The older I get the more I genuinely appreciate and respect independent thinking. People who don’t take anything for granted, who don’t assume anything, but who examine everything with new eyes and come to a conclusion that is uniquely their own – they have my admiration.
I aspire to be an independent thinker, but there’s a lot that gets in the way.
I call them lenses. I was raised in a Christian household and community. So that was the first worldview that I adopted and my first lens through which to view the world. I registered as a Republican, so that’s a lens. I’m white, born to white parents, and have lived in predominantly white neighborhoods my entire life. So that’s another lens. I’m educated, that’s another lens. I’m a man, so that’s another lens. I’m comfortably middle class, another lens. I’m an english speaker, another lens. Live in the U.S, another lens.
The point is I can’t think independently until I’m able to remove each of those lenses and view a thing for what it really is. And that’s an immensely difficult task. Because you first must be aware of what your lenses are – you need to be conscious of what you think and why you think it and then remove any layer of thinking that is influenced by a lens. This is a task made more difficult by the pressures of intellectual tribalism. People around you might criticize you for daring to stray from the accepted norms of the group. You have to push through that in order to think independently.
But it’s even harder than that.
Because the next step is to put your lenses back on; you have to do this to develop a unique opinion, otherwise you’re just parroting facts or talking points into the void. So, you look at a thing for what it is, without any external factors influencing your understanding of the true nature of this thing. Then you take one lens at a time and put them back on, being very careful to observe how that lens changes your conception of the true nature of that thing. The lenses that distort the truth into falsehood should get thrown out, and the lenses that add understanding should be kept because they help you see a fuller picture of the truth.
Lenses aren’t good or bad inherently, they just are. We’re all biased one way or another. It’s only a problem if we don’t acknowledge our biases, our lenses, in how we think and communicate.
My path to independent thinking started in high school with the topic of when/how the earth came into being. Many Christians – and I was one of them – believe that the Earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old and was created by God in 7 literal days. This is a belief-set generally referred to as young-earth creationism. And it was a lens through which I viewed the world.
Well, when I took my first few science classes in high school and college I came face-to-face with mountains of evidence pointing to the fact that the earth is billions of years old and was created through the process of evolution. Of course, this didn’t jive with my view of the world at the time. I needed to decide how to deal with that.
I ended up sorting the information into two boxes. Box 1, my religious beliefs. Box 2, what science has proven to be true. So I was able to remove the lens of my religious beliefs long enough to at least learn the material and get ‘A’s in my classes The hard part came later – I now needed to figure out how to reconcile the info in these two buckets.
I’ll save you the inner turmoil I went through, but I ended up concluding that my religious beliefs were off base and that the science I had seen was right; the earth was formed over billions of years through the process of evolution. So I threw out the lens that I saw as distorting the truth. I’m still a Christian, but my views have changed. I believe that God created the universe and I think science has illuminated for us exactly how that happened.
So – fast forward to today and I’ve been examining, removing, and replacing my lenses for more than 10 years. I work really hard to think independently, but I don’t always succeed. It’s an uncomfortable and painful process. You have to be willing to live with uncertainty. But the result: unique and well-reasoned opinions, can be a huge value to yourself and those around you.
All that to say, I encourage anyone and everyone to begin to think independently. It’s going to take a long time to do it well, it’ll be painful, but in the end you’ll be a better version of yourself.
MW 