About Intellectual Humility

Tribal affiliation is the biggest threat to intellectual humility. It is insidious--we join tribes emotionally and organically--there is not official signup form, so we don't even know that we joined. Once we join, the confirmation bias takes over, making us hubristic and even willing to fight for things we didn't choose to believe.

The solution is to disengage, to step out of one's tribe. That is extremely difficult once we get used to the comfy confines, the smiles and encouragement of our comrades, the non-stop warmth of that feeling that of belonging, the feeling that one is always at home. Once we are comfy, we turn off any thoughts that maybe we don't belong. We are completely credulous regarding tribal dogma. Stockholm Syndrome takes over. We become our own prisoners, setting up electrified fences to cordon off any improper or impure thoughts. The only hope for most people is that external tragedy resulting from the dogma comes crashing in, resulting in depression, nihilism and scales falling from our eyes. This might offer us a more-or-less blank slate on which to rebuild, a chance to build one's own belief system based on intellectual humility: curiosity, skepticism and evidence. More likely, it merely sends one on a shopping trip to join the next most attractive tribe.

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About Sasha Stone’s Podcast

This week, a friend introduced me to one of his favorite podcasts: "Sasha Stone's Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning."

I jumped right into Sasha' most current podcast, "The Mugshot Heard Round the World: Did the Democrats finally make a Trump voter?"" Sasha is intensely and creatively thoughtful and her non-partisan ideas will emotionally move for those of us who are not completely enraptured with one political tribe. Hence, the "Free Thinking" part of the title to her podcast.

Despite the paltry and insulting offerings to American voters year after year, the challenge is still to vote for the lesser of two evils, right? What is the lesser of two evils in 2024, at the point where the Democrats have repeatedly shat upon the rule of law, desperately embraced censorship and become louder cheerleaders for endless war than even the Republicans?

And will this be the year when black voters thoroughly reject the political party that has repeatedly taken them for granted, often in insulting ways? I'm speaking of the Democrats. I'm basing this question on several conversations I've recently had over the past month, but Sasha also sees a wider trend based on her own research.  And I don't think that most loyal democrats have the faintest inkling that these tectonic plates are dramatically shifting.

In this single episode, Sasha repeatedly challenged me, forcing me to reframe some of my long-held ideas. I immediately became a subscriber. I invite you to listen if you are looking to be challenged.

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The Mistreatment of Jordan Peterson: How Cancel Culture Works

The case of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson illustrates how cancel culture works. The chilling effect is how and where most of the damage occurs.  Here is an excerpt of an article at The Free Press titled, "Jordan Peterson Goes to ‘War’: The psychologist sells out auditoriums. But he can be stripped of his clinical license because of his tweets. He tells TFP why he won’t back down:

Most of Peterson’s work is technical. (Even the titles of his research are intimidating, like his 2007 paper “Reducing memory distortions in egoistic self-enhancers: Effects of indirect social facilitation.”) Other projects by Peterson are completely anodyne, like his guide and program to improve essay writing.

That’s not what the Ontario Court has taken issue with.

The problem isn’t his clinical practice or his academic research. It’s his worldview. Specifically, his tweets and a few podcast comments, which the College of Psychologists of Ontario, a licensing body for psychologists in the province, considered “unprofessional.”

“The percentage of people who actively oppose what I’m saying is very, very tiny,” Peterson said. “But some of them are extremely committed. And so they can bring disproportionate sway to the decision.” ...

Even if Peterson ultimately loses his license, a man with his following on social media can’t ever be “cancelled.” (And he no longer sees patients anyway.) The more chilling effect of the court’s decision is that it acts as an intimidation toward all other clinical psychologists: self-censor if you share Peterson’s views, or face punishment.

“In all of the areas in which we see pervasive self-censorship, it only takes one example for people to become unwilling to speak their mind. Or even one threat,” Pamela Paresky, a psychologist and author, told The Free Press. “When people say that cancel culture isn’t real because they don’t see people that have legitimately been cancelled, they don’t understand that cancel culture isn't about the cancelling, it’s about the culture. And it’s a culture of fear.”

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