Who Really Wants to Think?

“Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of ‘the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.’ ”

“Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. . . .

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of ‘the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved’—especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitudes is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends? . . .

People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have ‘the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved’ will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted. . . .

Anyone who claims not to be shaped by such forces is almost certainly self-deceived. Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.”

—Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 17, 21, 23.