In defense of thought-stopping

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality, while making it easier for them to part with them

• Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless ¹

Thought stopping is a method in which one overarching belief system allows people to “fallback” on it for answers. Instead of considering a situation it provides a template for answers. These systems could be religious, political, conspiratorial etc. They don’t need to be reliable, they only need to feel reliable, sometimes even just emotionally relatable is enough. Almost everyone does this, and everyone does this to some extent, and often in different areas. Two quick common examples are epistemological claims, and ethical ones.

Authority

Epistemology is basically a fancy word for describing “how you know what you know”. What makes up knowledge, and how do we define something as “true”. Many people like to default to “rationalism”, where there’s a set of rational processes that they use to determine truth. In reality it’s rare that people (especially after the internet) actually research and try to do things the traditionally “rational” way. Instead people often defer to an authority, or a group they belong to. A claim might be made that for example drinking orange juice can help keep you from getting sick. In this case the “rational” thing to do would be to find out the claimed mechanism, and then determine if there’s evidence for that claimed mechanism working in the way described. Instead you are much more likely to find someone believing it simply because “a doctor said so”, or some other authority someone can offload the consideration to. So is thought stopping just deferring to an authority then? Short answer is no.

Ethics

Another example to illustrate why authority isn’t the only thought stopping mechanism is to look at ethics. Many people differ drastically on their ethical beliefs. This is because topics like ethics are neigh-impossible to get an “objective” answer on. THerefore much of the arguing gets abstract very quickly, and conversations are often much longer and harder to parse. Lots of people will say for example that “all humans have worth”, however this isn’t self-evident intellectually. Instead it’s often used self-evidently in an emotional way. One ethics system where this claim would be ignored is a purely machiavelian naturalism, wherein people deserve what they can take, and maintain. In this system other people are just objects to overcome.

The purpose of this example isn’t to actually argue the ethics I discussed, rather it’s to argue that when given the opportunity to rely on things that are “self-evident” people will take them for granted. Moral emotivism² is a moral system that claims that when people make ethical claims it is simply a proxy for emotions. Whether true or not in an absolute sense, it does seem to be true often. Having to construct these systems from scratch is awful and tedious. This makes being able to offset that responsibility to “a higher power” (ideology, king, god etc.) an attractive option. While semi-arbitrary it grounds your belief in an “authority” that lets you avoid hard problems. When I use authority here it’s important to note these don’t have to be an actual authority, and that’s where the distinction lies.

Good cases

In programming one of the main techniques for optimization is caching. You essentially store the result of some sort of operation, if that operation is called again with the same parameters you just return the stored value instead of doing the operation. If someone believes in the 10 commandments then they can “store” an opinion with the authority of God behind it to answer hard moral questions in an “objective” way (the will of God). This is an incredibly attractive system for reducing the complexities you face in day to day life. The world is growing ever more complicated. Thought-stopping can provide a reprieve into comfort for people. As time goes on this is more and more the case, so something you can fall back on to just skip past a conversation might be necessary.

The assumption to jump to is that this is maladaptive because of it’s potential for wrong information, but this assumes you must be right. Many cases whether you’re right or wrong is irrelevant. You can be completely misinformed about the iraq war and still get up and go to work effectively every morning. You can believe the government is turning the frogs gay and still be a capable and well meaning friend. The list goes on and on. Often times an “absolute answer” can be much better than a well-reasoned one.

One such example I would argue is existentialism. Existentialism covers a lot of things, but broadly it asks why you should bother to live. It posits that nihilism is correct, and that the world is meaningless, therefore we need to find a meaning for ourselves. There is no fully objective answer to this question, and likely never will be. The best we have so far is to live in nihilism, embrace religion, or go down the absurdist route³. It takes time an effort to try to construct, and/or mitigate the potentially harmful outcomes of existential dread. As such many people go the religious route, instead believing that their life has meaning because the creator of the universe imbued them with it. Arguably this is a cop-out, however it can be a useful tool.

Existential dread can cause a ton of problems in one’s life, and opting for a quick answer in order to just “get on with it” can be helpful. I would even argue that someone who is nihilistic and miserable is worse off intellectually than someone who is religious and happy. Namely because I would argue in this case that existentialism is definitionally illogical, and the desperate need to cling to a logical answer is the problem in the first place. For all intents and purposes it’s likely for most people that just finding “an answer” works, and will functionally have little impact in their lives compared to the much more difficult task of parsing these things yourselves. Therefore, much like caching, thought-stopping in certain domains can be an efficient, and stress-reducing way to move through life.

Bad cases

It should be obvious that there are some potentially severe consequences to thought stopping systems. This paper is meant to be a case for when and why you should engage with them occasionally, however I think it’s irresponsible to not provide at least a few counter-arguments. Primarily it’s important to remember that our ideas, considerations, and lack thereof can have real consequences. While it’s fine to be inconsistent sometimes in more abstract thought, the problem comes when your ideas inform actions that are no longer theoretical, and instead pass into the realm of reality.

Let’s say for example you have an ideological belief system that is quite conspiratorial. In general you don’t believe in any medicine, or any government statements. You might have ideological leaders who reenforce these ideas, and with them the ideas become the source of your answers. Whenever someone tells you to go to the doctor, you feel you don’t need to go because they’re all just working for big medicine, and are out to scam you. Likewise you refuse to let your children have anything medical done to them (like Jehovah’s Witnesses⁴). In the first case you likely will bear out real consequences for yourself. If you have a heart condition you might stroke out and die, or even just deteriorate. In the second case I would argue it’s much worse because you’re necessarily opting family members into the consequences of your beliefs. You may care about your kids, but if the goal is to keep them healthy you can be objectively wrong in an action you take that is informed by your beliefs being in line with that goal.

A better solution

The cop-out answer to this is to tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and simply always seek truth. I think this is idiotic, and with the intention of being pragmatic I think there’s a better solution. Instead of trying to parse all this complicated nonsense there is a simple alternative. What if we just limited our scope of interests to things we can focus on. I would argue that no answer held apathetically is better than a wrong one held stubbornly. There are some arguments you don’t need to have, or even that can be put off for a bit if you’re busy.

Setting a scope on what you want to be informed on can allow you to focus and not worry about being “informed” on everything. Learning to be fine with not having an answer, or even just not having an answer now is a skill people should have. When you try to split your attention far too much you end up being stretched too thin, and it’s impossible to do that much analysis well.

Last bulwark

So, while we may think of thought-stopping as a bad thing, it can be useful. It can be used to help us avoid problems that are insufferably complex, emotionally difficult and/or have no “answer”. That being said the danger present in shortcut thinking is obviously lingering, and it’s not a good answer in many cases. Again I would implore people to simply limit their scope of thinking, but if you do refuse that then best of luck out there, and make sure to challenge your beliefs where you can.