to discover what processes inside our own minds are holding us back, and change them. As much as we'd like to change the world, we can only change ourselves. And by changing ourselves for the better, we gain influence in the world. As George Bernard Shaw said, "Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
In the next few minutes, I want to give you a "tour of the badlands." We're going to take an informal, metaphorical, airborne flight over a strange, arid landscape where little grows, and that holds mazy canyons of thought where many lose their way and find bad ends. Learning to recognize these twisty paths and how to deal with them in ourselves and at least recognize them in others is an essential part of becoming a great thinker.
Our flight first takes us towards what appear to be the populous cities of cognitive biases. But as we fly closer the towns dissolve into mirage, leaving nothing but empty desert. Like mirages, biases make us tend to believe things that often turn out not to be true. You've probably heard of confirmation bias: the tendency to favor information that supports our existing beliefs, and disfavor information that might cause us to rethink them. A good part of the scientific method is devoted to ensuring that confirmation bias doesn't skew experimental results, but confirmation bias also plays a huge role in modern daily life. For example, the fact that social media algorithms recommend you consume more content like that you've already consumed. Remember that with social media, if you're not paying for the product, then your attention is the product. The more we consume of a particular world view, the more we're fed that by the algorithm. If we don't make a concerted effort to see the world more broadly, we end up boxed into narrow echo chambers with people who think just like us.
We take some time to land and walk around a wide landscape of bizarrely twisted, sculpture-like structures. This is the plain of fallacies. You may have heard people say things like, "Millions of people believe X, do you think they're all wrong?" You may have made a similar argument yourself. A fallacy is an argument that is unsound: in other words, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises; either because the premises are wrong or the logic built on top of them is wrong. Fallacies come in a huge variety shapes and sizes, and can sometimes be hard to classify. But generally, fallacies can be recognized by their form. You can stick almost any belief in the place of belief X and easily see that, even if X is true the number of people that believe it doesn't actually make it more likely to be true. Coming from the perspective that you can only really change yourself, going forward I'm going to focus on learning about fallacies primarily so you can personally avoid using them. When you recognize others are using them, understand that merely calling them out on it is almost never a productive strategy. This is because the fallacy is frequently a symptom, and not the cause, of deeper bad thinking. In the future we'll take occasional trips to the "Gallery of Fallacies" and study what they look like and the sort of motivation that often underlies them. We'll also deal with more effective strategies for dealing with them when they arise. As the scientist Thomas Huxley observed, "Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic."
Flying on, we pass over the canyons of cognitive distortions. The unhappy people trapped in these dead ends can be heard repeating statements like "They're just congratulating me to be nice," or "If you're not with us, you're against us!" or "What's the use of me putting my ideas out there? I already know people won't like them," or "I have no control over my life, I'm simply a victim of my circumstances." These distortions are various forms of habitual, oversimplified, and often fear-based prejudices that end up limiting our potential. Eckhart Tolle said, "The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking."
So we fly on.
That mountain up ahead is riddled with the Caves of Delusion. People who find their way into delusion are convinced of things that are demonstrably not true: all the evidence is against the belief, and they believe nonetheless. They might firmly believe they are being persecuted, or that they are deeply worthless, or that they alone hold the key to unravelling the mysteries of the universe. They act as though these things are true because they truly believe them, and the fact that the evidence says no paradoxically only gives them cause to dig themselves in deeper. In the words of Carl Sagan, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Now, if you look off to your right you'll see we're passing by the walled City-State of Thought Termination. The people who live in there believe rigid ideologies and dogmas, and they're often striving for some sort of imagined utopia. Historically they've quite often incited wars, and even the most convivial conversations there usually end with someone saying, "Well I don't care, you're still wrong!" The official State language is Newspeak. George Orwell once wrote a book as a warning that these people took as an instruction manual. In it he wrote, "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
As the sun begins to hang low in the sky we pass over a desert rave just getting started. These are the Personality Disorder dancers. If you met them at work or school you might not notice anything unusual about them, at first. You might even find the costumes and masks they wear beautiful and seductive. For the most part they're good people, but if you get close to them you eventually start to notice that something isn't right. Maybe they lack empathy, or can't regulate their emotions, or are excessively needy, or selfish, or rigidly perfectionistic. They may or may not know or care that they have trouble getting along with others, or that they often drive the people around them away. As we learn to recognize these people we can love them for who they are, but it's often best if we do so at a distance.
Now as the sun sets, we pass over a wide, empty plain dotted with people, apparently wandering aimlessly. Looking through binoculars we see that each of them is wearing a headset that covers their eyes and ears. These are the Mindless Ones. They never bother to reflect on who they are, what they have become, or what they might still do with their lives. In fact, they're actively discouraged from this behavior, and they've become content to repeat what the media flooding their eyes and ears tells them without question. Their power as individuals is controlled by whoever controls their media feed: they love what they are told to love and hate what they are told to hate. The mantra continuously repeating in their ears is, "The past is the present, the present is the future. So it goes."
As we fly on into darkness and look above us, we're startled to discover there are no stars in the night sky. We've passed into the final realm of our tour: that of The Shadow. From the darkness below us we can distinctly hear unearthly howls of strange animals. Are they possibly monsters? But the most chilling thing about the sounds is: we can tell they're calling to us. They know us. In fact, our spine tingles at the sudden thought that whatever is down there is part of us, and we are part of it. The Shadow is the aspects of our being that we are taught to repress, and the aspects of society that that society itself rejects. And the ironic thing is that the more we deny, rather than integrate the Shadow, the more toxic and dangerous the monsters actually become. Integrating our Shadow involves recognizing that the dangerous, howling monsters in the dark below us are actually an important part of our complete humanity.
Jordan Peterson said, "If you’re harmless you’re not virtuous, you’re just harmless, you’re like a rabbit; a rabbit isn’t virtuous, it just can’t do anything except get eaten! That’s not virtuous. If you’re a monster, and you don’t act monstrously, then you’re virtuous."
And as C.G. Jung put it: "No tree can grow to Heaven, unless its roots reach down to Hell."
We finally touch down, back at our starting point. Our tour of the Badlands has concluded for today. Thank you for joining me. In future episodes we'll explore this territory in more depth. I'm also looking forward to interviewing experts in these areas who can take us to deeper levels of understanding.
Learn more about the world's premier critical thinking tool Flying Logic at FlyingLogic.com. Help spread the word by rating and reviewing this show on your favorite podcast platform. Discuss this episode at BewareOfWolf.com. And keep raising the bar, whether the world likes it or not.