If you are like me at all (which I have a feeling you are), you are concerned.
We look around at our culture and see the degradation of principles and values. We look at the lives of American families and see a far cry from the happier homes – or at least more stable ones of generations past. We look at our workplaces and see the unethical behavior of many corporations. We look at our schools and see the “dumbing down” of education and its glaring shortcomings. We look at our local communities and see people who do not even know their neighbors anymore and take no pride in where they live. We look at our government (that we no longer trust) and see it seemingly working against us at every turn. We look and see a society that is in a decline and a world that is in the brink of self-destruction.
There is truly a monumental problem. We share a real unease for where we find ourselves and an even graver concern for where we are headed.
We feel like a decided minority and wonder how we got to this point and what we can do to fix it. This captures the mindset where I began and – like many of you – have worked tirelessly for the past few years to address. And this is personal to me having three children whom I love dearly and wish nothing more than to leave behind a better world than what we have currently become.
While it is simple enough for us to all agree that things in our world are not what we would like for them to be, it proves far more difficult to isolate the exact reasons why that is the case. Unfortunately, most people do not invest any time in thinking about this problem. Judging from the state of society, many people do not even seem to care…but you and I are not those people.
Everything starts with some scrap of knowledge and one of the first things I looked at was why we are not like those around us who seem numb to the crisis at hand. How is it that we can see the waterfall down the stream while so many others are swimming toward it without concern? What makes us different?
To me this is never really been a political statement. We can set our individual bias aside and take a look at the state of America and quickly conclude the problems go far beyond the scope of government policy. We can agree our concerns are not isolated to Washington, D.C., but they persist in our schools, our offices, our homes, and our communities.
I personally spent a great deal of time evaluating this underlying problem with the hopeful intention of finding its solution in a social movement. Our schools, businesses, communities, and levels of government are all systems, and a social movement is often the most effective tool to transform an established system. Gandhi stopped the advancement of the British with a spinning wheel and a social movement. Margaret Mead an activist in the women’s right movement who said “No doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” With any system everything becomes more and more centralized and with that becomes less and less freedom – counter to this are smaller independent systems or mini-movements.
I could likely persuade you to agree that a potential solution to reversing the negative trends we all see in our society could be – and likely should be – social movements initiated by dedicated and passionate citizens (we even wrote a book about it). This agreement leads me and anyone to our next hurdle in finding the people to lead these movements. It was then (and is) my beliefs if we could somehow inspire and encourage self-governing leaders, those individuals could serve and lead. If we could instill self-education, self-sacrifice, and self-reliance, those leaders would likely emerge.
But while on the surface the answer may be found in self-governing leaders that inspire and lead movements, I was still drawn back to the matter of at the heart what makes us different from the blind swimmers we mentioned before. How could we – in the matter of a few paragraphs – arrive at a plan of action that we would both embrace, promote, and feel confident was a step in the right direction for future generations? We are no smarter than some of the highly educated individuals that are currently steering the course for our society. Why do we share such motivation to find a way to help alter and correct that course in our lifetime?
I believe the answer is the exercise we just went through and how we got and looked at this problem in the first place. Technically and almost unwittingly and assuredly unknowingly what I (and we) did was:
- After starting with the scarp of knowledge, expanding it to comprehension,
- analyzing it,
- synthesizing it - finding relationships to other bits of knowledge,
- drawing warranted conclusions,
- further questioning these generalizations,
- then continuing the process to reconstruct patterns and beliefs on the basis of wider experiences and observations
- finally rendering a judgment.
A whole lot less technical - the difference, I propose, is that we do not take life at face value. We question everything with boldness – even our own beliefs. We examine the cause and effect of the actions we see around us. We see through the politics and the personalities and instead trust in our beliefs and our principles. We refuse to participate in “group-think” or accept the influence of media, but we take responsibility to listen, question, and decide for ourselves.
Searching for the right term to use for what separates the blissfully ignorant from the marginally alert, I settled on “critical thinking.” Whether we all realized it or not, this was the process we learned to guide our lives with, and it is the process that sets us apart from the waterfall-bound masses. Thinking or more so thinking critically is the root cause. Critical thinking was and is what makes us different.
Critical thinking is the problem. A society without critical thinking produces untold negative
Critical thinking is the solution. If an individual’s thinking becomes deeper and more deliberate, it impacts and improves every relationship, family, business, organization, community, and society in which they interact. It illuminates freedoms, provides the tools for an enlightened society, and…yes, could fix the very problems we face today.
Why Brush Fire Forum?
Brush Fire Forum is both a conclusion and a beginning.
I truly believe the problems we face today often arise because people decide not to think. Whether we call it critical thinking or reasoning or synthesizing or whatever, it generally means the same thing. In large part due to the systems that have been put in place and the upbringing of generations, we are breeding societies that have largely stopped thinking for itself. If we are to correct the problems we face today and – more importantly – those of tomorrow, we must restore critical thinking skills. If we are to reclaim and restore our principles and values and achieve individual success, we must as individuals begin critically thinking and rise above the norm of the collective.
There are numerous philosophical and intellectual endeavors into the practices of Critical Thinking - in many ways this is not one of them. We are not here to carry a torch of deep thinking but rather igniting sparks in others. We are here to make you begin to purposely think and reason, exercise your thought skills, provide ideas and practices to improve all parts of your lives, and to inspire a better you. Thanks to years of “dumbing down” society, schools no longer teach anything that even resembles critical thinking - the bar for success has been set admittedly low, but we aim to wildly surpass it.
In a world of mediocrity, we're a community "keen on setting brush fires in people's minds" to inspire and encourage thinking and leading.
It is our goal to use this forum to not only share our personal insights and thoughts but to learn and grow from you as well. Together, we want to foster an environment that shares concepts, ideas, opinions, thoughts, and – in that process – develops and strengthens the thinking and reasoning skills we have lost as a society…for my children and the sake of our future generations.
