Your Own Thinking

• Our institutions are designed to create a stable society, and so there’s an aspect of control that they need to exert. In the 20th century, populations exploded and technology became more complex at an ever-increasing rate. In this context, it was found that a shared sense and understanding of the world could be maintained over a very large population using broadcast media. A system evolved where our colleges and universities provided educated specialists who’s job it was to make sense of the world, then work with journalists from broadcast news and newspapers to distribute that understanding to the people. Our job was to learn what was being passed down to us from the top.

• Overall, that system worked well and helped give us a shared sense of the world that helped us work together and accomplish great things. Over time, however, it distorted our sense of the world. Broadcast media was paid for by advertising which found they could manipulate people in ways that made them want their products. Some experts adopted views of the world that suggested (or outright stated) that our lives were meaningless and we became more and more disconnected from each other and our world.

• The Internet began to change all that by making it possible to go around the top-down nature of broadcast media and speak directly to each other. Suddenly, there was no longer a shared understanding of the world, but many, often contradictory ones. As a result, our job has changed from simply having to learn what we’re being told from the top to having to make sense of it all ourselves. This is a fundamentally different relationship we have to media and our authorities, like government officials and academics. You can see it in the general distrust people have with those authorities.

• It’s in this new context that we need to free ourselves from the opinion of the past and literally rethink everything that we think we know. To be clear, we don’t need to trash it all and start over; much of what we know is fine, but the meaning we put around what we know might need to change and become more nuanced and inclusive. We need to understand why we think what we think and decide if it’s really accurate.

• One of the side-effects of this change in how we make sense of the world is that we no longer have a shared sense of the world. We can change that by forming an honest and direct worldview based our perceptions. We all share the same basic biology, so it follows that our experiences would have a lot in common. You can see evidence of that in our shared sense of humor about the human condition. The key will be that we’ll need to weave those shared experiences together into a kind of collective sensemaking, but that’s another pattern.

• Visualization: (when I was younger, I thought of my mind as a gleaming metal geodesic structure, but it was stained with dirt and slime that represented the errors in my thinking and understanding. I felt like it was my job to clear it up and get rid of that mess. I’m not so sure I like the visual now, though, because you don’t so much get rid of error as you replace it with the correct knowledge and label the old ideas false.)

Therefore: