I learned three fundamental things in graduate school. The first was not to turn down free food, the second was to speak with authority even if you weren’t sure, and the third was that there’s a cost to free thinking. The first two were invaluable to me in school, but the third didn’t seem to have much application until I got a job. Then I had to count the cost of disagreeing with my employer. While all of us are capable of free thinking, defined in my context as espousing a minority opinion, history reveals what majority champions will do to you. For example, in the 16th century, when the scientific and religious communities thought the earth was flat, Galileo said it was round. He was labeled a heretic. This, in spite of the fact that everyone could see the shadow of the earth on the moon every month, that it was crescent-shaped, not straight. Today he is lauded for standing against the conventional wisdom of the time because he was right. But more often than not, free thinking leads to errors that history never forgets. It’s a risk to be a maverick because conventional wisdom is usually built on tried and true principles. To illustrate this point, consider Lamarck, a French naturalist from the 17th century. He is best remembered for his idea that acquired characteristics are inheritable, which he tried to demonstrate by cutting off tails of female rats before they became mothers to see if their babies were born without tails. We laugh at this idea today because he was wrong. But both of these men took the same chance and it cost them their reputations.
The risk is the same today. If the consensus opinion rules, minority ideas are suppressed. For example, agencies that fund research base their decisions on the prevailing facts. Even with obvious facts to the contrary, like the crescent moon, a bias is hard to overcome. It takes a free thinker who will gamble with his reputation to challenge the establishment. It’s much safer to agree with the majority of your peers and suppress any disagreement you might have. This is what most people do on the job, especially when they are scientists whose research is funded by majority advocates.
Scientists talk a lot about the facts, like their conclusion is obvious from them, but facts can be interpreted in more than one way. No doubt scientists in the 16th century thought a crescent moon was caused by something besides the earth’s shadow but their interpretation was wrong. All of them were wrong. Nowadays, the establishment says ‘that can’t happen because our data is much better’, but an interpretation is still required, and with it, comes the possibility that everyone is wrong.
Albert Einstein once said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” While most inventors would agree, the ones without imagination would not. And unfortunately, they are often the people in positions of established authority. They got there by impressing others with their knowledge of facts, not with demonstrating their imagination. Here’s a case in point: When was the last time you heard a job interview where the potential employee focused on his dreams instead of his accomplishments? It doesn’t happen very often and when it does, that person doesn’t get the job unless it’s a position calling for creativity.
So, if our society doesn’t foster free thinking, how are advances made? Well, there are many centuries in our past when they weren’t made. And what those time periods have in common with some countries in our world today is draconian control over people’s thoughts. What people think can’t be blocked but what they say or do can be, resulting in no advances. That’s why totalitarian countries often must copy inventions from free societies in order to compete in world markets. In those countries, only their leaders are allowed to express their ideas and they aren’t known for imagination. Rather, they maintain the status quo because it benefits them.
In contrast, free countries like Great Britain and the United States established copyright laws in the 1700s to protect outspoken individuals from having their ideas stolen or suppressed. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, named after Britain’s reigning Queen. It was enacted in 1709 to promote learning and probably wouldn’t have happened without her influence. She was born into power, which is one way a free thinker might gain a leadership position. And because of Britain’s subsequent intellectual advancement, the United States followed suit in 1790 with its first copyright law.
If you’re a free thinker, I can imagine your protest now, what about all the famous creative people from suppressed countries? What about Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn? Not a good choice to make your point. He was imprisoned for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a private letter and lost his Russian citizenship under Nikita Krushchev. Russia took him back when the Soviet Union dissolved. What about Confucius, the Chinese philosopher in the Zhou dynasty? Again, not a good choice. He was a poor aristocrat who tried a career in politics and eventually fled his country to avoid persecution. They took him back in old age. I’m sure there’s somebody you can think of whose biography would contradict my premise that totalitarian regimes don’t foster advancement, but it’s only a pattern, not an absolute, so exceptions are allowed.
Free thinking, in its purest form, challenges the establishment on several fronts— politics, morality, and economics to name a few. Should the establishment tolerate nonconformist ideas at the cost of instability? If it does, the potential for human advancement is large. But unfortunately, that isn’t the priority of most leaders, even in free societies. Their priority is to maintain the status quo in their lifetime, even if advancement must be rolled onto the backs of future generations. You see, in order to promote human imagination, you must pay the cost now, and it won’t seem worth it unless, by inheritance or some other miracle, you’re a free thinker in a position of power. It is far more likely that if advancements occur, they will be made by the mavericks of our time, who risk their reputations, speak with authority, and don’t turn down free food.
