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The Malfunction of Intellect |
I don’t know when it started—perhaps sometime after the Kennedy assassination, after our dreams and future were suddenly stolen from us on one November day, we Americans stopped thinking. We were so confused and upset by events that were apparently out of our control, we started looking for easy answers. This slow erosion of critical and imaginative thought was especially insidious for us because of our form of government. Our democracy is at its best when we have not only an educated population, but more importantly, one that is thoughtful as well. The next significant series of events occurred in the early 90s when corporate America joined the non-thinking alliance. Faced with a massive economic downturn and vanishing returns, we embarked on the easy, short-term solution—downsizing. We thought that profit margins could be restored if we had fewer people to do the same amount of work. This attitude accelerated our erosion—people no longer had the time to think. As someone who consults in creative thinking to corporations, I saw the effects of this “up close and personal.” One CEO succinctly expressed the problem to me over lunch when he said, “ I feel sad because I no longer have my mind available to me.” It’s important to distinguish between intelligence and thinking. Edward De Bono, a world-known thinking guru, describes this difference as analogous to that between a car and a driver. If you have a Porsche for a mind, it's even more important that you drive it (think) well. Poor thinking in bright influential people leads to disastrous consequences. The rest of the story predictably follows. Bright media folks and politicians started to capitalize on this “dumming down” of our country. Sound bytes and sensationalism replaced thoughtful articulate exchange. Decisions were made based on overly simplistic generalizations and stereotypes. No political, ethnic, racial, or economic group was immune from this practice. It surfaces from the hyperbolic political correctness on the left to the religious fervor and flag waving on the right. The inevitable result is that the search for truth got buried and prejudice increased. America became polarized with negativity. We see it time and again in the behavior of TV and radio folks, our newspapers, and regrettably, our justice system on up to our highest levels of government. It seems the only way out of this is to emphasize thinking as part of the core curriculum in our public and private schools. It is at least as important as reading and math and should be treated as such. We need to pay as much attention to preserving and nurturing our mental environment as we do to our external one. Today, as the joke goes, “when someone tells you they are lost in thought, it's generally because they’re in unfamiliar territory.” Let us obsolete this idea and get back to making America great again. |
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Innovation Inc. |
by Stephen R. Grossman|
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Don't take my word for it. Dig deeper. |
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