How to Think

Consider, as one final and disturbing example, the belief common in the early modern era that animals were effectively robots or (to use the term of the period) “automata”—“actuated by the unerring hand of Providence,” as one eighteenth-century lady wrote, to fulfill the Creator’s inscrutable purposes. Therefore when you strike an animal and it cries out, it does not feel pain—that is reserved for humans. An action has merely produced a preprogrammed reaction, as when you push a button and a doorbell rings. Therefore one need not worry about cruelty to animals; one actually cannot be cruel to them.

When that happens to us, we are in a bad way, because those screens become permanently implanted, and we lose the ability to redirect our attention toward those elements of reality we have ignored.

The most dangerous metaphors for us are the ones that cease to be recognizable as metaphors.

all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story they believe in.

Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.
We fixate so immovably on this notion of argument as war in part because human beings, generally speaking, are insanely competitive about everything; but also because in many arguments there truly is something to be lost, and most often what’s under threat is social affiliation. Losing an argument can be a personal embarrassment, but it can also be an indication that you’ve sided with the wrong people, which means that you need to find a new ingroup

And Orwell concludes that “this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity”—and also, one might add, social conformity.

George Orwell, in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” captures this phenomenon with an eerie vividness:
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.

keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought.