Bertrand Russell was brutal, but he was also honest when he reputedly said:
Most people would rather die than think; many do.
What he revealed was also true: thinking is hard. He was not the first person to say it. He won't be the last. We all know it.
We understand what Bertrand Russell said when we try to understand the government's accounts, a budget speech, or a newspaper claim that “we cannot afford social security”. We are challenged.
We also appreciate the comment when we try to reconcile our experience of life with the stories politicians tell us about growth, deficits, and the need for austerity.
The reason is simple: thinking is an act of resistance.
Thinking resists our biology. The brain is designed to conserve effort. Genuine analysis takes energy. It requires us to hold competing ideas in our minds, to test evidence, to admit doubt. That is tiring. So we fall back on habits and stories. We reach for metaphors like the household budget myth I have referred to in this morning's video because they are easy. They require no effort. They feel true. But they are wrong. A currency-issuing government is not a household, and pretending it is has done immense damage to the UK by justifying cuts to public services that people rely upon. This claim is thoughtless.
Thinking also resists identity. When we think seriously, we risk discovering that we are mistaken. Worse, we risk discovering that our tribe is mistaken, or that our favourite newspaper has misled us, and that "our" party told us what turned out to be comforting lies. It could also be that we discover that our own interests may conflict with fairness. That is painful. So we avoid it. We defend what we already believe.
This is why bad economic ideas persist. It is easier to blame migrants, or claim that public servants are lazy, or insist that growth will fix everything, than to confront the reality that inequality is structural and that policy choices created it. It is easier to believe that public spending must be cut than to accept that the real issue is who benefits from our economy and who does not.
Thinking also resists certainty, and humans crave certainty. We want the world to be simple. We want clear answers. We want reassurance that everything will be fine if only we do whatever we are told. Reality does not oblige. Reality is messy. It is uncertain. It demands judgement in conditions of incomplete knowledge.
That is why people reach for slogans. “There is no money left.” “We must live within our means.” “Growth will solve all our problems.” Those phrases shut down thought. They offer emotional closure. They remove doubt. But they also remove truth.
Thinking resists power. That is because institutions very rarely reward those who question their assumptions. Media rewards outrage and simplicity. Politics rewards confidence over honesty. Neoliberal economics thrived not because it described reality but because it offered convenient stories for those who benefited from them. It told us markets are always efficient, governments are always wasteful, and inequality is the price of progress. Those ideas were repeated until they felt natural. And when people tried to question them, they were dismissed as unrealistic.
Thinking also demands moral courage. To think seriously about political economy is to ask who benefits and who pays. It is to ask whether we care about people we do not know. It is to recognise that economies exist to sustain life, not the other way round. That means maintaining the capital that really matters: human, social, environmental and physical. It means accepting that social security is not charity but a collective guarantee that none of us is abandoned. Those are moral choices. And they are uncomfortable.
Thinking is slow as well. It requires time, reflection, and revision. But we live in a culture that rewards instant reaction. Social media demands opinions before facts. News cycles last hours. Politicians talk in slogans. So careful thought is crowded out by noise.
And yet thinking is essential. Without it, we drift into the politics of hate, where easy answers replace honest analysis, and blame replaces care. Without it, we accept the myth that public services must decline because “there is no money”, even while wealth accumulates in the accounts of the wealthy. Without it, we accept stagnation as inevitable when it is the product of policy.
So what should we do?
We could make thinking easier to do. We might teach critical reasoning. We can explain how government money actually works. We should tell better stories about what an economy is for. We are capable of building institutions that reward honesty and care.
Facilitating these processes is why I spend time on the Funding the Future glossary.
It is why I talk about sectoral balances, capital maintenance, and the myths of taxpayers' money.
None of this is because jargon is clever, but because understanding liberates us. It shows that alternatives exist, that austerity was a choice, and that investment in people, homes, health and the climate is possible, meaning that a politics of care is practical.
Thinking is hard. But refusing to think is harder still, because it leaves us trapped in systems that do not work and stories that are not true. The anger we see in Britain today is, in part, the result of years of not thinking honestly about how our economy operates and who it serves.
If we want a better future, we must do the difficult thing. We must think, not as an academic exercise, but as a moral commitment to each other because only when we understand our world can we change it, and only when we care about each other can that change be worth having.
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Excellent Richard! Critical thinking, hard though it is, is essential. At your recommendation, I am wrestling with Erich Fromm’s “The Sane Society” and much of what he wrote in the 50s applies even more so now.
Thankyou for your careful, methodical approach to the politics of care and contrasting it with the politics of destruction.
Thanks
Agree. I’d also argue that thinking is linked to questioning (“why is that?”) & as you note, those in power much prefer servility from those not in power/without agency which is +/- most of the UK population.
Related: I hope the Greens win by a landslide on Thusday. I hope the usual parties get wiped out in May. This would be a message to those in power hopefully leading to electoral reform in the UK wrt the British parliament. Sadly power is never easily relinquished – but desparation can force things – which is why it is important for a LINO wipe out to happen in Wales and Scotland (& ideally this week – with best option LINO lose their deposit).
Much to agree with
[…] need renewal. The only problem is that, as I have noted already this morning, the thinking that might provide the foundation for that renewal has not been done by many people. […]
Also we should cherish people who are different and think differently, and listen to them rather than encourage them to conform.
Agreed
Yes we should definitely teach critical thinking in schools. It can be applied, as in Finnish schools where a critical analytical approach is taken with media and online content.
Thinking is hard, you are correct. But so can imagining be, and we need imagination to picture and build things that we don’t have now, whether due to decay or lack of invention.
Creative thinking should also be encouraged. Sometimes it is not subject to logic, it may be non-verbal, but we need the chance to ignite it in more people.
An education system that relies on rote learning to turn us into a uniform product is harmful, and I imagine not what most teachers want to be doing.
I rarely comment here these days Richard, partly for personal reasons and partly that I’m so busy doing a degree in Environmental Studies.
But I feel moved to quickly say what a brilliant point you’ve made here. Thinking, especially for ourselvers in the age of algorithmic brainwashing, is hard. But needs to be done.
Many thanks.
Good luck with the degree.
If a fundamental idea is easy to understand at first hearing, it must be wrong.
🙂
Thanks to all for a most pressingly relevant article!
Might mass education [c. 93% of our population] post the Education Reform Act (1988) have contributed significantly to our nation’ s problems by enforced teaching of learning compliance/obedience and avoiding the attitudes, skills and knowledge which results in critical thinking and questioning, ditto lateral thinking and questioning, ditto spectrum thinking and questioning?
Rote learning is to thinking what arsenic is to life.
In terms of mass education being responsible for our current inability to think through our current dilemmas, might I recommend a book I read as I was about to send my highly sensitive child to school aged 4. (Many moons ago; he turned out alright.)
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down – The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
It is from 1992 and it does address the American school system, and I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that we need “less school, not more” because I believe we need to change the way education is delivered, not reduce it.
However, the book is a real eye opener to how mass education stunts the minds of the children it is supposed to prepare for adult life.
Thanks
My new screensaver, replacing Kipling’s “If”
Thanks
A friend of mine who taught in FE commented that many children have had their curiosity beaten out of them – often by their parents sadly
Maybe by poarents
Most especially by a terrible education system
Parents believe they must comply with its demands
One of your very best articles, full of gems. As a fan of Bertie he would be proud.
Thank you…
These one take a little longer.
I’ve been trying to work out why what we’re doing is so darned hard sometimes.
Well, partly the aim of civilization, is to segregate (higher) learning to smaller and smaller communities, as specialization becomes economically actionable. But, true, we’re not there yet. The Laws of Manu entombed every indian into a predetermined position, job, income, social relations – absolute totalitarianism: no-one had to learn how to think about anything outside their (family’s) sphere of existence. And for a long time it worked at putting cheap food on the table but only the Priest class was allowed to think; much like classics’ scholars during what I imagine to have been the Stuart-ine era (?). I’m not certain that people are unable to learn how to think, as it may be the quantity of useful information imparted does not reach a critical threshold. As in, making an assessment of likely outcomes or circumstances, requires situational data; caution, prudence, proficiency, are teach-able, but the environment arises out of, here, economic relations.
I see under the telegraph comment section that our fellow citizens want equality under the law just as Kant demanded. It is not that I believe them to be wrong. I believe they don’t understand Kant. They are just like the communists that once saw the ultimate failure of the system that they supported regressed into easy modes of thought and let a philosophy do their thinking for them. And they say this on a comment section about Orwell’s warnings about Stalin. I don’t believe that they know the wrongs of Stalin either.