The Myth of the ‘Free Thinker’

Yes, your beliefs belong to an ideology

As the political climate intensifies, so too does the use of political language. From a re-emergence of ideological terms such as libertarianism, socialism, and even an unfortunate rise in Fascism and authoritarianism, to the use of the more colloquial terms of progressive and conservative, many conversations are being had about how these words guide our thinking and what they even mean.

For most political commentators, this is no surprise. As individuals seek to increase their competence in a field they may not have otherwise been engaged with, they will naturally adapt new terminology and ideas as they try to locate themselves within the political ‘playing field’.

For others, this natural phenomenon is not as clear. For them, the rise of self-identification corresponds with self-imposed limitations on individual openness and tribalism. Self-identification, they would say, means that one prioritizes defending the position of a group as opposed to pursuing critical thinking or seeking the truth. Self-identification means ceasing to be a ‘free thinker’.

Conforming to non-conformity

Ironically, the people who take up this stance often do so by automatically dismissing anyone who self-identifies by an ideology. In pure unscientific fashion, they also assume that the ‘in-groups’ they have identified contain no pluralism, and wrongfully assume that one can’t possibly self-identify on ideological lines and retain a critical thought process. This, in turn, assumes that individuals adopt ideologies first and then apply this to their worldview, and not that ideologies are formed from lived experience or a thought out process.

This is not to say that the process of self-identifying cannot be reflexive and social. Many use the terms as a sort of heuristic to summarize their viewpoints in general, not a radical way of subsuming their entire identity to a group. It’s also important to understand that the process of self-identification is different than ‘othering’. Self-identification is a heuristic for the individual who is self-identifying, a way to present themselves to others in simpler ways, not to present others in simple ways (which is what the process of othering is). It is an indicator as to the beliefs and ideas that a person may adhere to and serves to guide others in conversation. Othering, on the other hand, is when an individual assigns/ imposes a label on others to remove the complexity of their individual members and erase pluralism and their humanity.

This is something we are seeing much of today and is an effective tool most often used by those in power to create a false narrative of victimhood. We have seen this in the rise of white supremacy movement, male rights activists, and so-called free speech activists who use these pretexts to undermine legitimate social grievances.

Highlighting social divisions acts as a smokescreen in which those in power can actually claim that they have their hands tied and therefore are not able to act in a constructive way (even though they hold possession of all levers of power) or, can be used in the opposite effect as an excuse to pass undemocratic and suppressive laws.

The ‘problem’, or at least what we perceive to be the problem, becomes that people are too ‘ideological’ or that they are too ‘uncivil’ when in fact the only source of the problem (and its exacerbation or elimination) can be the power structures with decision-making authority themselves — i.e. government.

The tool is so effective that it has become the main way in which we witness online foreign intervention which has been successful in destabilizing otherwise homogenous societies.

Issues as ‘Complex’

The largest mistake these individuals make however is by assuming that they don’t belong to an ideology simply because they do not recognize themselves as belonging to an ideology. This is completely absurd as we all grow up surrounded by, and therefore inundated into, a dominant ideology. As such, many of these ‘free thinkers’ are by default restricted by how this dominant ideology has formed them. In the western world, this mostly translates into an appreciation of individualism, parliamentarian democracy, and a strong belief in the free market and the individual's location within it (how a person become ‘successful’). These ideas usually guide our moral reasoning which sees us significantly more concerned with ideas related to commerce and entrepreneurship than politics itself. This set of ideas is easily contained within the liberal philosophy which allows for an individual to hold even contradictory ideas about certain political policies.

And this is really where the kernel of the ‘free thinker’ lays — not in that they are free of ideology, but that they retain the ‘freedom’ to investigate each policy as a stand-alone matter and then ‘freely’ make up their mind about it as opposed to being hindered and limited by ideology.

Again, this proves a limited understanding of what political movements and those who self-identify with an overarching ideology believe in, and that is that issues are interconnected with an overarching narrative and issues need to be dealt with as a whole. Instead, ‘free thinkers’ present themselves as those who are intellectually more in tune with the ‘nuance’ of individual issues making their entire stance a moral and self-indulging one where they — with their infinite wisdom — are left to wrestle with the ‘real’ difficulties of making up their own minds about individual issues as they operate ‘above’ those professing ideologies or overarching stances. Ironically, this too requires the adoption of a caricature where everyone else (the other) belongs to a hyper-politicized camp.

The Denial of Reality

What is most harmful in this idea is that it thrives on a denial of reality. For the ‘free thinker’ to be able to remain ‘unaligned’ they need to truly believe that nothing connects different issues to each other. Politics, in this view, is an atomized process of policy suggestion and individuals deciding what is or isn't reality.

This is embedded in the ‘complex’ demeanour that ‘free thinkers’ present. When this ‘complexity’ is actually a denial of the complexity of systems of government and its impact on individuals and society in large. Indeed this philosophy of ‘free thinking’ can be adopted when an individual is ‘above politics’ not just in the intellectual sense that they perceive themselves to be, but in the notion that allows them to see the strong stances others take as absurd because they are not invested in them as much because they are buffered from their impact.

More importantly, what this ultimately means is that ‘free thinkers’ do not believe that there is a correct or truthful way in seeing the world. It denies the idea that the world, and how it functions, can be perceived in a ‘correct’ and accurate way and that there are, therefore, correct and accurate interventions need to be made to make it function better. In this way, their entrenchment in the concept of “freedom” becomes the largest surrender into the dogmatism of inaction, a sort of nihilistic anti-politics.

In all these ways ‘Freethinkers’ expose themselves as the ultimate dogmatists. First, in othering those who self-identify with political movements so they can indulge in moral grandstanding. Second, in an anti-intellectual and automatic dismisal of the relevance and importance of political ideologies and philosophies which is underpinned by a worldview that acknowledges no interconnectedness of issues. Third and finally, in vainly not recognizing the ways in which ideology already works in shaping their own perceptions and identifications.