Although often we do damage to ourselves through simplistic thinking, there are other times when people may seek to damage us for daring to think well.
If we think a great deal and others don't particularly like it, that is their problem, not ours. If you use your brain it's bound to create a problem for others if they are seeking to use, abuse, or control you or keep you dependent or fearful. Their hidden motive may be to discourage you from realizing the sense of personal power that is directly related to the ability to exercise good, independent thinking.
Much is invested in having us believe everything we read in newspapers and everything our government tells us. After all, if we're not thinking for ourselves, we are easy targets for control and manipulation. To keep us dependent, we are taught that it is not necessary to think that much. How many parents or teachers have told children you think too much. What a terrible thing to say to anybody. The reason we were given a brain is to think. But we live in a culture that places little value on the intellect, the ability to think well, because it is viewed different - and possibly even dangerous. For anyone who is in control, it may feel like a threat when someone else thinks independently.
The most common response to written is not that said presents anything particularly new. It is that written about were the kind of things that a lot of people have been thinking all along, but were afraid to talk about. They have found the knowledge that they are not alone - not crazy - to be of great solace in a culture that discourages thinking, ,and often candor. Indeed it takes courage to be different, to dare to be oneself. If we choose to think for ourselves, we must be braced for backlash. We risk being seen as eccentrics or malcontents. We may be presumed to be on the fringes of mainstream society, regarded as different and abnormal in the worst sense of the word. But if we dare to seek growth, we have to dare to think.
It can take a lifetime for many people to come to terms with the freedom they truly have to think for themselves. But this path to freedom is obstructed by societal myths, one of which would have us believe that once we have completed adolescence, we can't change much. In reality, we are able to change and grow throughout our lifetimes - even in the sublets ways. But it is a choice. Often it is when we meet the crises of midlife that our thinking takes off in new and independent directions. And for some, independent thinking evolves only when they are about to die. Sadly, of course, for many it never happens.
Educational edit Book Share: The Road Less Traveled and Beyond - Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety - author M. Scott Peck, M.D.
