Thinking Right

I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking lately.

I’ve been thinking about thinking, that such a thing as rightward thinking must exist, and that some equal and opposite wrongward way of thinking must exist to oppose it.

A wrongward way of thinking, I thought, which must be the absolute source of all discord and malice on this Earth.

I was thinking about thinking, that if only we could consistently identify patterns of wrongward thinking, we might stand a chance at setting wrongward thinkers rightward, and so setting them, set all other things with them.

I was thinking these thoughts about what constitutes the rightwardness and wrongwardness of such a thing as thinking — when I caught myself thinking in an assuredly wrongward way. Thinking, that is, narrowly, matter-of-factly, and rigidly.

All of my discerning of rightwardness and wrongwardness had gotten me worked into a nearly constant state of disapproval of every “wrongward” thing I found in the world.

Umbrellas are too eye-pokey. So anyone who’s sincerely considerate of others should wear a poncho when it rains. The subway runs late sometimes, so there should be a second subway, below the first, to ensure that there always be at least one punctual subway. The Kardashians are killing culture, so we should slowly and quietly remove them from the media and condemn them to irrelevance forevermore.

When asked by friends and family how I intended to make these “rightward” things happen, my utopia quickly developed some dystopian traits.

Never having been much one for authoritarianism, I found my psyche experiencing some dissonant thoughts while seeking a way for “rightward” and “wrongward” to exist without free-thinking crumbling around me.

It was just as I was seeking some reconciliation between “rightwardness” and reality, that a friend of mine was respectful enough to disagree entirely with my way of thinking on the matter, and to share her thoughts on thinking with me to help bridge some of my gaps.

She argued that every person is, primarily, a product of their environment; and that to disregard the influence of society on a person developed within it is small minded and hopelessly naive.

Because of the great debt of personality which we all owe to each other, said she, there are no true individuals. Only many selves, who, together, compose a corpus of human thought, knowledge, and understanding, for which we are all responsible, but of which, none can be representative. Least of all in a “right” or “wrong” way.

“Wrongward,” is, itself, wrongward in a collective model of thought such as this one, because within the necessarily binary structure of “wrongwardness” and “rightwardness,” we are compelled to establish “Us”s and “Them”s. When we each are responsible for the creation of the other, there ceases to be any need for “them”s. We become them. And they, us. Only, each without the other’s understanding.

Now… I don’t know if I buy into my friend’s whole “nonexistence of individuals” thing. It just seems awfully self-diminishing to me. But I like how she put the meaninglessness of “right” and “wrong” into the context of the various social debts we owe to each other.

I, for instance, owe her a social debt for helping me out of my wrongwardness. I admit to thinking that way sometimes.

Even with wrongwardness being so clearly wrong, though, I feel there must be some knowable structure by which to pursue a good quality of thought. If I were to endeavor to create such a quality of goodness in my thinking, I would find some structure of thinking similar one to the sort which great thinkers before me have had, and emulate that.

I cannot speak for those great thinkers, but judging vaguely from their biographies, I would say a quality way of thinking would probably be characterized as curious, flexible, and broad.

Binary thinking is what we have computers for.

With only twenty seven years of practice at thinking, I cannot pretend to know much more about it than that, but until I do, I’ll just copy the greats.

It’s all imitation anyway.