The suppression of critical thinking
Let us suppose we are on an island where there are fishermen and summer guests from the city.
We want to know what kind of weather we are to expect and ask a fisherman and two of the city people, who we know have all listened to the weather forecast on the radio.
The fisherman, with his long experience and concern with this problem of weather, will start thinking, assuming that he had not as yet made up his mind before we asked him. Knowing what the direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, and so on mean as a basis for weather forecast, he will weigh the different factors according to their respective significance and come to a more or less definite judgement. He will probably remember the radio forecast and quote it as supporting or contradicting his own opinion; if it is contradictory, he may be particularly careful in weighing the reasons for his opinion; but,and this is the essential point, it is his opinion, the result of his thinking,which he tells us.
The first of the two city summer guests is a man who, when we ask him his opinion, knows that he does not understand much about the weather nor does he feel any compulsion to understand anything about it. He merely replies, "I cannot judge. All I know is that the radio forecast is thus and thus." The other man whom we ask is of a different type. He believes that he knows a great deal about the weather, although actually he knows little about it. He is the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every question. He thinks for a minute and then tells us "his" opinion, which in fact is identical with the radio forecast. We ask him for his reasons and he tells us that on account of wind direction, temperature, and so on, he has come to his conclusion.
This man's behaviour as seen from the outside is the same as the fisherman's.
Yet,if we analyse it more closely, it becomes evident that he has heard the radio forecast and has accepted it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else's authoritative opinion, and believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion, but if we examine these reasons we see that they could not possibly have led him to any conclusion about the weather if he had not formed an opinion beforehand. They are
actually only pseudo reasons which have the function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority's opinion without being aware of this process. It could very well be that he is right about the weather and the fisherman wrong, but in that event it would not be "his" opinion which would be right, although the fisherman would be really mistaken in "his own" opinion.
The same phenomenon can be observed if we study people's opinions about certain subjects, for instance, politics.
Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a certain political question. He will give you as "his" opinion a more or less exact account of what he has read, and yet - and this is the essential point - he believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking. If he lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, "his own" opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent.
Another reader's opinion may be the outcome of a moment's embarrassment, the fear of being thought uninformed, and hence the "thought" is essentially a front and not the result of a natural
combination of experience, desire, and knowledge.
The same phenomenon is to be found in aesthetic judgements.
The average person who goes to a museum and looks at a picture by a famous painter, say Rembrandt, judges it to be a beautiful and
impressive picture. If we analyse his judgement, we find that he does not have any particular inner response to the picture but thinks it is beautiful because he knows that he is supposed to think it is beautiful.
The same phenomenon is evident with regard to people's judgement of music and also with regard to the act of perception itself.
Many persons looking at a famous bit of scenery actually reproduce the pictures they have seen of it numerous times, say on postal cards, and while believing "they" see the scenery, they have these pictures before their eyes.
Or, in experiencing an accident which occurs in their presence, they see or hear the situation in terms of the newspaper report they anticipate. As a matter of fact, for many people an experience which they have had, an artistic performance or a political meeting they have attended, becomes real to them only after they have read about it in the newspaper.
The suppression of critical thinking usually starts early.
A five-year-old girl, for instance, may recognize the insincerity of her mother, either by subtly realizing that, while the mother is always talking of love and friendliness, she is actually cold and egotistical, or in a cruder way by noticing that her mother is having an affair with another man while constantly emphasizing her high moral standards.
The child feels the discrepancy.
Her sense of justice and truth is hurt, and yet, being dependent on the mother who would not allow any kind of criticism and, let us say, having a weak father on whom she cannot rely, the child is forced to suppress her critical insight. Very soon she will no longer notice the mother's insincerity or unfaithfulness. She will lose the ability to think critically since it seems to be both hopeless and dangerous to keep it alive.
On the other hand, the child is impressed by the pattern of having to believe that her mother is sincere and decent and that the marriage of the parents is a happy one, and she will be ready
to accept this idea as if it were her own.
In all these illustrations of pseudo thinking, the problem is whether the thought is the result of one's own thinking, that is, of one's own activity; the problem is not whether or not the contents of the thought are right.
As has been already suggested in the case of the fisherman making a weather forecast, "his" thought may even be wrong, and that of the man who only repeats the thought put into him may be right.
The pseudo thinking may also be perfectly logical and rational.
Its pseudo character does not necessarily appear in illogical elements. This can be studied in rationalizations which tend to explain an action or a feeling on rational and realistic grounds, although it is actually determined by irrational and subjective factors. The rationalization may be in contradiction to facts or to the rules of logical thinking. But frequently it will be logical and rational in itself; then its irrationality lies only in the fact that is not the real motive of the action which it pretends to have caused.
An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke.
A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbour had broken it and, on being asked to return it, answered, "In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you gave it to me."
We have an example of "rational" rationalization when a person, A, who finds himself in a situation of economic distress, asks a relative of his, B, to lend him a sum of money. B declines and says that he does so because by lending money he could only support A's inclinations to be irresponsible and to lean on others for support. Now this reasoning may be perfectly sound, but it would nevertheless be a rationalization because B had not wanted to let A have the money in any event, and although he believes himself to be motivated by concern for A's welfare he is actually motivated by his own stinginess.
We cannot learn, therefore, whether we are dealing with a rationalization merely by determining the logicality of a person's statement as such, but we must also take into account the psychological motivations operating in a person.
The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought.
The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside himself.
Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself.
Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality.
[...]
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it.
But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves.
A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
When children are asked whether they want to go to school every day, and their answer is, "Of course, I do," is the answer true?
In many cases certainly not. The child may want to go to school quite frequently, yet very often would like to play or do something else instead. If he feels, "I want to go to school every day," he may repress his disinclination for the regularity of school work. He feels that he is expected to want to go to school every day, and this pressure is strong enough to submerge the feeling that he goes so often only because he has to. The child might feel happier if he could be aware of the fact that sometimes he wants to go and sometimes he only goes because he has to go. Yet the pressure of the sense of duty is great enough to give him the feeling that "he" wants what he is supposed to want.
It is a general assumption that most men marry voluntarily.
Certainly there are those cases of men consciously marrying on the basis of a feeling of duty or obligation. There are cases in which a man marries because "he" really wants to. But there are also not a few cases in which a man (or a woman for that matter) consciously believes that he wants to marry a certain person while actually he finds himself caught in a sequence of events which leads to marriage and seems to block every escape. All the months leading up to his marriage he is firmly convinced that "he" wants to marry, and the first and rather belated indication that this may not be so is the fact that on the day of his marriage he suddenly gets panicky and feels an impulse to run away. If he is "sensible" this feeling lasts only for a few minutes, and he will answer the question whether it is his intention to marry with the unshakable conviction that it is.
We could go on quoting many more instances in daily life in which people seem to make decisions, seem to want something, but actually follow the internal or external pressure of "having" to want the thing they are going to do. As a matter of fact, in watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as "their" decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure.
It almost seems that "original" decision is a comparatively rare phenomenon in a society which supposedly makes individual decision the cornerstone of its existence.
Bibliography: The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm, Routledge Classics (2001).
We want to know what kind of weather we are to expect and ask a fisherman and two of the city people, who we know have all listened to the weather forecast on the radio.
The fisherman, with his long experience and concern with this problem of weather, will start thinking, assuming that he had not as yet made up his mind before we asked him. Knowing what the direction of the wind, temperature, humidity, and so on mean as a basis for weather forecast, he will weigh the different factors according to their respective significance and come to a more or less definite judgement. He will probably remember the radio forecast and quote it as supporting or contradicting his own opinion; if it is contradictory, he may be particularly careful in weighing the reasons for his opinion; but,and this is the essential point, it is his opinion, the result of his thinking,which he tells us.
The first of the two city summer guests is a man who, when we ask him his opinion, knows that he does not understand much about the weather nor does he feel any compulsion to understand anything about it. He merely replies, "I cannot judge. All I know is that the radio forecast is thus and thus." The other man whom we ask is of a different type. He believes that he knows a great deal about the weather, although actually he knows little about it. He is the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every question. He thinks for a minute and then tells us "his" opinion, which in fact is identical with the radio forecast. We ask him for his reasons and he tells us that on account of wind direction, temperature, and so on, he has come to his conclusion.
This man's behaviour as seen from the outside is the same as the fisherman's.
Yet,if we analyse it more closely, it becomes evident that he has heard the radio forecast and has accepted it. Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else's authoritative opinion, and believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking. He imagines that the reasons he gives us preceded his opinion, but if we examine these reasons we see that they could not possibly have led him to any conclusion about the weather if he had not formed an opinion beforehand. They are
actually only pseudo reasons which have the function of making his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking. He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority's opinion without being aware of this process. It could very well be that he is right about the weather and the fisherman wrong, but in that event it would not be "his" opinion which would be right, although the fisherman would be really mistaken in "his own" opinion.
The same phenomenon can be observed if we study people's opinions about certain subjects, for instance, politics.
Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a certain political question. He will give you as "his" opinion a more or less exact account of what he has read, and yet - and this is the essential point - he believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking. If he lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, "his own" opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent.
Another reader's opinion may be the outcome of a moment's embarrassment, the fear of being thought uninformed, and hence the "thought" is essentially a front and not the result of a natural
combination of experience, desire, and knowledge.
The same phenomenon is to be found in aesthetic judgements.
The average person who goes to a museum and looks at a picture by a famous painter, say Rembrandt, judges it to be a beautiful and
impressive picture. If we analyse his judgement, we find that he does not have any particular inner response to the picture but thinks it is beautiful because he knows that he is supposed to think it is beautiful.
The same phenomenon is evident with regard to people's judgement of music and also with regard to the act of perception itself.
Many persons looking at a famous bit of scenery actually reproduce the pictures they have seen of it numerous times, say on postal cards, and while believing "they" see the scenery, they have these pictures before their eyes.
Or, in experiencing an accident which occurs in their presence, they see or hear the situation in terms of the newspaper report they anticipate. As a matter of fact, for many people an experience which they have had, an artistic performance or a political meeting they have attended, becomes real to them only after they have read about it in the newspaper.
The suppression of critical thinking usually starts early.
A five-year-old girl, for instance, may recognize the insincerity of her mother, either by subtly realizing that, while the mother is always talking of love and friendliness, she is actually cold and egotistical, or in a cruder way by noticing that her mother is having an affair with another man while constantly emphasizing her high moral standards.
The child feels the discrepancy.
Her sense of justice and truth is hurt, and yet, being dependent on the mother who would not allow any kind of criticism and, let us say, having a weak father on whom she cannot rely, the child is forced to suppress her critical insight. Very soon she will no longer notice the mother's insincerity or unfaithfulness. She will lose the ability to think critically since it seems to be both hopeless and dangerous to keep it alive.
On the other hand, the child is impressed by the pattern of having to believe that her mother is sincere and decent and that the marriage of the parents is a happy one, and she will be ready
to accept this idea as if it were her own.
In all these illustrations of pseudo thinking, the problem is whether the thought is the result of one's own thinking, that is, of one's own activity; the problem is not whether or not the contents of the thought are right.
As has been already suggested in the case of the fisherman making a weather forecast, "his" thought may even be wrong, and that of the man who only repeats the thought put into him may be right.
The pseudo thinking may also be perfectly logical and rational.
Its pseudo character does not necessarily appear in illogical elements. This can be studied in rationalizations which tend to explain an action or a feeling on rational and realistic grounds, although it is actually determined by irrational and subjective factors. The rationalization may be in contradiction to facts or to the rules of logical thinking. But frequently it will be logical and rational in itself; then its irrationality lies only in the fact that is not the real motive of the action which it pretends to have caused.
An example of irrational rationalization is brought forward in a well-known joke.
A person who had borrowed a glass jar from a neighbour had broken it and, on being asked to return it, answered, "In the first place, I have already returned it to you; in the second place, I never borrowed it from you; and in the third place, it was already broken when you gave it to me."
We have an example of "rational" rationalization when a person, A, who finds himself in a situation of economic distress, asks a relative of his, B, to lend him a sum of money. B declines and says that he does so because by lending money he could only support A's inclinations to be irresponsible and to lean on others for support. Now this reasoning may be perfectly sound, but it would nevertheless be a rationalization because B had not wanted to let A have the money in any event, and although he believes himself to be motivated by concern for A's welfare he is actually motivated by his own stinginess.
We cannot learn, therefore, whether we are dealing with a rationalization merely by determining the logicality of a person's statement as such, but we must also take into account the psychological motivations operating in a person.
The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought.
The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside himself.
Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself.
Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality.
[...]
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it.
But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves.
A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
When children are asked whether they want to go to school every day, and their answer is, "Of course, I do," is the answer true?
In many cases certainly not. The child may want to go to school quite frequently, yet very often would like to play or do something else instead. If he feels, "I want to go to school every day," he may repress his disinclination for the regularity of school work. He feels that he is expected to want to go to school every day, and this pressure is strong enough to submerge the feeling that he goes so often only because he has to. The child might feel happier if he could be aware of the fact that sometimes he wants to go and sometimes he only goes because he has to go. Yet the pressure of the sense of duty is great enough to give him the feeling that "he" wants what he is supposed to want.
It is a general assumption that most men marry voluntarily.
Certainly there are those cases of men consciously marrying on the basis of a feeling of duty or obligation. There are cases in which a man marries because "he" really wants to. But there are also not a few cases in which a man (or a woman for that matter) consciously believes that he wants to marry a certain person while actually he finds himself caught in a sequence of events which leads to marriage and seems to block every escape. All the months leading up to his marriage he is firmly convinced that "he" wants to marry, and the first and rather belated indication that this may not be so is the fact that on the day of his marriage he suddenly gets panicky and feels an impulse to run away. If he is "sensible" this feeling lasts only for a few minutes, and he will answer the question whether it is his intention to marry with the unshakable conviction that it is.
We could go on quoting many more instances in daily life in which people seem to make decisions, seem to want something, but actually follow the internal or external pressure of "having" to want the thing they are going to do. As a matter of fact, in watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as "their" decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure.
It almost seems that "original" decision is a comparatively rare phenomenon in a society which supposedly makes individual decision the cornerstone of its existence.
Bibliography: The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm, Routledge Classics (2001).
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