Making Me Think?

Versus telling me what to think!  Ask that question as you listen to the voices in your lives.  Are they pushing their agendas and talking points and trying to convince you they are right? Or are they offering thoughts to promote your thinking … letting you synthesize, sort, sift, and consider things holistically?  Do they want you to think, or to simply accept the thoughts of others?

So many of my recent blogs have been about the bombardment we are all under by those who want to convince us to follow their lead, rather than perhaps find our own paths.  Yes, we as a nation need to collectively decide what to do about our challenges today and into the future, but I am not convinced that our leadership is interested in a dialogue.  They have made up their minds and just want us to give them the permission and money to do what they want.

Admitting we don’t quite know the answers to our profound problems requires humility and curiosity … traits I find conspicuously absent today.  True dialogue depends upon critical thinking and most Americans have been lulled into the false hope that our political process will naturally synthesize the best answers to profound questions.  That presupposition assumes the questions we all face have been accurately asked, and that we are not just trying to address symptoms rather than underlying diseases. 

Let me repeat this last thought: we are way too prone to medicate away our symptoms rather than search for and face the underlying causes.

We have a lot of intellectual work to do … at a time when most Americans are exhausted just trying to make ends meet, get through their days, and enjoy some time unwinding as they get ready to go to bed.  Sorry … most Americans are not interested in thinking any longer. We don’t even play games like Monopoly and cards with each other or even work on puzzles together.  We sit in front of our electronic screens rather than in front of our fireplaces talking to each other.

I never liked most games a lot because the results of chance confounded my desire for predictable outcomes.  I entered engineering because the laws of physics and energy offered concrete answers to complex problems.  Monopoly reminded me that bad things happen to good people even when you do the right thing.  After all, how could anyone enjoy the fact that random events resulted in windfalls.  Engineers don’t like that.

Games made me think.  Life can make us think.  Most TV programs and especially the news do not encourage us to think.  They tell us what to think.  We can’t force each other to think, but we can create fertile environments for it by asking better questions … not to trap a person into thinking they are wrong, but perhaps to encourage each other to share insights that collectively might bring us to higher ground in life.

Leaders must lead, but when their talking points become indoctrination agendas they have moved beyond leadership to manipulation and attempts at brainwashing … aka gaslighting … they are not only assuming you aren’t thinking, but they are also attempting to lure you into giving up thinking. 

Please think!