HUMAN NATURE: CRITIC OR BUILDER

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING

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Today's post is intended to be fierce, critical, lengthy, but straight to the point. I am about to draw you into an infinite catacomb of critical thinking. Stay with me, be keen, be curious. I assure you that you would have thoughts and questions by the time you are done.

CRITICAL HUMAN NATURE

It is self-evident that by nature, human beings are critical beings. I mean 'critical' in the negative, fault-finding sense of the word. We do not require experience or prior knowledge to find fault in something, we just can! It is amazing how we can spot the imperfections in a thing without knowing what the perfect version of that thing looks like. We can see something for the first time and know it is wrong. And we can show why something is wrong without an idea of the correct version. This explains why critics can point out everything negative while being ignorant of the details of how such a thing came to be and how to change it. It also explains why two people who hold polar opposite views about a topic can be wrong. So the earth is littered with people who can see all shades of wrong, but cannot do anything to fix the wrong, all the while taking pride in only knowing what is wrong.

THE BUILDERS

Sadly, the world does not advance under the oversight of critics. Articulate, fine faultfinding has never been the vehicle of human progress. It has always been men who are willing to get their hands dirty and dig deep that force us to move forward.

Get critical all you want, the world will forget. What the world never forgets are the people who ensured that they contributed to what works. I bet you can remember the names of inventors. And I can bet you do not know the names of those who said those inventions would never work. There were men who said we will never fly. A few days later, the Wright brothers had their first flight test. I don't know the men who made snide remarks, no matter how honest they may have been. But I sure know the lowly bicycle repairing brothers who changed the world.

The fathers of critical thinking never intended to produce critics. The goal was to birth creative builders.

WHAT THEN IS CRITICAL THINKING?

Critical thinking is not synonymous with a brash, arrogant, verbose use of language to bedazzle your listeners. It is not the guy who insists on walking against the crowd. It is not the stiff line of thought that refuses to reconsider because it thinks it might be right. It is the art that recognises the complexities of reality and seeks to make coherence of it.

The best thinkers make things simple, not complicated. They study the difficult catacombs of ideas, perceptions, and concepts, and navigate the map so easily you would think it was a straight line. The product of that navigation is building what endures. Critical thinking is not aimed to spite and despise. Rather it aims to put things in their rightful positions.

Reality is like a difficult entanglement of cables. Although made for a purpose, they are useless in that state of entanglement. If you have ever seen an entanglement of cables, you would know how difficult they are to loosen and it remains a mystery to me how they become so. Critical thinking is you loosening that strange entanglement so that you can use the cables for well defined purposes. Like the cables, the product of critical thinking should be useful information and creative problem solving.

Entangled cables. Image source: google/istockphotos.

THE BEST OF CRITICAL THINKING

My best part about critical thinking is how it affects my personal life.

I realised that a room in disorder is a function of a cluttered mind. How do I know this? When I get in the mood to write, like the juices are flowing, the first thing I do is clear my surroundings. I can't get to work until I clear out my room first. You might figure "well, that's normal." No it is not. It is my mind solving a problem (scattered room), in order to be able to solve other problems that I intend to tackle with my writing.

Critical thinking is not this strict, tough, philosophical activity. It is literally self-improvement.

The objective of critical thinking is to become a creative problem solver. How you will solve those problems is up to you. But you must be in a consistent state of preparation to solve problems. By so doing, you become the builder that civilization needs to advance.

CONCLUSION

I will conclude this publication with a famous Theodore Roosevelt quote from his speech ‘The Man in the Arena.’ It summarises the demand for builders. It succinctly puts why being a builder is the ideal.

Here it goes;

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Whatever you are doing, keep at it. Get better. Take an active approach to improving yourself and your ability to solve problems both at emotional and cognitive levels. Become a builder. Be determined to build. That way you will etch your name on the stones of time. That way, you will get the best of critical thinking.

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Smell you later.