My ideal reader is … you.
Ok, that may not quite be true if you’re boiling with rage and wanting to burn me and everything I’ve written at the stake for heresy.
If thinking is for everyone, then my ideal reader could be anyone. It doesn’t matter where they live, what they look like, or how they live their lives. They do at least need to be a little bit open-minded otherwise they are not going to engage with what’s here at all.
When I’ve shared some of the ideas here the reactions I get do seem related to the age of the person I’m talking with. This tallies with my sense that there has been a significant cultural shift since I was young in the 1970s and 80s.
Most people aged 40+, and definitely 50+, are quite familiar with the idea of objective truth and objective thinking. I’m not sure thinking has ever been very well taught in most schools but the notion that there were realms of knowledge independent of the personality and feelings of the person studying them was widely accepted.
This doesn’t mean everyone agrees about everything: clearly not. To take contentious examples like how to deal with viruses or respond to a changing climate, the fault line is around whether the science is settled or not, not whether science itself is the right way to get to the truth.
With a few older people, and a larger proportion of under 40s, the idea that truth is relative or subjective is much more widespread. As Oprah Winfrey might say to an interviewee, ‘tell me your truth’, not the truth.
Elsewhere I have described a war against objective thinking arising from the social constructivist idea that all reality is socially constructed and so objective thinking is not possible.
Allied to this widespread view, is a growth in social media and an incredible pressure to think ‘correctly’ or face the danger of being ‘cancelled’. There has always been social pressure but never before on a scale like this, and it disproportionately affects the under 30s.
For these reasons my ideal reader is anyone who is emboldened by these ideas to think for themselves as part of the process of becoming the person they were born to be. If that person is you, and you are experiencing collectivist pressure to think and behave in a certain way, that you know in your bones is not right, then you are my ideal reader.
I’d love to hear from you.