How power, conformity, and social media erode critical thinking | Jonny Thomson
Intelligence, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
is measured by the ability to think critically.
It is the ability to take evidence, condense it,
accept what is good, and reject what is bad.
It requires thinking for yourself rather than outsourcing
your thought process to technology,
influencers, academics, or parents.
However, in positions of power—particularly within modern
political party democracies—people are frequently expected
to surrender their critical thinking for the wider party.
Politicians are pressured to toe the line and obey the party whip
rather than voting according to their own rational beliefs.
While the Peter Principle suggests people are promoted to their
level of incompetence, Bonhoeffer presents an inverse idea.
You need intelligence and critical thinking to get elected,
but once you occupy a position of power, you are expected
to sacrifice that intellect to follow a leader or a political party.
Truth, Conformity, and the Rise of Bullsh*t
In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that truth
is not inherently valuable in and of itself,
but is rather a tool to be used.
While truth is evolutionarily useful for identifying dangers,
conformity often takes precedence.
People quickly learn that the tall poppy gets cut down first,
meaning that towing the party line within institutions
and corporations is often viewed
as more important than seeking the truth.
This concept aligns with philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s distinction
between a liar and a bullshitter.
Frankfurt argues that a liar is actually better than a bullshitter
because the liar still cares about the truth;
they are actively trying to warp reality to hide it.
A bullshitter, however, completely disregards the truth
and will say whatever is necessary to win or achieve their ends.
If you catch a bullshitter in a lie, they simply shrug and move on.
Normalizing this disregard for the truth leads to conformity,
which Bonhoeffer warns can pave the way
for dangerous regimes.
The modern rise in bullshit is largely driven
by societal expectations that everyone must have
an opinion on everything.
Because it is impossible to know everything about politics,
pop culture, and current events,
people resort to bullshit to avoid appearing ignorant,
forgetting the ancient wisdom that those
who admit they do not know are actually the wisest.
The Danger of Hollow Language
A reflection of modern mechanisms behind stupidity
can be found in George Orwell’s 1946 essay,
Politics and the English Language.
Orwell points out that the language we use around economics
and politics has become hollow, flat, and vague,
which consequently flattens our thoughts.
When asked for an opinion, people frequently rely on a menu
of ready-made platitudes and clichés.
Leaders use euphemisms like “necessary sacrifices”
instead of admitting people will be worse off,
or “negative growth” instead of announcing a recession.
In the corporate world, firings are masked as “efficiency gains.”
We have entire teams devoted to storytelling and messaging
rather than truth and clarity because it provides plausible
deniability and is easier to digest than stark reality.
Social Media and the Age of Assertion
Social media introduces a range of problems,
but an often ignored casualty is the death of proper debate.
Two and a half thousand years ago,
Plato attacked the Sophists—paid philosophers
who taught people how to win arguments at any cost.
Modern social media functions as the ultimate tool for Sophists,
creating an “age of assertion” where a 140-character post
or a 90-second video is falsely considered a debate.
Real dialectic requires time, maturity of thought,
and spaces free from identity-based confrontation.
The online world replaces this with echo chambers
that reward users with dopamine for repeating agreeable statements,
even if those statements are untrue or unexamined.
This behavior perfectly illustrates Bonhoeffer’s definition of stupidity,
as millions of capable individuals value tribal conformity
over their own critical thinking,
willingly outsourcing their beliefs to algorithms and influencers.
Radical Doubt and the Apple Barrel Analogy
To combat this intellectual complacency,
we must introspect and question our own indoctrination.
René Descartes established the archetype of self-questioning
in his Meditations, arguing that everyone should question
all of their beliefs at least once in their lives.
We naturally inherit beliefs from our parents, friends,
and environments.
Descartes compared this to a barrel of apples containing
a hidden rot.
Instead of painstakingly checking each apple,
the most rational approach is to throw all the apples out
and start from scratch, carefully assessing which beliefs to keep.
We must also reconsider our relationships
and actively avoid real-life echo chambers.
To genuinely challenge your beliefs
and ensure they are right and good,
you must surround yourself with people
who hold different ideologies.
A powerful thought experiment to analyze your own beliefs
is to ask what you would do if the entire world hated your perspective,
or if holding it cost you your job and reputation.
This helps reveal whether you hold a belief because it is fundamentally
true, or simply because it is socially advantageous.
The Courage to Say “I Don’t Know”
The ancient Skeptics, a Greek school of philosophy concerned
with finding mental tranquility, made a bold claim:
you can be free of anxiety and distress if you get used to saying
“I don’t know.”
When asked for an opinion on a complex topic you lack knowledge in,
the healthiest response is to simply admit your ignorance.
To reverse the societal trends of groupthink and bullshit,
we must actively model this behavior.
Admitting ignorance is a courageous act that invites others
to do the same.
More importantly, society must start challenging
willful ignorance.
Remaining willfully ignorant requires determination
and a deliberate commitment to avoiding correcting information.
A society that accepts people who proudly do not know
and do not care about knowing risks exactly what philosophers
like Aristotle warned about: the death of civilization.
