Improve your thinking (a practical exercise)

A degraded view of humanity. Uh, I feel where we are effectively like marionettes. Um, and that we're just being played, and that we don't have any agency anymore, and therefore, uh, we can't be responsible for our own words. Not just our actions; we can't be responsible for our own words and their ramifications. So, we have to be controlled, and we have to be stifled by the state, and it's very—it makes me very nervous.

So, I've been thinking through, um, the importance of free speech, I suppose, from a psychological perspective. And it seems to me that, well, we can walk through some axioms, and you can tell me what you think about them, if you would. So, I mean, the first thing we might posit is that it's useful to think—it's better to think than not to think. And that might seem self-evident. But thought can be troublesome and stir up trouble, and your thoughts can be inaccurate. So it's perhaps not that unreasonable to start the questioning there.

But I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die instead of us. And so he was thinking about the evolution of thought, in some sense, from a biological perspective. So imagine a creature that's incapable of thought. It has to act something out—a representation of the world or an intent. It has to be embodied, and then if that fails, well, it fails in action. And so the consequence of that might be death; it might be very severe.

Whereas once you can think, you can represent the world abstractly. You can divorce the abstraction from the world, and then you can produce avatars of yourself, sometimes in image, like in dreams, let's say, or in literature and fiction and movies and so on. Produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional and then run them as simulations in the abstract world and observe the consequences. And we do that in our stories; we do that when we dream. We do that when we imagine in images and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out.

But then we also do that in words, because we encode those images—it's one more level of abstraction. We encode those images into words, and those words become partial dramatic avatars, and then the words can battle with one another. So thought seems to work, let's say, verbal thought. You ask yourself a question; you receive an answer in some mysterious manner. There's an internal revelation of sorts. That's the spontaneous thought.

You know, when you sit down to write a book, thoughts come to you, perhaps because you pose yourself a question, and no one knows how that works, but we experience it. That thoughts manifest themselves in the theater of our imagination. So that's the revelatory aspect, and then there's the critical aspect, which is: well, now you've thought this, and perhaps you've written it down. Can you generate counterpositions? Are there universes that you can imagine where this doesn't apply? Are there situations where it doesn't apply? Are there better ways of formulating that thought?

But I would say, with regard to critical thought and, to some degree, with regard to productive thought, an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech, and that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech. So you and I are engaging in a dialectic enterprise. You'll pause at something, and I'll respond to it, and you'll respond to that. And we're in a kind of combat; there's some cooperation about it as well, and we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly, at least in principle, if we're being honest.

We do that when we're speaking. So our thought, the quality of our thought, is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds. Absolutely. And then—sure, go ahead.

Well, I couldn't agree more, because I think speech is the way in which we collaborate on our thoughts. You know, that's how it works. You refine those thought processes that you've described. I mean, I'm no psychologist, but I understand this basic premise that we have these various thoughts that are continually in conflict within ourselves. Unless we're able to articulate them and to engage in others through that process, through that transactional process of speech, then those thoughts are never refined, and they remain in this kind of infancy.

And this is, yes, they're as refined as we can make them as individuals, but that's also assuming that you even have the words, which you also learned in a dialectical process. Right, exactly. It's not as though the truth is ever fully graspable, but we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts.

And in fact, even in the act of, like you say, writing or articulating yourself—uh, as with your self-authoring program, for instance—the act of writing things out is what clarifies the points of view for you. I've actually found that the way that I think about these issues now is largely a product of the fact that I've written so much about it and changed my mind through the act of learning how to express myself on these points.

And the consequence of not having that opportunity, I think, is something I would barely want to contemplate. And I think that to give an example of the moment, which is that because any kind of attempt to have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between trans rights and gender-critical feminism—because to even attempt that discussion at the moment will have such grave social consequences and certainly, in terms of career prospects, major consequences, people will not have that discussion.

I have people I know in politics, in the media, and they say to me quite honestly, "I will not talk about this. I have concerns; I have qualms; I want answers to questions, but I absolutely will not open my mouth about this." And if you don't do that, uh, this is why no one understands the issue. This is why no one has reached any kind of consensus on this issue. All we have is a sense in which to have the "quote unquote" wrong opinion makes you a pariah, and therefore, I'd better not have that opinion.

Well then, that's not a sincerely held conviction; that's just—if the definition of wrong is continually transforming and in an unpredictable manner, then it's best just to sidestep the issue entirely, and then that leaves it murky and ill-defined, and assuming that you believe that thought has any utility. And so when you're sitting down to write—when I'm sitting down to write and I produce a sentence—you know, it might have come from some theoretical perspective. Maybe I'm approaching something from a Freudian perspective or a Marxist perspective or an Enlightenment perspective, etc.

I mean, it's a psychological trope, I suppose, that we all think the thoughts of dead philosophers, right? We think we have our own opinions, but that's really very, very, very, very rarely the case. It's not that easy to come up with something truly original, and generally, one can only make incremental progress at best. And so your ability to abstractly represent the world and then to generate avatars that can be defeated without you dying is dependent on your incorporation of a multitude of opinions.

And that, in itself, is a consequence of—I mean, that works to the degree that communication is actually free and that you can get access to as much thought as you can possibly manage. So I can't see how you can deny the centrality of free speech as a fundamental right, or the fundamental right perhaps, unless you simultaneously deny the utility of thought. But maybe if you are also inclined to remove the individual from the central position of the political discourse, then maybe you can also make the case, at least implicitly, that individual thought doesn't matter and that mostly it's just causing trouble.

But I think individual thought is key. And actually, even in the outline you've described there, there is individual agency in reaching a conclusion that has been articulated before, insofar as if you are engaged with a multitude of writers and philosophers and artists and ideas and you've come out with a perspective, well, that perspective may not be original to you, but the process that you've gone through to reach that viewpoint is individual to you. You know, there is power in that; there's something important about that—there's something crucial.

If you're a practicing psychotherapist, one of the things you have to learn is to not provide people with your words too much; what you want is for them to formulate the conclusion, and you can guide them through the process of investigation. You talked about the self-authoring process, which is online at selfauthoring.com—that it steps people, say, through the process of writing an autobiography, of analyzing their current virtues and faults, and of making a future plan. The utility of all of that is dependent on the person who's undertaking the exercise generating their own verbal representations.

Right? And that seems to cement it somehow as yours if you've come up with the words. And so it's that—it's the uppermost expression of personhood—the ability to have the words that you should speak reveal themselves to you and to have the right to express them as you see fit. Yes, in which case, if you are merely repeating an accepted script, then to what extent can you say to—can you even say to be an individual at all?

You know, this, this to me—well, I think that's part of the philosophical conundrum, is that if you believe that all people do is repeat pre-digested scripts, especially if your view is that the fundamental human motivation is power and the entire social landscape is nothing but a competition between equally, what would you say, selfish and single-minded power drivers, then there is no individual. There's no individual in that conceptual world, and it seems to me that that's the world that we're being pushed to inhabit and are criticized for on moral grounds for criticizing.