Humility by a Thousand Cuts
In my experience, critical thinking has never felt like a great exercise in intellectual superiority. No, that’s a fantasy peddled by people who want to dress up as Socrates without drinking the hemlock. It feels more like being slowly and systematically dismantled by the truth. It is the constant humiliation of realizing that the stories I told myself about the world, about others, and about myself were often just elegant fictions, embellished with self-confidence.
It’s not that you become smarter. In a way, you become emptier. Less attached to your favorite theories. Less in love with your own cleverness. Every time I thought I had figured it out, reality would appear like an impatient Zen master and knock the cup out of my hands. Again and again.
And the worst part? You start to welcome it.
There’s a strange kind of masochistic grace in saying, “Yes, show me where I’m wrong. Please.” Not because you enjoy being wrong (God forbid), but because you’ve learned that being bad is often the last clear step before being less wrong. And being less wrong is the closest we mortals come to wisdom.
“Critical thinking, despite its intimidating name, is less about wielding a scalpel of intellect and more about submitting your ego to death by a thousand tiny cuts. It is the intellectual version of being mugged by reality and still thanking it for the lesson.”
Critical thinking is not about proving others wrong. It is much more about constantly revising the manuscript of one’s own beliefs under the merciless red pen of evidence. It is the death of the ego, in slow motion, every day. A thousand little cuts, and you bleed certainty.
And the scar tissue? …. that’s called humility ;-)
It’s not pretty, but it’s real. And in this era of performative certainty, it’s the last thing we should be striving for.
This might be of interest:
You can read an excerpt from the book “Critical Thinking is Your Superpower” here:
