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Odysseas - How to Think Critically in a Divided World (4 Techniques)
Critical thinking is hard, but if you love truth, honesty, and justice, then you have to learn how to do it. Especially in this world that's more and more toxic and divided and apparently stupid. We're chained down by ideology. We're driven by mob beliefs and we're fed this endless [ __ ] spew of unreliable info. And worst of all, some of us outsource thinking entirely. None of that is freedom. That's mental slavery. With critical thinking, you cut through the noise and form your beliefs carefully. You stay open to new ideas and you protect yourself against BS. And that's much better than rotting away in these online arguments and echo chambers.
And look, I'm not a debate bro. I don't do this professionally. But still, I've had my edgy political phases. I've been in echo chambers. And now I have the responsibility of making videos without chatting complete [ __ ] Like I can't lie to you. So all in all, I hope I've learned something useful that I can share with you here. I thought it made sense to talk about a problem and then answer it with a solution just to keep things neat. And finally, I'm not here to push a belief. I'm not telling you what to think, just how to approach it as a whole so that you can make your own decisions.
Slaves of ideology
The first barrier to critical thinking is ideology because it's so easy to become a slave to it. An ideology is a set of beliefs. It's a way to see the world. It's your isms. It's your political parties, your schools of thought, that kind of thing. And as people, we are tribal. We are loyal to these groups and ideas. And I mean that's fine. It's part of who we are. But it does come with a sinister side. Sometimes we serve the ideology at the cost of truth. We're blind to its faults. We're loyal to it even when it fails. And we stubbornly close ourselves off to anything beyond it. We let our loyalty get in the way of thinking.
And a good example of this is in political parties when members turn a blind eye to all the bad stuff because they're so loyal to the name that it can't possibly be the fault of the party. It has to be something else. It has to be someone else. And things get even worse when it becomes an echo chamber. When your prejudices just grow and grow because you're hearing the same stuff being pared over and over and anything external or contradictory, well, you never see it or it's just kicked out in the first place. When I was younger and more impressionable, I wanted a sense of belonging and identity. So, it's no wonder then I ended up in some kind of mad online spheres. I thought I was being clever and seeking the truth and all, but I was a victim of ideology and I was just being manipulated to believe whatever the group did.
The solution is, as Harold Bloom says it here, you are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions. It takes practice, but you can grow a level of self-awareness so that you can separate yourself from your ideology, at least temporarily. It's okay to have a set of beliefs like that's inevitable. But the point is to know when you should leave them at the door and open yourself up to new ones. It is difficult and it is scary because that's all new territory. But it's the only way you can learn new things and challenge yourself.
It's also important to realize when it's time to abandon old beliefs. Learning is not just finding out new things, but letting go of old ones. And you need to be willing to unshackle those from you, even if it is uncomfortable, which it will be. But that is part of growth. That is part of learning. That is part of changing. And if you're not changing, you're dying.
A good way to practice this is to criticize the groups that you're loyal to. And I'm not saying to stab them in the back or to be this annoying Reddit contrarian, but if you can point out their shortcomings, their mistakes, their weaknesses, it shows that you haven't surrendered your thought completely. You're still independent. You're still thinking about things. And that's all in spite of your loyalty. It's not bad to follow things, but it is bad to blindly follow them. And remember, you serve the truth, not any one ideology.
Your feed manipulates you
The second problem is that you are being manipulated by your feed. You're a victim and I'm a victim. Okay, I'm being a little dramatic here, but hear me out. In 30 minutes of scrolling, you can see a hundred different takes, tweets, headlines, talking heads, the lot. Without even realizing it, you're passively absorbing these into your own view because it's all you see. Some people say, "Oh, well, actually, I'm immune to propaganda." You're not, mate, because no one out there is putting on their thinking cap for every single real they see and then analyzing it. It just doesn't happen. At best, they'll see something, you know, while lazily scrolling and think, "Huh, yeah, cool. Fair enough." And then they move on. No investigation, no nuance, nothing.
What's the result of that? Well, you become the sum of your feed. This walking set of talking points seemingly copy and pasted from the next person. And nobody wants that. If everyone's passively watching the same stuff and reading the same things, then they will start thinking the same things. And that is where critical thinking goes to die.
Now, I'm not saying we break our phones and run off to some cave to hide away from the evil internet. It's not like that. And actually, it's okay to get your information from social media. But do not take anything at face value. There should be this filter of doubt which everything passes through. In other words, the solution is to suspend judgment. You can believe things, but you have to do it slowly and carefully and never jump to conclusions. A balanced worldview needs nuance. You need to read deeply to experience things to talk to people. And this is all slow. Like it takes effort. But at least then you end up with something that has a grounds to exist rather than a belief system based on Tik Toks or tweets.
It's why intelligent people tend to be aware of their ignorance. They know that something's missing and they will never prematurely claim to have the whole picture. My personal rule for this is that unless I've done a good amount of research into something, I will just not give my judgment on it. I wouldn't say anything. And if I do say something, I will try and make it as clear as possible that I don't know what I'm talking about. This is just what I've seen, what I've heard. I don't know if it's true. And I'd much rather do that and admit that I don't know it than pretend to know something based on what I saw online on a tweet or while scrolling. That's lazy. It's pathetic. It's inauthentic. So, either don't say anything or accept your limits. And then you can use that ignorance and that self-awareness to learn, to ask questions, to research, to build towards a conclusion. That is the essence of debate. That's the essence of learning. But that can only happen if you're humble and you accept your limits in the first place. If your beliefs are based on a few videos or some tweets, then they're not beliefs at all.
If you want to seek depth in your ideas and to move past the shallow takes of social media, then news articles are a fantastic place to start. But even then, it's a tricky realm to dig through. Who can you place your trust in? What do you read? Where do you go for the truth? I can't lie, the burden of these questions often made me not want to bother with the news at all. And I know that's bad, but it's true.
Ground News is sponsoring this video, and they've helped me heal that relationship with the news and give me more confidence to understand what I read and where it's coming from. They don't just tell stories like any other outlet, but compile them from across the entire political spectrum, left, right, and center, so you can read with a smarter frame of mind. You also get more precious context from each source, like the factuality and even who owns each outlet, which are the details we deserve to know as careful readers. The feature which made me fall in love, though, is the blind spot feed. Ground News shows you which stories are under reported on each side of the political spectrum. For example, amidst the Trump Putin talks, left-leaning sources seem to have missed coverage on Pence's stance. And closer to home, I also discovered that about 40 children from Gaza were being medically evacuated to the UK, which was not covered on the right. And in fact, I hadn't seen it anywhere else before this. This system pushes you beyond your usual spheres, and you're forced to engage with stories from across the political spectrum, which is exactly what you want when training your critical eye.
So, if you want to cut through the online fog and read with clarity, then go to ground.new/odysius or scan the QR code on screen and that will give you 40% off of the Vantage plan which is the one I use now. I really respect their mission and I hope you enjoy using it just as much as I do. So, thank you to Ground News.
Intellectual pride
The third problem is intellectual pride because ego kills critical thinking. Humans and especially men are competitive and they want to win. But because the chances for physical competition have gotten rarer, we seek this status and this competition elsewhere like in the intellectual realm. And I love that. I love debating. I remember back in the day, I used to stay up until like a.m. debating my friends in Xbox parties about stupid [ __ ] or whatever. We were having fun. And more recently, I had a 4-hour flight to Cyprus where I had this debate on religion with my friend. And it was thrilling. It was fun. It was interesting. We probably pissed off everyone around us, but you know, whatever. And every time I felt a thrill. It's nice to be able to fight in this way, to find clever thoughts, to pick apart the arguments.
Inevitably, there's a desire to win, to come out on top. And while that is natural, it's not necessarily healthy for critical thinking. If we approach every conversation like it's a fight, like we're trying to own someone, then we have our guard up. And the conversation is less about learning something and more about winning just to protect your pride. That's why modern politics gets so damn toxic. There's no sense of unity and common goal. It's just who can beat the other side into submission. Who can win?
The solution here is simple. The willingness to change your mind is a virtue and you should see it as such. Disagreements are not fights, but chances to learn from one another and to work towards this common good. It's a cooperative act. This might sound mad, but there is no such thing as agreeing to disagree. Agreeing to disagree is like saying, "Well, yeah, one of us is wrong, but we're not bothered to find out who, and if we do, we're not bothered to change our mind." It's immature, and there's no point of talking in the first place if it's going to lead to that. However, when you are humble and willing to change your mind, meaning you recognize that you are wrong, and you can abandon old beliefs. Well, that's a sign of maturity, not weakness. It's why debates between intelligent people are often so civil and constructive. Like they're genuinely trying to figure something out together and not just bass each other like gorillas in a zoo.
And of course, some [ __ ] howery is fine in the right time and place. Like if you're, you know, arguing your friends over some stupid [ __ ] in a pub. Fair enough. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about serious debate here. Just to be clear, only the stubborn fool refuses to change his mind. So you have to learn how to be humble. More like me, the most humble.
Practice critical thought
Problem four is that no one practices. Critical thinking is not a talent that you're magically born with. It's a skill that you can improve. And yet, most people neglect it. We've seen how easy it is to outsource your thinking to other people. Be it your ideology or the mob mentality or your Instagram feed. I mean, that's proper NPC behavior. The more you surrender your thought to something else, then the weaker your critical thinking will get. It's very much a use it or lose it situation. Like if you were to stop going to the gym and you just see your muscles wither away cuz you're not using them.
There's many ways to practice critical thinking, but perhaps the most accessible, and my personal favorite is to write your thoughts down. So, how does that work? Well, ideas in your head tend to sound good. They make sense. They're intuitive. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, apparently. When you write down your thoughts, you isolate them from your mind. They're physically separate from you, and there's nowhere to hide anymore. They must stand alone and face the scrutiny.
I like to think of it like this. When you wake up in the morning and you want to check that you look okay before heading to work, you have to look in a mirror because you can't see your face. You can't see any of the imperfections and flaws. But when you look in the reflection, then you can see that your hair is out of place. You need to trim your beard maybe and you have some toothpaste there. So, you clean it. The same is true for your ideas. You can only judge them when you step back and see them from afar. You might write something down and think, "This doesn't sound as good as it did in my head." You see the flaws, the inconsistencies, the gaps and all of that helps you understand it better and then you know correct yourself essentially and in itself the very act of writing will slow down your thinking and it will let you understand yourself better and what you believe and that self-awareness as you've seen is important in all of critical thinking.
Now how you write is up to you. My preferred way is mini essays in Obsidian because they're fun, they're quick and they're easy to make a habit of. But you can do journaling, you can write articles, you can just do brain dumps of whatever you think that day. I'll link a few videos if you want to get started there. So, do check those out. And also check out the newsletter. It's free to subscribe down below. And there's room for similar styles of content, but also different ones that you don't see on YouTube. So, I'd love to see you there. And of course, thank you so much for watching. I appreciate your time.