Resources on Thinking for Yourself

Thinking for yourself spans a whole range of skills and techniques for gathering and processing information to make good decisions.  Here are some resources you may find helpful in that process.

Using Your Head

Using your head means applying different types of thought to the situations you face.  

Critical thinking has certain steps to follow in a practical process.  You may pass through stages as you learn this style of thinking.

Logic is another mental skill.  It teaches you to make conclusions based on the data you have.  You also learn to avoid logical fallacies.

Scientific method is a rigorous process of observation and experimentation that helps us study the world objectively and figure out how it works.

Statistics is a mathematical discipline that gathers and summarizes data.  People often misuse or deliberately abuse statistics in attempts to promote their own ideas or goals.  You can defend against this by learning about basic statistics in resources aimed at beginners.

They’re Messing With Your Mind

Governments, churches, corporations, and other groups often try to control the masses for their own benefit.  They have many tools for this.  All can be resisted or subverted in various ways — if you know what you’re doing.

Propaganda is material designed to promote a particular idea or agenda, often distorting the facts to do this.  Learn to identify and defend against it.

Television has a major effect on modern culture.  What we put on the news influences what we know and how we think about the world.

Free your mind.

Literary and Cinema Classics

Since free thinking is both popular and unpopular by swings of fashion, history, politics, and culture — it is a perennial theme in literature and movies.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is among the most famous examples of dystopic science fiction.  It gave us the ideas of “doublethink” and “Big Brother” and many other wonderful metaphors for government gone horribly, maniacally wrong. 1984 was adapted into a movie.

Animal Farm is an allegory with animals as the main characters. After taking over the farm, however, they become more and more like humans … though not humane. This book has also been made into a movie.

Brave New World tells of a society stratified into rigid castes, where children are raised in laboratories with ever-whispered instructions of their roles. It also explores the need to connect on a deep emotional level with other people.  This became a made-for-television movie that ruthlessly exposed key capitalist memes such as “Work! Earn! Buy!” and “I hate old things.  I want all new things!” and “If you want it, you can have it.  Reach out and grab it!  You deserve  it.”

The Matrix is a science fiction movie trilogy about people trapped in a computer-generated world while evil robots use their bodies as batteries. The Matrix Collection: 4 Film Favorites includes all three of the live-action movies plus the animated one. Also worth reading is The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Popular Culture and Philosophy).

V for Vendetta began as a graphic novel about a fascist England and a bizarre vigilante. The movie does a stunning job of bringing it to life and showing how people learn to think again after stifling themselves for many years.