No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves

From my point of view, unconscious adherence to an expert-driven, empirical bias is the source of nearly all psychological, social, racial, political, economic, and ecological problems facing the world today.

Behaviorism presents a double impediment to this development. It substitutes conditioning for genuine self-management, and it uses an array of rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behavior, most of which have as their subtext the implied threat of nonbelonging. The need to belong to coherent social groups is a core driver of human behavior

The dominant contemporary theory of thinking in the United States assumes that it is possible to build knowledge over time, along with the answers and certainty that it provides. From this point of view, everything about the world can be known, and our job is to acquire enough of this information to establish a working relationship with things as t

The spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti put it in gentler terms when he warned us never to trust the teachers. He was not trying to promote paranoia and distrust. Rather, like all lineage practitioners, he was pushing us to develop our own wisdom, to see beyond the capabilities of our teachers so that we can make our own contributions to the e

My premise about change is that building people’s independent thinking capacity is, in and of itself, a social responsibility, one that will have more far-reaching and enduring consequences than any targeted effort to change material conditions.

Why did so many people accept (or reject) the things I said without subjecting them to rigorous examination? I was beginning to be seen as a source of solutions and best practices, and this disturbed me deeply. I was contributing to the collective illness, whereby we never learn to think for ourselves, and I knew that something had to change.

We develop the ability to be an evolutionary instrument in an evolving world when we dedicate our will to serve the potential of the larger wholes that seek to express themselves through us. This is what it means to be a living expression of life on the planet. It is an ancient spiritual insight that a person becomes truly themself, and therefore s

Key to the progress of the nation, behaviorists believed, was the conversion of public education from a means for individual self-fulfillment to a system for channeling the energies of children toward societal goals. Rather than adapting the environment to the needs of individuals, behaviorist education would change human nature to better fit its e

I realized that providing expertise is antithetical to cultivating agency, and I began seeking new ways to engage my client organizations. For example, I stopped offering organizational models and started emphasizing the use of living systems frameworks, which provide the structure for thinking but require participants to supply the content and do