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

the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity.

Our social taxonomies are useful, but if we think of them as something more than that, if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another, if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible, they serve us poorly.

the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not a

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

Chesterton’s gustatory metaphor: it suggests that when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished. The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled.

Instability of this kind—the kind that makes you wonder whether your ingroup is helping you draw closer to the truth of things or blocking you from seeing that truth—is pretty much impossible to live with for the long term. You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than

All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are often created by opposition. Those who are subject to the same forces, the same powers-that-be, can find themselves grouped together, sometimes to their own s

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integ

The “true believer” of Hoffer’s title is someone who belongs not to the few but to the many, someone who strives to bring the entire group (the church, the nation, the world even) within the grip of one narrative, the force of one body of belief, the authority of one charismatic Leader. This kind of fanaticism has no interest in Inner Rings; its mo

You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position.