‘I’ll go along with the charade until I can think my way out’
Bob Dylan
Some years ago, a patient presented at the practice where I used to work having been sent to us by a doctor from the local minor injuries unit. Having had an ECG which had revealed a minor abnormality, she had been advised to request an urgent blood test to determine her blood levels for a certain heavy metal. It subsequently turned out, however, that the automated report had attributed the ECG’s irregularities not, as had been believed, to lead poisoning but merely to lead positioning!
It was an embarrassing mistake, made by one who clearly hadn’t been thinking. But before we laugh too loudly, I wonder how many times we have acted similarly.
In an increasingly hectic world, it is all too easy for us to stop thinking for ourselves and fall into stereotypical patterns of behaviour based on the assumptions we make as a consequence. Though they may speed our decision making, such cognitive errors too often serve our own purposes rather than those of others, and make us quick to draw conclusions which steer us down the familiar paths that we find most comfortable to travel.
Might it be that we too have stopped thinking properly, failed to see what was in plain sight and, ignoring our own responsibility to help, chosen to pass blindly by on the other side? On occasions, I undoubtedly have – and so I find myself asking why that might be.
Of course the easy answer to that question would be to say that it’s because I’m either too lazy, too busy, or too uncaring to properly address the problems that are presented to me. And again, I don’t doubt that, if I am honest, each of those explanations have almost certainly sometimes been true.
But another explanation might be that, rather than face the distress of a problem that cannot be solved, it has sometimes been easier for me to not notice what I have been unable to put right.
In his book, ‘How to think’, Alan Jacobs writes of how, once established, the consensus is hard to challenge because there is great comfort in sharing the commonly held position. He quotes Marilynne Robinson who suggests that we have a ‘collective eagerness to disparage, without knowledge or information’, alternative or unpopular views ‘when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.’
If this is true, we are predisposed, to unthinkingly endorse the view that every problem can be solved be that by adequate education or inexorable scientific advance, sufficient financial investment or wise political intervention. Because not only is this what we would all like to believe, it is also a view that is liable to make us unpopular if we disagree.
And we do, of course, all so like to be liked.
And so we are all invested in not thinking because it would feel too uncomfortable to disagree and, as Robinson puts it, ‘unauthorised views are in effect punished by incomprehension…as a consequence of a “hypertrophic instinct for consensus”.’
Jacobs asserts that if we want to think, then we are going to have to shrink that ‘hypertrophic instinct for consensus’. But, he says, ‘given the power of the instinct, it is extremely unlikely that [we will be] willing to go to that trouble.’
Jacobs believes that the ‘instinct for consensus is magnified and intensified in our era because we deal daily with a wild torrent of what claims to be information but is often nonsense’. That is certainly true in our world of relentless 24-hour news cycles, multiplying social media platforms, and artificially created polemics in which nonsensical opinions are too often unjustifiably imposed upon us.
Jacobs quotes T.S. Eliot who, almost a century ago, wrote, ‘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 anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.’ And in such circumstances, ‘when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.’
That is, confused about what to believe, we will default to what feels comfortable and agree with the consensus – what is the perceived wisdom.
Could it be then that when we are presented with a problem we cannot fix, a problem for which we do not have the answer, the cognitive dissonance we subsequently experience serves to make it less likely that we will see that problem at all and so end up seeing only those with which we feel we can deal?
And as a consequence, might we see asylum seekers as criminals rather than individuals who need our help? Might we see dictators as powerful individuals we can do a deal with rather than those we should oppose? And might we see members of another nation as enemies who need to be killed rather than children who need to be fed.
Jacobs believes that ‘anyone who claims not to be shaped by such forces is almost certainly self-deceived.’ We are social beings who need to feel accepted and, since agreeing feels good, we are, therefore, prone to toe the line. ‘For most of us’, Jacobs suggests, ‘the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognising the subtlest of social pressures…The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.’
So could we do that? Could we practise patience and master fear and thus resist the ‘hypertrophic instinct’ which insists that we have an answer to all our problems.
I hope so.
But it will mean feeling uncomfortable at times – as speaking the truth often is.
It will mean giving up the charade that we have the answers and having to look outside of ourselves for help. And, recognising our own weakness, it will mean choosing to sit alongside those who suffer and, for a while at least, sharing their distress with them.
And that would be a far more thoughtful way to behave.
Related posts:
To read ‘On not being heard’, click here
To read ‘On the crises in the Middle East’, click here
To read ‘On refugee-ism’, click here
To read ‘Anxiety over the NHS’, click here
To read ‘More severed thinking’, click here
To read ‘Severed Thinking’, click here
Some musings 