I can’t quite remember the exact article that triggered it for me, not even the headline, nor the topic, or why I was even reading it. However, what I vividly remember is reading the comments section afterwards and saying something out loud that surprised even me, “Damn, I think critical thinking is dead.”
At the time, I dismissed it purely as a moment of frustration as opposed to an epiphany of some sort. After all, people arguing about politics, religion, sport, and current affairs was normal and prevalent. But despite my acknowledgement of this, the thought stayed with me ever since. And once it had been planted, I started noticing the same pattern all over the place.
At first, I saw it in online debates, the majority of people seemed to lack interest in understanding the person they disagreed with. They didn’t seem to be motivated by curiosity but were rather more concerned with victory. It felt like every issue had already been divided neatly into camps, and most people appeared to arrive at conversations with their position fully formed before the discussion had even commenced. The ‘debate’ itself felt performative considering the respective positions were predetermined and sometimes seemed immovable. The more I paid attention, the more I found it apparent and difficult ignore.
I saw it in politics, where I noticed supporters often defended parties and personalities with the same unwavering loyalty that football fans reserve for their clubs. I saw it in social issues, where complex topics were increasingly reduced to simplistic choices between two opposing sides. There was very little room for uncertainty, nuance, or the possibility that both sides might possess pieces of the truth. Ultimately you were deemed to be either for something or against it.
I wasn’t concerned about disagreement itself, in fact, quite the opposite as I believe that disagreement can be healthy. The problem was that fewer and fewer people seemed willing to evaluate their own assumptions. It increasingly felt as if people inherited opinions rather than arrived at them. They adopted beliefs from political tribes, friendship groups, news outlets, online communities, and professional networks. Then they defended those beliefs with remarkable confidence, often without ever questioning them seriously. This baffled me because I had always believed that changing your mind was a sign of growth, particularly in an intellectually developed society.
Many of the most important lessons in my own life came from discovering that something I previously believed was incomplete, naive, or simply wrong. There are too many examples to count, but I certainly recognise that moving to the UK challenged assumptions I did not even realise I held. In a similar vein, working in sustainability challenged others, then becoming older, becoming a parent, and navigating different social and professional environments added further layers of complexity. If learning is supposed to expand understanding, then surely it should occasionally disrupt certainty? Yet, modern discourse increasingly treats certainty as a virtue and the person who expresses doubt is perceived as being weak. I know first-hand that the person who asks awkward questions risks being viewed as difficult. The person who changes their position can often be accused of inconsistency. Meanwhile, the person who repeats the same view with complete confidence often receives admiration, even when that confidence is unsupported by evidence.
Social media has undoubtedly accelerated this trend. Perhaps because algorithms reward certainty because it is proportional to the engagement it generates. Strong opinions travel further than nuanced ones and outrage certainly spreads faster than reflection. Complex arguments struggle to compete with simplified narratives that fit neatly into a headline or a thirty-second video. As a result, people are bombarded with information while becoming increasingly vulnerable to intellectual shortcuts. Despite the fact that we know more than any generation in history, I sometimes wonder whether we are spending less time thinking about what we know. The irony is that access to this level of information has so much potential. However, it seems it has often encouraged us to delegate our thinking to whichever tribe, commentator, influencer, or political camp we already agree with.
I see this tendency everywhere. At work, where people often instinctively align themselves with prevailing opinions because challenging consensus can be uncomfortable. In politics, where people defend policies they would have criticised had they been proposed by the opposing party. In social debates, where belonging to the correct side often appears more important than understanding the issue itself. And, perhaps most surprisingly, I see it in the sustainability sector I work in.
This may sound strange because sustainability is often portrayed as a rational, evidence-led discipline. Yet, in reality, sustainability operates within a world of competing priorities, imperfect information, and difficult trade-offs. Making real progress often requires balancing environmental concerns, social needs, economic realities, political constraints, and human behaviour. Nothing about balancing that complex equation is simple. Yet in my professional life, I have frequently encountered pressure to fully embrace particular narratives or reject them entirely. Certain discussions sometimes feel as though they have already been settled before they have properly been examined. I’ve found that questioning assumptions can be interpreted as opposition rather than curiosity. This should concern all of us because critical thinking is not the enemy of progress, it is actually one of the conditions that enables progress. Without it, we become emotionally attached to ideas that may not be delivering the outcomes we want. We continue supporting approaches because they sound right, feel right, or align with our identity rather than because they are actually the best option.
To be clear, I don’t believe the purpose of critical thinking is to reject popular ideas simply because they are popular, nor be to be sceptical or contrarian for the sake of it. Rather, I think that critical thinking is fundamentally an act of humility, because it requires us to create enough distance between ourselves and our beliefs to examine them honestly. Asking the challenging questions; Why do I think this? How do I know it is true? What evidence would change my mind? Could I be wrong? Those questions are uncomfortable precisely because they challenge certainty, but they are also the questions that drive learning.
Every meaningful advance in human history began with someone willing to question what everybody else accepted. Scientific breakthroughs, social reforms, technological innovations, and cultural shifts all emerged because individuals were prepared to challenge prevailing assumptions. We need to recognise that the common thread was not intelligence, it was curiosity and a willingness to risk being wrong in pursuit of a better understanding.
That is why I find the current state of public discourse so troubling, not because people disagree more, but because fewer people seem interested in discovering whether their position is in fact correct. As the objective increasingly appears to be defending belief rather than pursuing truth. Perhaps that is why that offhand comment, to myself, several years ago has continued to resonate with me. Critical thinking is dead. I do not literally believe it is dead, of course, but I do believe it is under pressure.
I believe we are living in an age of unprecedented access to knowledge, while simultaneously losing some of the habits required to interpret it wisely and objectively. The challenge facing modern society is not a shortage of information, but finding enough curiosity, humility, and intellectual courage to question what we think we already know. Because a society that stops asking questions may continue accumulating knowledge, but it will gradually lose the ability to understand it.