This price is dirt cheap when compared to the sacrafices our forefathers gave so that we can be free. We, as free people, must think. I am not talking about daydreaming about winning the lottery or analyzing the latest stats on your favorite baseball player. I think about those things just like the rest of us. I am talking about thinking critically about the words we hear everyday. Think about what the news reporter says. Is he reporting facts or interjecting his own opinion? Think about what you read on the OpEd page. Obviously what you have just read is Opinion but is it soundly argued? Does it resort to logical fallacies? Does it hold water? Think about what your congressman is actually saying and what he is not saying. Has he been consistent on the issue being addressed? If he has not, did he change his position due to reasoned argument or to please a particular group of constituents?

Thomas Jefferson said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” What does he mean by vigilance? It can’t be just to watch. Watching will do us no good if we cannot recognize what it is we are watching for. What we are watching for is sometimes hard to see. Those that wish to get one by us are very good at hiding their true intentions behind seemingly sound argument. This is where true thinking comes in.

Thinking requires real effort. It is not always intuitive. Sometimes the truth is far from what your “gut” tells you it is. For instance, Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity states that as we move faster time slows down. This is a concept that most have a hard time with when it is first presented. Use your ability to think critically and study the argument and you soon find that it makes perfect sense and the reason it seems so foreign to us is that for its effects to make themselves evident we would have to experience extreme conditions that we would never be exposed to normally. Every experiment done to verify SR has provided additional verification that it is correct.

Thinking requires a suspension of emotion. Emotion is part of us. We should not deny it or suppress it. However, we do need to conduct our reasoned arguments with out it. The logical fallacy of the Emotional Appeal is commonly used by politicians, sales men, and hucksters. When a politician starts talking about the “children” we have to be careful that we do not get pulled in and accept the argument as true without thinking. We all love our children. On one level or another, we all love everyone’s children. It is easy to be lulled by concern for our children into allowing dangerous erosions of our civil liberties. For me, my children’s future fits into every decision I make and I make those decisions from a position of reason.

Thinking requires a willingness to be wrong. You cannot think if you believe yourself to be right. That is not to say that you should not hold opinions. I have plenty of them, just ask my wife. However, to think you must be willing to let go of even your most cherished beliefs. Again referencing Einstein, it has been reported that when the Quantum Field Theory was being presented he raved “God does not play dice with the universe”. He was also guilty of inserting a “cosmological constant”, which he termed his “greatest blunder”, into the Theory of General Relativity because he believed that the universe was static. Edwin Hubble, the great astronomical observer, proved that he was wrong and forced him to come to grips with the expanding universe. These are just a few examples of scientists having to give up their deeply held beliefs. The problem is that for scientists, this is part of thier training. For the rest of us, we have to learn it on our own.

There are probably more things required to clear the way for true thinking but this is a good start. In future installments I will be discussing the need for Critical Thinking and Logic courses in early education, how non-critical thinking produces bad ideas from the left and right of the political spectrum and how to spot logical fallacies.

Thanks for reading.