Skip to content
Home » Blog » On Thinking For Yourself

On Thinking For Yourself

To think for oneself in solitude seems to be often neglected by most individuals. For them, it is too much exertion to reflect on their being or to form views of their own. If that is not the reason, then it is because of fear; fear of themselves, a denial of the meanness of existence and the malice among their fellow humans. For the fearful, it is much more soothing to blind oneself of the world’s afflictions and the fallacies of humankind. But this blindness can lead one to further inadvertent problematic occurrences – deceit, backstabbing, injustice, disappointment, unassertiveness, delusion, herd mentality and bigotry. Instead, a positivity bias seeps into their minds in an attempt coat humanity’s woes.

Too, people would rather replicate their views and thoughts from other individuals, or worse, from groups – the herd, or a particular herd. They struggle to generate their own ideas as they are not familiar with the necessity of free thinking, and when they attempt to think freely, there is a glooming doubt as to whether their original thoughts will be accepted by the crowd; a herd that they so deeply want to be accepted by. Acquiring opinions from external sources is preferable for them since they are already confirmed by the words of another person.

I must emphasise that it is not entirely erroneous to listen to various types of people, but it is mistaken to not utilise your intellectual ability to analyse what is being said. You may agree with the thoughts of an individual about one thing or many things, but that does not mean you have to accept and agree with everything that this person says and to follow them like a cult of personality. Analysis (and even derivation) is a more reasonable option when in receipt of the philosophical, political or general views of others, rather than blind replication or cognitive indolence.

Tags: