TRUE THINKERS ARE DANGEROUS

If there’s anything that a tyrant or a dictator does not want, it is people who think. People who hunger for power and control want people they can control, and the more a person is a true thinker, the less one can control them. The less they will mindlessly comply. They will ask questions. They will ask for evidence and reasons. They will use a healthy dose of skepticism to question where you get your information and check if you have done due diligence in gathering that information.

This makes a true thinker dangerous—dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to manipulation, dangerous to politics as usual, to PC politics (politically correct), dangerous to fake news, and dangerous to Woke philosophy. Given all of that, a personal question: Are you a true thinker? A sign that you might be is if people around you, above you and below you are constantly saying, “Relax, you think too much!” “You shouldn’t ask so many questions, it’s not polite.”

Now truly thinking, and asking lots of questions, is one of the things that Abraham Maslow discovered in the self-actualizing people who he modeled. Actually, they were self-actualizing precisely because they were thinking and because they were asking lots of questions. And this fits our long-term goal in Neuro-Semantics of changing the way people on Planet Earth think. Our goal is to enable people to think clearly, critically, and creatively. Maslow wrote that: “People who know too much are likely to rebel.” (1968, p. 62). Accordingly with more thinking people on this planet, they will be rebelling against what de-humanizes and for more humanity.

William James added this: “A great many people think they are ‘thinking’ when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” When you do borrowed thinking, you merely quote the bullet points that someone else created. You are not yourself engaged in asking and answering probing questions to get to the facts or to the heart of things. The result of this: “Many people are strangers to their own minds.” (Think like a Genius, 1996, p. 2). So they don’t know how their mind works. They don’t know how to create or find the information they need and/or how to apply it. They don’t know how to do original thinking and/or independent thinking.

Learning how to truly think is something you have to learn. It doesn’t come naturally —what comes naturally is biased thinking, cognitive distortion thinking, and fallacious thinking. There are the thinking patterns we have to grow out of and rise above. A primitive cutlure is a primitive culture precisely because people are still engaged in the childish thinking patterns that we call the Cognitive Distortions.

Now because critical thinking means refusing to simply accept information at face value, it is dangerous to all forms of brainwashing, manipulation, and misinformation. It is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do and what to believe. To do that use the beginner’s mind to ask dumb questions and assumptive questions. This will also be dangerous to your own biases and prejudices, but that’s okay, if we are truly committed to following what is true regardless of the consequences.

Because true thinkers are dangerous, those who like to control what others think, believe, and do are always wanting to restrict people’s freedom of speech. They want to control what people hear. And whenever something is said that they don’t like, they call it mis- information or dis-information. The implication, however, of this is that they think people are weak and unable to think for themselves.

In Neuro-Semantics, we believe that everyone can learn to think critically, clearly, and creatively. To that end we teach the Meta-Model of language; we conduct the Brain Camps, and it’s why I wrote Thinking for Humans. Here’s to you becoming a dangerous thinker—one who thinks for him or herself and who searches for truth.