No Neutral Ground ? Then What Are We Standing On?

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

A Contemplation: In the past 7, going on 8 years, how many friendships have you destroyed and how many family relationships have you abandoned over differing political views? How much media influence are you still allowing to infiltrate your brain and control your thoughts, speech and actions? How do you feel about being a puppet? Do you feel justfied? Self-righteous? Like a patriot spreading the word? Tell me – What does it feel like to be a fool?

“Our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” – C.S. Lewis

Critical thinking is a kind of thinking in which you question, analyse, interpret, evaluate and make a judgement about what you read, hear, say, or write. The term critical comes from the Greek word kritikos meaning “able to judge or discern”. – http://www.monash.edu

Many people ignore the rampant lack of critical thinking in society. People are too focused on the opinion they’ve already built up to want to go back and re-examine it. Sadly, this interferes with many people’s ability to think logically and analytically, which leads them to make poor decisions or believe lies.

10 Reasons for the lack of critical thinking in today’s society:

1) Fear 

Fear of making the wrong life decisions is a big one.

2) People pleasing

This is just another way of avoiding problems – it’s easier for you to say whatever people want to hear so that they will like you.

3) Lack of practice 

This is the old saying: “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

As Justin Brown says in his YouTube video below, a person who is afraid to use something will never get better at using it. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N8hegtlktA

“The more you do something the better you get at it. If you procrastinate and don’t work on your skills and knowledge, then you are never going to get good at it.” 

4) Laziness

We all have our days where we are lazy and procrastinate from doing the things we need to do – a lack of critical thinking is a form of laziness as well. If you don’t work at becoming more knowledgeable, then it won’t happen.

5) The way we learn (not being creative and having an average mindset)

If you are always dwelling on what you already know and what everyone else knows, then you’ll never learn or improve. 

6) Herd instinct

This is a big problem for society. We all want to fit in, and as long as everyone else is doing it, or thinks something is true, then you’ll probably believe it too. This is probably the worst thing because it causes people to stop thinking critically and to accept everything that everyone else believes as true even if they don’t believe it themselves.

7) Complacency

We all hear stories of people who achieve great things and we admire them. But, many don’t have the desire to do the same thing because they feel that there is nothing left for them to do. But, if you are complacent, then you aren’t going to make any improvements or accomplish anything in life.