Thinkers are Everywhereby Gerald Angelo Cirrincione
Are you a thinker? Yes. Certainly. Without doubt. I may have never met you, but I nevertheless say with complete assurance that you are a thinker. Are the people you run into every day thinkers? Again, yes. As a human being, you are a thinker by nature. It is part of your biological adaptation. Being a thinker is not a profession, or a hobby. It is much closer to you than that. It is deep within your DNA, your essence, what makes you human. You can no more resign from being a thinker than you can resign from being human. Everybody you have ever known has been a thinker. To think is our cosmic duty as well as our cosmic opportunity to fulfill our destiny and potential. Our role in the ecology is to take energy and information from the environment and-by means of our species' unique anatomy and physiology -produce thoughts. Bees make honey, humans make thoughts. Humans build hypotheses with the same instinctual inevitability that beavers build dams. It is what we do. Whether paid or not, we are thinkers. It is something our nervous system-brain and sensory apparatus-is distinctively suited for. You and everybody you know is neurologically designed to react to the world around them by looking, listening, and considering. We are warm-blooded thinking machines. To think is your happy responsibility, always, forever, it cannot be given away. Your thinking is more you than anything else in your life-more you than your possessions or your physical appearance. Being a thinker is not a choice; it is a consequence of your having been born human. Precisely because it is within our very nature to think, the act and process of thinking itself will always remain elusive, hard to grasp, difficult for Homo Sapiens to focus on and talk about. Try to have a conversation with a fish about swimming; a bird is mostly unaware of how it flies. Likewise, thinking remains too close for us to look at for very long. After talking about it for a while, think-ing begins to seem strangely unreal, like a shifting mirage, and you can't even believe that you can do it. Because the workings of thinking are too slippery to be comfortably examined, human beings have a tendency to scrutinize the doers of the thinking-the thinkers. People look one another over and quickly decide-on the basis of one or two superficial traits-who is a thinker and who isn't. To regard somebody as not capable of being a thinker, or as not "cut out" to be a thinker, is perhaps the most pernicious, elitist, snobbish, harmful, destructive notion in the world. The scarcity of thinking on this planet may be a direct result of the self-fulfilling assumption made by families, schools, and churches, that says people are not fit to think for themselves. This scarcity of thinking can end as we begin to see ourselves and each other as thinkers. This happens when we announce in the way we behave and carry ourselves, "I am a thinker and I expect to be treated as such." And when we say to others in the way we relate to them: "You can always trust me to treat you as the thinker you are and can be." A crucial and formative time to treat people like thinkers is while they are still children. Children are thinkers. Each child deserves to be treated with dignity. Children are explorers, conquerors, researchers, experimenters. You are not superior intellectually to a child. When you learn how to accept and nurture the thinker in a baby, you will have learned how to relate to the thinker in everybody-including yourself. Notice what the individual child has an affinity to look at, listen to, and consider-and support her or him in that. Children need never be made to feel that their questions are stupid or irrelevant. Or that their mistakes are bad. Do not consider the young thinker's initial attempts to look, listen, and consider as silly, cute, shocking, or scandalous. Treat the child's explorations with respect. Children don't have to be taught anything in particular. Instead, they need to have their questions answered, and to be helped to find those answers for themselves. Level with the child; speak to her as one thinker to another. There is no need to pretend that your answers are pat and certain when they are not. Address the topics that the youthful thinkers are already thinking about; they are already interested in so many surprising things. Education can be casual, informal, and flexible, and it can instill in the young thinkers a desire to do their chosen explorations humanely and ethically-avoiding what is grossly dangerous to themselves or others. But otherwise they can be encouraged to take definite risks to discover things on their own. When you teach a thinker, you teach freedom. A child is no less than a Voltaire, impatient with hypocrisy and inconsistency. You are taking a risk when you encourage thinking, because it may be used against you. That is, you may find that your own erroneous ways are exposed, or that the youthful thinker will not comply with your hazily thought-out ideas. Welcome that. Teaching thinkers is sometimes unsettling, and requires stamina and courage. Are you afraid of children reaching the full power and potential of a thinker? Are you embarrassed at being confronted with your own folly and errors? Genuine education regards both teachers and students as thinkers and is incompatible with coercion and dogma. The standard compulsory educational system, however, treats the young like nonthinkers who must be compelled to use their minds. It imposes artificial competition and grading systems that are destructive to a young thinker. It forces students to stop thinking about what is actually on their minds and imposes a one-size-fits-all curriculum. The suppressive message: "Don't think: Absorb!" In the child's mind, swallowing may become confused with thinking. To think, however, is simply to look, listen, and consider-and reach your own conclusions. Compulsory education is an oxymoron. What is needed is the complete separation of state and education. Adults are often struggling to overcome the childhood suppression of their thinking natures: "Who?! You?! A thinker?! Don't be ridiculous!" Their confidence that they truly are thinkers may be tentative and fragile; worse yet, they long ago may have given up completely on ever thinking for themselves. Or-at the other extreme-adults are often smug and complacent from childhood inflation of their thinking ego: "Oh, you! You're so exceptional! So above average!" They have acquired an intellectual swagger; they smirk with clever condescension and quick conceit. They feel themselves to be one of the few, the proud, the thinkers. But thinkers are everywhere, and it is essential to treat everyone, including ourselves, like a thinker. Nobody is not a thinker. There is no elite. Just those who work at reaching their potential. Help yourself and other people build on and expand the quantity and quality of thinking that you and they do. This will cut down on pointless arguing and even prevent violence. We can relate to a person with whom we are in conflict by assuming that we are both thinkers. A degree of respect will result that will keep us from insulting each other. We will listen to and begin to see the other person-perhaps for the first time. You don't have to let others treat you as though you are not a thinker and thereby disempower you. At the same time, do not let others treat themselves as though they are not thinkers. Empower them. Let life become an informal, anywhere-you-happen-to-be, school for thinking, where we help ourselves (and one another) explore every nook and cranny of life and the universe. This can transform the relations between yourself and others. It will keep discussion, including differences of opinion, on a dignified level. It will make you a better citizen, and society truly civilized. Gerald Angelo Cirrincione hosts Jazz— Conversation for radio and Omniverse for cable TV. Gerald is currently living in Marinette, Wisconsin and has recently begun to work on the writing of his first book.
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