Critical Thinking and Discourse
“Discourses,” by their constructed nature, are coherent. Incoherent thinking=incoherent discourse=0 discourse. “Discourse” is necessarily critical, as in “critical discourse.” It is constructed and maintained on a foundation of critical thinking. It may be erroneous and flawed, even noxious, but it will be consistent and coherent within its own parameters.
That’s the definition of “discourse.” You can discourse with someone who is grounded in a different critical discourse from your own, but they must still have one for their reasoning, arguments, and even their speech, to be coherent. Coherence is necessary to maintain any chance of informed, rational consensus or common understanding by the end, as a thing aside from sheer emotional unreasoning emotional surrender, acceptance of the other’s platform, or capitulation to a more powerful will or personality — let alone informed compromise.
Attempting discourse in the absence of critical thinking (or at the very least, the capacity for it) on the part of one or both of the participants is like pissing into the wind, or shouting into a hurricane, and just as chaotic. It is a waste of breath and heart, like trying to talk reason to cultists. The only possible approach is a manipulative one, that speaks to their belief structure and/or fears.
This can be to their benefit, as in deprogramming brainwash victims, as that is what they will invariably have in place in lieu of critical thinking. Or it can be deleterious to the correspondent, as in entraining the correspondent to cultic beliefs and reactionary responses to emotional triggers and behaviourally modifying prompts, of benefit only to the cult leader and his or her lieutenants and enablers.
It is thought that tons of Trump followers continue to support him, believe what he says, and do dumb things like follow his coronavirus recommendations. This is put down to their conservative fear-based Stockholm Syndrome type behaviours and an inability to process factual information due to cognitive failure and lack of critical thinking skills, the result of defective or deficient education. It’s thought that critical thinking is a trained behaviour that has to be taught, and that they weren’t.
But really it’s that their inborn critical thinking skills, which are analytical faculties that constitute an aspect of the survival skill of pattern recognition — the ability to recognize, create or synthesize patterns, which is one definition of ‘genius,’ retained in artists, innovative scientists, and other creatives and present in all children — have been drummed right down and out of them by anti-intellectual religious conditioning, shaming for being pansy artists, or other bullying social mechanisms. In reality, we were all born curious, risk-taking, trusting, open-minded, adventurous and explorative thinkers. This is how babies and toddlers learn complex language patterns, millennia of ingrained cultural and social nuances, rapid socialization and social acceptance techniques in quick-time. We are ‘disciplined,’ or more properly, punished, into the shut-down, split and severed modes of conservative-authoritarian brain function.
It’s generally thought that critical analysis is a left brain function, when truly it’s a right brain activity, like any other form of creative mental synthesis. The left brain is capable of storing, listing, enumerating and cataloguing information, the raw ingredients of critical thought, then forking them over to the right brain for processing and analysis. We’re all born with the neurological interface intact, then it is severed to various deleterious degrees by conformist authoritarian social conditioning.
Kathleen Taylor, an Oxford neuroscientist, is leading a movement to classify Fundamentalist belief as a form of mental illness like Stockholm Syndrome, with serious cognitive dissonance symptoms affecting performance. A science writer affiliated to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics,” Dr. Taylor made the suggestion during a presentation on brain research at the Hay Literary Festival at the University of Wales, Swansea, in 2013. This approach would explain the deplorable situation in the United States, whereby former EPA head Scott Pruitt announced sweeping changes to the agency’s science advisory boards on October 31st, 2017, closing off scientific discourse on Climate Change, and opening the door to more input from the business world.
As I’ve stated elsewhere in this publication, referencing the Book of Joshua in citing The Bible “…as a reason to vandalize constituent and environmental protection agencies is the natural and inevitable result of a couple of decades of concerted Christian Fundamentalist conditioning, brainwashing, and propaganda. Add to this the ongoing, unconscionable desecration and vandalism of educational standards in schools of “religious grounds,” which has made ‘an American Education’ the equivalent of a Hasidic ‘education’ in a Brooklyn Yeshiva, or a Wahhabist ‘education’ in an ISIS madrassa anywhere in the virtual ‘Second Caliphate.’ In short, it’s really not an education. It’s just overt brainwashing, resulting in measurable brain damage.” (https://medium.com/@yewtree2/is-religious-fundamentalism-a-form-of-mental-illness-1bdd454bd8b2)
In response to a question about the future of neuroscience, Taylor said that “One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” The Times of London noted at the time. “Someone who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” Taylor said. “In many ways it could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage.” The author emphasized that she wasn’t just referring to the “obvious candidates like radical Islam,” but also meant such beliefs as the idea that beating children is acceptable. (Meredith Bennett-Smith, ‘Kathleen Taylor, Neuroscientist, Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness,’ The Huffington Post, 05/31/2013)
My point — conservatives weren’t actually born that way. They were made. By what? By ideology, some of which is actually crippling and causes damaged or impaired brain function. Why? Because it’s terrorizing or, at the least, authoritarian, which is to say bullying, which is to say abusive, which leaves trauma in its wake, which militates against critical thinking and rational discourse and actually renders it impossible.
