"Critical thinking" is one of those terms that immediately makes me wary when someone uses it. Too often in my experience "critical thinking" is a euphemism for a self-righteous, casually destructive mentality that revels in the smirking, cynical assassination of what is dismissed as others' deluded credulity. Most of the time I have seen the term used as a way of attacking someone who thinks differently.
As an Enneagram Five I am sadly too well acquainted with this mode of discourse, and have frequently to catch myself and refrain from inflicting it on people. I have far more often than I like to admit failed at this, and deepened my alienation from others by wielding my well-stocked armory of supposedly superior information. It's about defense and control.
People who have been victimized by such critical thinking rightly feel unheard and ignored, ashamed, angry, and in pain.
I have learned that any form of critical thinking that is not primarily, indeed exclusively, self-critical thinking has no positive value, and only adds to the stress, violence, and misery in the world.
The Lord Jesus says we need to remove the logs from our own eyes before we can see clearly enough to assist another in removing the specks from theirs. Personal optical log-removal is a life-long endeavor, and only those dedicated to its discipline have any standing to offer advice to someone else. It is the basis of the necessary humility with which his ethic is saturated.
Critical thinking aimed at others, treating them like objects to be manipulated, utilized, dissected, and commodified, is how we got the world into this perfect storm of intractable global catastrophes in the first place. This kind of critical thinking rationalizes Modernity's fundamental mode of relationship, which is vivisection.
Critical thinking only works positively when applied first and most rigorously to my own perceptions, values, memories, expectations, ways of thinking, and behavior. It has to be a letting-go of my ego-centricity, my self-importance and self-righteousness, my sense of myself at the center, separate from, over-against and above others, independent and autonomous, and the matted wad of stories I have invented to justify this way of seeing and acting.
Once I come to the recognition that what I think is my identity is not true and real but actually something I imaginatively constructed to deal with my own fear, anger, and pain, I may therefore let myself go, releasing all these artificial supports. I may repent, which is to say, see and think differently. Then my ego falls, and my deeper and true Self emerges. In and as that Self I am connected to and one with all.
I must have the courage to lose, and even identify with the losers and the bereft, the pure of heart and the poor in spirit, the childlike and simple, those whom Jesus explicitly blesses.
This deeper and true Self is Christ, the heart of my soul and the Soul of the whole creation. From this place, not above in the sense of remote and dominating, but within, real and good critical thinking deconstructs all the artificial and oppressive binaries and dualisms, the invented the strata of superiority and subordination/inferiority, the artificial, imposed inequities and imbalances, which continue to afflict and mangle the world.
The critical thinking we apply to ourselves, we exemplify before the world and invite others to participate in. We become gentle influencers of truth against lies and goodness against evil; witnesses to and practitioners of unity, equity, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, freedom, and acceptance, who express solidarity with and advocacy for the marginalized and disinherited. We become agents of deterioration exposing, infecting, corroding, and weakening the false and murderous structures of Empire. Deconstructed and disassembled in this way, Empire falls, and the Kingdom of God emerges.
In other words, "critical thinking" that is done out of ego-centricity only tightens Empire's grip on people and planet. Self-critical thinking and acting, which is applied humility and gratitude, serves to liberate creation, setting us free from our egos, and bringing life into balance.
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