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

Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using such keywords—indeed, they’re necessary. In any gathering where human beings communicate with one another, some beliefs or positions will be taken for granted: we cannot and need not justify everything we think, before every audience, by arguing from first principles. But keywords have a tendency to be

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.

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for

Lewis thinks that the modern Western world tends to give us a choice between solitude—not always easy to choose—and “inclusion in a collective,” a collective for Lewis being an environment in which we all have more or less the same status and identity: as, for instance, part of the audience at a concert, or the crowd at a football game. What tends

We have already seen that it is not possible to “think for yourself” in the sense of thinking independently of others; and we have likewise seen how the pressures imposed on us by Inner Rings make genuine thinking almost impossible by making belonging contingent on conformity.

he explores this psychology The True Believer (1951). It might seem from that title that Hoffer is talking about something quite similar, if not identical, to the kind of delusion Marian Keech’s followers suffered from. But it is not so dramatic; it is perhaps even less dramatic than the sort of thing that prompts a South Sea Bubble, most participa

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.

The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.