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Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understa
by lesterbuck 14y ago
Upton Sinclair's classic quote gets to the source of resistance to critical thinking:
I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
And often the costs are far beyond financial, including ostracism, shunning and shaming. Critical thinking, as a mass movement, is about the most dangerous idea there is to any existing power structure.
- PavlovsCat 14y agoI've heard Hilde Domin say something similar in an interview I listened to yesterday, paraphrased: "When you're young, you can still act on your insights [in this case, leaving Germany because of the rise of Hitler], but older people have more relations/commitments; and in fact many people don't even want insights, that's sadly true." It came to mind because people can be very defensive and petty even when no salary and no danger is involved... just because we believed X for Y number of years and somehow identified with it. So in that sense critical thought is like democracy, we mostly pay lip service to it, while trying our best to restrict it where it is inconvenient for us personally (or our masters, depending on how much we internalized that).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danpat 14y agoThat reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being a critical part of making things funny." Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier that contradicts the rest.