When you’re a child, you don’t know any better than to think as your parents tell you to. If they say it’s bad to put your elbows on the table or good to change your underwear every day, you believe them. It’s part of being a child to absorb your parents’ values and systems. As you get older, you start to find that your teachers have a slightly different set of rules, and your school friends may have values or opinions that are different again. So you start to modify your earlier views and incorporate others that you acquire from fellow students or friends who might think very differently from your parents. And when you’re young you probably think about these quite carefully.
Of course, it’s easy and comfortable to hang out with other people who broadly think the same way as you. As you form your values, you look for other people who are like-minded. It means you have plenty in common and you don’t have endless arguments. When someone else says what you were already thinking, it makes you feel validated, makes you feel you must be right, reinforces your view, makes you feel like you belong. It’s a good feeling and you can all spend time together validating each other’s beliefs and making yourselves feel right and valued. You can find a partner who thinks the same as you, can have friends like you, can work in a place where there are other people who think the way you do.
And this is what we call an echo chamber. Yes, it’s comfortable and affirming, but it makes it very difficult to be your own person. Everyone in your world votes the same way, supports the same causes, has the same beliefs, prejudices and values, and all belong to social media and online groups that reinforce them.
And it gets harder and harder to think in any other way. For one thing, you’ve virtually cut yourself off from being exposed to different ways of looking at the world, except perhaps so you and your friends can all agree on how wrong they are, in a self-congratulatory way. And that means you don’t want to change your views or, presumably, your friends will all agree how wrong you are, and that’s not going to feel very nice.
And yet, and yet … the world is full of people, lots of them lovely people, who don’t agree with you about everything. You may rarely encounter them, but can they really all be wrong? Some of them are just as clever as you and have arrived at their beliefs in as valid a way as you have. Maybe more valid – because you’ve stopped thinking for yourself and moved in to a groupthink where your views are the collective ones, where you don’t really ever have to challenge yourself any more. You’re no longer an independent person. You’ve unwittingly become a bit of a sheep.
If you want to be a Rules thinker, you need to change this, shake things up, force yourself to broaden your views, listen to other ideas with a genuine open mind. About the best way to do this is to cultivate friends based on who they are, not what they believe. Aim to have friends of all ages, from other cultures, varied backgrounds, different classes from your own. Between them, they’ll make you see the world in a more nuanced way and, if your beliefs can’t match up with all of them – because they’re not all the same – you’ll have to think for yourself.
CULTIVATE FRIENDS BASED ON WHO THEY ARE, NOT WHAT THEY BELIEVE