THINKING: WHAT AND HOW

Here’s an astounding fact. Just as you can go through all 12-grades of school (elementary, middle, and high school) and never learn to actually think or learn, you can also go to University, even graduate with a degree, and still not know how to think or how to learn. Amazing, isn’t it? Well, amazing in a horrible way. And how horrible is that?

Now, learning what to think, yes that’s important, but what if you learn the wrong stuff? What if you learn something that is already outdated or that has been made redundant? What if you are only learning the prejudices and biases of your teachers and those who control the pursue strings of the university? Then not only is your learning irrelevant, it may also be actually destructive to you and others. Every religion, philosophy, and school teaches you what to learn—actually they have a vested interest in that. What they are often afraid to teach you is how to learn and how to think.

This has become clear recently in US Universities that have adopted one particular presupposition. While it is an assumption that is over-simplistic to the point of being ridiculous, yet it is what so many colleges and universities are teaching. Namely the idea that— “The world is divided into two kinds of people—oppressors and the oppressed. Oppressors are bad people and deserve whatever they suffer; the oppressed are good people and have the right to take revenge on oppressors no matter how horrible or Hitlerian the revenge.”

Now anyone who has the ability to think can see through that idea as pure non-sense. First, a thinker would immediately recognize that this is Either–Or thinking and how it dichotomizes the world and over-simplifies to the point of being ridiculous. Numerous times Maslow wrote, “Dictotomizing pathologies and pathology dichotomizes.” If only the world was that simple! If only people were that simple! But alas, neither the world nor people are. Instead anyone or anything that oppresses does so to some degree, a degree that occurs on a continuum. There are degrees of oppressing from very little to a lot. And those who are oppressed can be oppressed a little bit or a whole lot.

Second, a thinker knows that any relational term like oppressor/ oppressed indicates that it is a relationship in which both parties plays a role. That’s the way it is with relationships—everyone plays a role to some degree. Each is responding and each has a degree of response-ability. Again, the world is just not that simple.

Third, a thinker would also recognize that no matter what anyone has suffered, what misfortunates has befallen someone, no mistreatment allows, permits, and authorizes that person to now do the same. A first bad deed does not give permission for others to do a second bad

deed. If something is bad— wicked, evil, inhuman—than it is bad for the oppressed to do as well. Being mistreated does not justify reeking revenge. Revenge is not justice, it is more injustice. The dynamic is the same, just the actors have changed. When our kids say, “But he hit me first!” we don’t say, “Well, okay, go ahead and hit him back just as hard.” At least if we are civilized human beings, we don’t teach our kids to think and act that way.

If you know how to think through something, how to think straight, that is, logically and rationally, the whole notion that “the world is made up of oppressors and the oppressed” is irrational. In NLP language, it is an over-generalization that arises from having deleted critical information that results in this distorted premise. If you know the Meta-Model of Language, you would be able to ask questions about what’s been deleted, generalized, and distorted and that would let you know that the statement is an ill-formed belief.

Similarly, if colleges and universities were teaching the students how to think and how to learn, if they were teaching critical thinking skills, how to reason logically and rationally, most of the so- called “protests” would not be occurring. Young people would know better. And that they do not seem to know better, this is an example of the failure of schools in teaching people how to think.

Solution? NLP trainers training the NLP Meta-Model. Neuro-Semantic trainers training Executive Thinking and Brian Camp I, II, and III. The solution lies in enabling people to learn how to unleash their critical and creative thinking skills.