critical thinking

Where people stop believing the truth, they do not start to believe in nothing, they start to believe in anything.

Do you begin to understand the mischief that self-uncritical democratist opinionizing has wrought, all across the cultural universe? NONE of our political rhetoric and religious and moral and other usages can afford to be taken at face value; all deserve to be scrutinized, to be hammered and tested as heartlessly as is rationally possible. The hard labors that our whole culture has NOT done in self-testing itself for us, WE must do as self-critical and acute individuals. Just as with our genome, so too with our noosphere: there is an overwhelming mass of non-functional or dysfunctional genetic detritus cluttering up our so-called minds. The "discriminating" intelligence by which this stuff might have gotten screened has been given a bad name (elitist, if not racist and sexist) by the psycho-social pressure groups that define the "politics of identity" (i.e. which particular segment of self-enclosing idiotists do you most immediately identify with).

Look always at the whole

"The price of temporarily suspending our disbelief while reading novels and viewing films is small.  The price of suspending our disbelief (turning off our critical thinking) in matters of politics, economics, technology and religion is immense.

One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns--about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering--in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.