How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

in many arguments there truly is something to be lost, and most often what’s under threat is social affiliation. Losing an argument can be a personal embarrassment, but it can also be an indication that you’ve sided with the wrong people, which means that you need to find a new ingroup or else learn to live with what the Marxists call “false consci

Haidt talks a lot about how our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind. “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” “Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence,

Optimistic attempts to promote what is Clearly Right will be presented as a pursuit of the common good, but Scruton believes that the attitude underlying them is always “I”-based: it’s for the good of me and people whose views are generally indistinguishable from mine. To this “I” attitude Scruton contrasts the “we” attitude—not the most felicitous

And where is the line that separates (a) matching my writing to my audience from (b) telling people what they want to hear so that I can get into the pages of an influential magazine? I didn’t know where the line was—I still don’t know where the line is—but I know it exists.

Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans? “Very simply,” Robinson writes, “it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” That is, we deploy the accusation of Puritanism because

The whole person must be engaged, all the faculties present and accounted for, in order for real thinking to take place. Indeed, this for Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all your parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is—and to act responsibly toward it.

our ability to think well will be determined to some considerable degree by who those others are: what we might call the moral form of our community. A willingness to be “broken on the floor,” for example, is in itself a testimony to belief that the people you’re debating are decent people who don’t want to harm or manipulate you—whereas if you don

For Hoffer, “True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.” And this is true on a smaller scale and in less extreme situations as well. The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.*5

So that’s the story so far: in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think.

John Stuart Mill, looking back from the end of his life on his youthful sufferings, impossible to draw a line that separates analysis on the one side from feeling on the other and to conclude that only the first side is relevant to thinking.