The Social Lens

As a sociologist, I study social things. I look at the social patterns that contribute to the creation of a culture. This may be in a micro setting, like the factors that contribute to the culture of a home, or a much larger setting, like the cultural elements of a society.

What contributes to cultural patterns stems from many things.

From a purely social perspective, some of us social scientists use a theoretical lens called social constructionism. This helps us understand how parts of social reality come to be taken for granted as natural, fixed, or simply taken as truth. It suggests that what may be true for one person is not that way for another. What that really means is the assumption that many meanings, categories, norms, institutions, and social patterns are shaped through historical processes, repeated habits, interaction, and shared understanding, which are then taken for granted, and over time, this creates our version of reality.

Versions of reality differ from person to person. So far so good. At this point, it all makes perfect logical sense.

Difference, Truth, and Diversity

Given that our environmental experiences are so different, we can develop an endless range of thought patterns and ideas about what is true. People live through different worlds, so they often arrive at different beliefs, values, and interpretations of reality. Because of that, one group cannot honestly take its own culturally shaped viewpoint and declare it to be the universal truth for everyone.

It is important that we do not force these culturally shaped ideas onto others as though they are a universal truth, because this is an impossible task and, in its most basic sense, entirely anti-diversity.

It is anti-diversity because diversity has never been just about different faces or cultural backgrounds. It is about different histories, experiences, lenses, and ways of making sense of our own private worlds. The moment one group says, “our interpretation is the truth, and yours is wrong,” it completely rejects difference. It immediately denies the legitimacy of other ways of seeing.

As an Indian-Australian who has seen how different worlds both clash and coexist, I have learnt that many of the truths people defend most fiercely are often rooted in culture rather than universal reality.

Why This Matters to Me

On top of my lived experience, I am also a social constructionist scholar. Together, these give me a stronger and more layered capacity to understand how social constructions actually form in real life.

Given this awareness and understanding of social constructs, I am also better able to identify what is not socially constructed. That is, in many ways, the point of my scholarship. True expertise in one area should make us more precise about its limits, as well as better able to identify gaps in knowledge, rather than fall into confirmation bias by trying to make everything fit the same explanation.

Social Constructionism Is Not Everything

Now, what I am getting at is that social constructionism is merely one theory, and while it is important, it is only one part of a much more complex grid. The other elements, which have also been shown to be scientifically and in reality obvious, are our psychological propensities. This means we each have a personality profile, and this is inherent and diverse between people, though the differences in personality tend to cluster in a limited number of recurring patterns. Cultural elements, by contrast, are endlessly varied, which means our thoughts can differ between us without end.

We are born with a personality type. We cannot simply change it, though we can understand it, learn behaviours, and choose to do things depending on need.

Our personality influences whether someone is naturally more outgoing or more reserved. Personality can strongly predispose someone in that direction, but it does not fully determine every expression of behaviour. Environment, fear, trauma, confidence, culture, and context also matter. So even here, we must first figure out whether someone is less outgoing because of personality, or because something in their environment has eclipsed that personality tendency and left them anxious or fearful in social settings.

This is the type of thing a good therapist is supposed to help us with: figuring out what is cultural or social, and how that impacts or interacts with the psychological.

Nature, Personality, and Biology

Now, let us simplify this.

Since we are born with a psychological profile, and we can see this very easily in children, especially in families with more than one child and more than one sex of child, this is one of the most useful ways to understand the differences between personality, biology, and social influences. Any parent with multiple children will immediately tell you that the children have different natures and that these differences were almost immediately noticeable.

So, because personality profile is a nature thing, this places it under the biological umbrella. Psychological profiles are, in this sense, a biological matter. Biological means that it belongs to our innate physical and neurological makeup. It refers to the aspects of us that arise from the body, the brain, genetics, temperament, hormones, and the natural structures we are born into before social and environmental life begin to shape them even further.

Where Post-Modern Social Science Went Too Far

One of the more unfortunate and problematic outcomes of some postmodern and post-structural thinking (the kind of ideas modern social scientists have been rather well rewarded for producing) has been the tendency in certain academic circles to dismiss biology simply because one studies another discipline.

Both intellectually and through my own cultural experience, which still draws upon the importance of differences between men and women in community life, family structure, and mental well-being, I have found this attempt to flatten those differences to be a deeply unconvincing leap.

Now, as a social constructionist scholar, I am well aware that biological explanations have required serious critique in the pursuit of a more just world, partly because biology was so often misused in the past to justify inequality, determinism, racism, sexism, and crude reductionism. This was well warranted, and the social scientists have done a great job in achieving great advancement in that regard.

But some thinkers and academic cultures became so concerned with critiquing essentialism (the belief that human differences are natural, fixed, and biologically rooted in a way that defines identity) and determinism (the belief that biology alone determines behaviour, capacity, and social life) that they ended up underplaying, neglecting, or distrusting biology altogether.

Plasticity and the Modern Clash of Ideas

Now, before you get too excited that biology is by far the strongest force, stop right there, because this is also not exactly true.

Biologically, what is also true is that our brains are plastic. Brain plasticity, and the remarkable ability humans have to learn and relearn and unlearn and adjust and adapt, is itself biological. It is also a biological truth that human neurological pathways are shaped through social interaction. This means our neural pathways are laid down from childhood, and they are intimately dependent on what we need to learn in order to survive in the context and literal environment we are in.

This is precisely why we are seeing such a big problem in the modern world. We may be raised with certain ideas inside the family, but given our global context of life and the ideas that flood the social world we eventually enter after we leave our families, there is often a giant clash in values, ideas, and beliefs about what is right and wrong in the world versus what we were told in our family. We do not live in close tribes anymore with common values.

Why Social Constructionism Still Matters

Social constructionism is an important way to figure out which elements in your social world are socially constructed. In doing this, you should be able, over time, to reveal what your personality is and what it is not.

In my field, the reason social constructionism is so important is that we often work, in a therapeutic sense, with very vulnerable people. So, for example, we may work with vulnerable children who were born into families that are neglectful or violent, and this treatment by their parents and caregivers shapes the child’s view of themselves, despite whatever psychological profile they may have. So this then becomes the social construction that has contributed to the way this child sees themselves. We then need to do a lot of work to undo the idea that they are who they have come to believe they are.

Now, outside of these extreme contexts, we have the rest of us. And we experience the same thing. Our ideas were shaped long before we applied them.

We are all battling with ideas that have been given to us by the social contexts in which we were raised. The best way to assess the relevance of an idea is to ask whether it fits the context in which you are applying it. An idea may fit within the context of your family but not within the context of your workplace, and that is okay. Culture is contextual. It is formed by a series of ideas that are integral to the functioning of a particular space. If that space is not functioning well, then those ideas can and should be critically analysed. Reading an idea about social constructs and then applying it blindly, without critical thought or reflection on its truth relative to your own experience, is futile.

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I was in a department that conducted social science.

I worked inside that academic institution, and a few others, for ten years of my life. I was the outsider at first. I had a lot of time to observe.

I am very lucky to have been taught scientific research skills. In a world where we are all trying to make sense of things, I learnt how to work out what might be more true than something else.

In social sciences, when we research and learn about human experience, the truth we uncover is contextual and subjectively relevant. Some truths can be shared by a group of people in similar contexts, obviously, but people have to voluntarily agree that this is their experience. Forced adoption of the ideas of others who have political or social power is not a shared experience; it’s idea coercion.

These are not the practices of truth-telling.

Social truths, which can also be called cultural truths or social facts, do not need to be shared by all people objectively. People have different cultural or social experiences. We have so many minute cultural differences that it would be impossible to replicate our exact conscious experience.

This is not rocket science; it’s social science.

Same species, same needs, different cultures, different ideas

I was perhaps the only culturally Australian-Indian person to arrive in this faculty at the institution where I completed my PhD and worked. No one looked like me, nor did they think like me. I didn’t find this exciting or anything unexpected; of course, we don’t think alike; we have actual different cultural backgrounds and experiences. We think differently for different reasons.

They thought they accepted me, but they didn’t really know who I was, so that is not acceptance or inclusion as it is corrupted by nature. I know they did not know me because I self-censored. Despite being the only one with obvious cultural differences, no one asked me about my story over the ten years, and funny enough, they often seemed to assume I thought exactly like they did.

I performed the usual Western performance by those of us who want to succeed in the West. It makes total sense to try to assimilate into this culture that seemed to enable more freedom of thought than my culture of origin did.

In this modern setting, I was the only migrant in the room, while these academics—who had never really experienced an outsider identity in the way I had—were teaching about exclusion, difference, outsider identity, identity risk, and racism.

My experience of racism was not even close to what those who could not possibly know what racism feels like were teaching the students.

For one, interestingly, despite this faculty promoting “lived and contextual experience” as a critical and fundamental source of social knowledge, no one ever asked me how mine intersected with the ideas I was learning. This was very odd, since qualitative social science is subjective, experience-based knowledge. The researcher researching and our worldview is of critical importance, since we are the ones writing the new knowledge.

I found that the gaps in logic, epistemological bias, and other unreasonable tensions began to impact my ability to authentically show up. I lost faith in the intellectual rigour of my colleagues. Especially as I began to become more confident in my understanding of theory, epistemology, scientific thought, and the relationship between science and reality.

The Faculty and the Expectation of Knowledge Obedience

While I was inside The Faculty, what I came to see is that if I did not conform to the ideas already established as “right,” I would be excluded. My place in the system of formal education was threatened if I didn’t teach what was already known. So, instead, I kept my truth in my head.

We are only paid by the institution if we stay quiet and teach social constructionism in the way they insist it operates. The literature they produce becomes their steadfast evidence. Outside that literature, despite qualitative science being iterative and based on lived experience, those truths, even if they exist, have no place. The Faculty’s most loyal soldiers were well trained in silencing our voices if we showed any ounce of knowledge disobedience. I learnt that very fast.

For me, this was a BIG problem. I am naturally rebellious, and I know the importance of dissent. This might have been because when I was granted entry into The Faculty, I was someone who had actually lived as a minority within a dominant culture. I felt and lived many cultural contradictions. It was my daily reality. I had become used to pushing back and challenging the dominant narrative.

The culture my brain was born into expected that I accept the social rules and ideas of the community, despite its incompatibility with the dominant culture of the country I was in. This isn’t breaking news since social alliance makes a lot of psychological sense when it comes to social survival and progression, but when you have cultures that totally clash in values, there will be tension.

It is not as simple as those who have never experienced the reality of this may think.

In the minority culture I was part of, independent thought and critical thinking were not encouraged. If we had ideas, they needed to align with the already established values and traditions. At the time, I had no idea that my mind had as much power as it would eventually find. It was of no biological surprise that I was a naturally curious young person. But if anyone dared step outside the boundary and if thought was too far up or too far down, we were reprimanded by the elders.

No one nurtured me into the rebelliousness and instinct for dissent that I had, which is precisely why I came to realise there was more than nurture and culture at play.

That lived experience meant that socially constructed ideas aggressively shaped my everyday life. I had to assess the cultural validity of an idea every single day, multiple times, because ideas contradicted themselves throughout my experiences with people inside and outside my community. I was told what was right or wrong by one culture, and it immediately contradicted what was right or wrong in another.

The culture that gave me unconditional love and acceptance was at odds with the culture I needed to succeed in for resources, security, and social safety.

This was a personal dilemma that I needed to solve.

So I was positioned to think persistently and intensely about social constructionism and biological realities, albeit unconsciously, and their origins, for very different cultural reasons than the academics in The Faculty.

The Gift of Critical Thinking

I only learnt intellectually what I was experiencing later, once I arrived at The Faculty. This place gave me a gift—the gift of critical thinking—but only in exchange for disciplinary loyalty.

The critical thinking I was permitted to practise was only allowed if it fell within the boundaries of The Faculty’s epistemological borders. The faculty members’ pay cheques were fat, and they would get fatter the more they published the same ideas in slightly adjusted ways. It was not entirely their fault. That was how they were contributing to their own survival. After all, we are animals, and animals need resources to survive.

The Faculty’s Governance was not stupid. They were smart enough to operate within a multi-billion-dollar industry. They had successfully engineered disciplinary compliance through the mechanics of institutional life. They did this through status games, rewards and incentives, publishing and promotional norms that were linked to grants and how much money the academics brought in. Institutional obedience has been done many times over, with such precision that this was nothing new or remarkable.

The remarkable part was in the irony.

The most obedient people in The Faculty were the ones teaching about power, oppression, and knowledge conformity, while themselves being disciplined, and disciplining the thoughts of impressionable young students. The contradictions were so obvious. I could not understand why nobody was talking about it. These were supposed to be intelligent intellectuals who had been taught critical thinking in its highest form. They should know that what they take for granted may not be true. They must know that bias was at play.

In the end, The Faculty operated exactly as it was designed. While this place had given me the gift of activating my intellectual brain, it also came with conditions. I could stay only if I remained intellectually obedient. Actually, it became not about intellectualism at all at that point. It became about group identity in its most primal sense. But this was not an identity that matched who I was and where I had been.

I had already lived through a world where free thought was suffocated for years. I had just opened my mind, expanded it so broadly it was ready to think about anything, and then I found myself being told to again rein that intellectual range back in. This time, it was harder to resist, since it came with status and social capital.

But what about the truth?

The Definition of Truth and Intellectual Ethics

I do not blame the faculty members, as I do not think there is anything wrong with responsibly completing the tasks of the job, fighting for social survival, and being able to afford economic resources. However, I do have an issue with the fact that many academics in the faculty I worked in were practising heavy disciplinary knowledge bias while pretending to be intellectually ethical. They are defining “truth” but through a gross failure of intellectual ethics.

This is wrong.

Basically, the contradictions were far too serious for me to accept that they were not also part of the very power structure that they were apparently fighting.

Power

In The Faculty—run by women—I saw women with power who wanted power. They set the knowledge rules and held academic and social authority. Strangely, they were constantly critiquing power “out there” in society, but that same critique never extended to themselves. The same practices of power were happening inside The Faculty: they controlled the rules of thought, set the acceptable frameworks and popular theories to be used to explain reality, and decided what could be said, how, and by whom. By default, this also sets the rules of what cannot be said.

I was expected to accept their terms even when I did not agree with how they were telling me my world is. They were doing to me what they claimed was being done to them. The irony in this was so loud. Again, Western women are so certain they are practising feminism, while universalising their own model as the model, speaking for “women” as if women are all only one single story. I did not share their version of the truth.

There is a hierarchy of knowledge in society, and none of us are exempt from it. The issue is NOT that these dynamics exist; the issue is when we pretend we are not part of the same system.

Interdisciplinary knowledge advances human intelligence

Our social decisions are not separate from our biological needs. To believe that is anti-intellectual nonsense. The way we respond to our social environment is deeply shaped by brain plasticity. We are fundamentally social. Brain plasticity is the brain’s capacity to change and reorganise itself in response to experience, meaning we are generally shaped by the immediate social environment we are in. This phenomenal brain activity gives us a chance to be contextually raised.

And this is why good knowledge matters so much. It is so very powerful when disciplines intersect. As a social scientist, I look at how the social world impacts our psychological well-being and general emotional state. This psychological state then impacts our mental health and day-to-day choices, experiences, losses, and successes. A neuropsychologist might examine how brain function and social experience relate to behaviour. A biologist adds the examination of how our genes and genetic foundations shape our biological needs and predispositions. As we try to make sense of the world, we need to draw on what we know collectively and put those puzzle pieces together. I see this also as community logic. It is as old as tribal logic—where we are better and stronger together. We are not very different at all from our tribal ancestors, and yet we think very highly of our modern selves as though we are superior to those before us.

Humans are a socially learning species, and our intelligence scales through others through shared memory, shared norms, and shared problem-solving. In the intellectual sense, when we bring different epistemological lenses together, we optimise what we can see, and we can correct what we are missing.

We can not see everything, and critical thinking is about creating angles of vision that we do not possess alone.

What might be the solution, then?

Human behaviour is shaped by biological predispositions, psychological processes, and social environments; no single disciplinary lens is sufficient on its own. Interdisciplinary work is how we reduce knowledge blind spots and knowledge that is more useful for practice.

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This is logical. It makes sense.

If someone has harmed us, we feel something. That feeling has to be processed and understood.

When we are emotional and vulnerable about an event or events, our critical thinking ability reduces. However, to process what has happened, we need to use reason and logic to understand it. We need clear thinking.

How do we become victims?

Well, let’s go to the formal definition first. A victim is someone who is currently being harmed, mistreated, or placed in a situation they cannot control and against their will. This person is literally, physically, and mentally experiencing what it is to be a victim in its present and very real sense.

Then there is the other type, the one that has been recently popularised — and notoriously so — in the modern world: where someone is not a literal victim but feels like a victim and so has a victim mentality.

In this case, the pain, the hurt, and the mistreatment were perhaps very real at one time, but there is no longer any immediate real danger. But it feels real, so our mind still reacts as if there is something to continue running from.

When we have been hurt, if we have not attempted to understand what happened — why we were targeted, what led to it, and what patterns were at play, including our own contributions to the issue — we may not be able to come to terms with it. We must process what has happened and reach a reasonable understanding of why it happened, otherwise the mind keeps returning to it, trying to solve what still feels unresolved.

There is a difference between processing and rumination: processing is when we make meaning and integrate the experience; rumination is when the mind loops, trying to gain control over something that feels so out of control. But to gain control, it is about accountability and pattern recognition. The only way forward is to commit to understanding what was within our control, what was not, and how to protect ourselves better going forward. When the experience is unresolved, and for many people this may be years on end, the nervous system can and will keep reacting as if the threat is still present, even when life has moved on. You can tell if this is the case based on your emotional triggers. Perhaps you are particularly sensitive about a certain topic or subject. In these cases, you must assess whether it is something that is a real threat or whether you need to attend to the mind.

Does a victim mentality mean the person views the world through an emotional lens?

When we are vulnerable, angry, and not yet at peace with what has happened, our emotional lens begins to lead our observations of the world. This is because our psychological frame is not at peace.

This lens can begin to distort reality or grossly misinterpret it.

Often, when we have been harmed, we feel confused and experience a sense of unfairness. We strive to understand why it happened and seek answers. When those answers or the clarity we need do not come, other outcomes can emerge, such as resentment and anger.

Why do the wrong ideas sound so right?

Seeing the world through emotional pain means we are in a state of some form of need. In that state, we can become susceptible to superficial validation and ready-made acceptance. It is because we have a basic human need that we do not have.

As we try to navigate ourselves amongst these feelings, which make us feel unstable, we become particularly susceptible to accepting a set of ideas that might not be right for us.

When we are feeling uncertain, lost, or misunderstood, we can be tricked into the allure of a pre-packaged sense of belonging because it feels stable. It offers us belonging, and the most alluring part, it offers it immediately.

This ready-made set of ideas also offers a system, and we all require some form of system to operate within. It also comes with a script already designed, so we do not have to do the work of articulation. On top of that, and most importantly, it comes with people who have a shared interpretation of reality. It tells you who is good, who is bad, why you are suffering, and what you should do next.

This exact phenomenon is why cults, churches, pyramid schemes, or any close social network are so effective in their recruitment and indoctrination.

Indoctrination means convincing someone that a set of ideas is the truth and training them to stop questioning it.

A clue that you are being indoctrinated, or are at risk of indoctrination, is if the space you are in does not allow dissent or healthy debate. In these spaces, questioning anything is instead treated as disloyalty by those who have created the space. If ever doubt is raised, the response is to shame or to socially exclude rather than discuss.

This is exactly how much of the politically motivated online groups behave in the modern world, and I believe it is the reason we have become so divided within our own local communities. However, not every setting that limits debate is indoctrination — sometimes limits exist for practical reasons, and this makes sense — but when silencing anyone who disagrees and when that becomes the norm, it means you might be easier to convince because people stop thinking critically and start complying.

Why are those with a victim mentality easy to convince?

High-control spaces that limit critical thought often recruit people in moments of vulnerability. These moments are often life transitions — times when your identity moves from one social state to another and your mind needs to catch up. Parenthood, childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood, health to chronic illness, and more. They also include loss, isolation, uncertainty, or distress — because in those periods we seek meaning, structure, and connection. We are easy to convince because we are psychologically and, therefore, socially vulnerable.

Belonging is a powerful driver.

We are fundamentally social, and once we feel included and seen, we become more receptive to the group’s norms and beliefs. This is why people often join people first — relationships, community, support — and only later adopt or intensify the ideas in order to keep that belonging. A reminder that not every community that welcomes vulnerable people is manipulative. Churches, charities, families, and support groups can offer real compassion and important support that is needed. Sometimes the place that we are is exactly where we should be. After all, we need to belong somewhere. The problem arises when we do not have anywhere we belong.

A good way to know if you are in the right place or wrong, ask…does your arrival come with support and also the right to autonomy, or does that support only come with control and dependency?

Also, vulnerability does not automatically equal suggestibility; some people become much more cautious when they are vulnerable and tread much more carefully. Your suggestibility rises when your vulnerability is paired with isolation, uncertainty, pressure, and a strong authority voice.

This has become particularly complicated in the modern world, because social media and algorithms respond to our psychological state and can funnel us towards groups and ideas that are not right for us. Before the global internet, we were harder to find, and we often moved through uncertain stages of life faster and with more psychological safety than we can now. This is a massive modern day psycholgical risk, especially for our young people who navigate many identity crises in their early years.

Belonging, stability, and acceptance are fundamental needs.

These needs drive almost everything we think about and do.

We all need to fit somewhere in the world that gives us unconditional acceptance.

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Thank you for reading.

We are socially motivated. Our psychological state depends on our social health. The world around you gives you clues all the time. Observe them. Adjust yourself as you get the evidence that you need to do so.

Our basic emotional needs are things like love, security, safety, comfort, validation, and belonging—without these, the human mind begins to struggle. If we have unmet emotional needs, we accidentally structure our environment in ways that are not good for us in the long run. We often don’t know this until we begin to behave in ways that clash. Our relationship with the social world we care about holds the evidence of whether we are right or we are wrong.

When the environments we rely on are not appropriately structured to optimise our emotional needs, then that’s when the deeper psychological problems slowly begin. We need to notice this and intervene early enough so that small, manageable problems do not turn into giant, unmanageable catastrophes.

At the same time, if we do not address the problematic psychological and behavioural patterns we have built over our lifetime—formed neuron by neuron through our experiences and relationships—we will keep repeating the same social choices, even when they harm us in the long run.

How do we experience the world around us?

We construct our environments based on a mix of cultural, personality, and biological factors. Depending on that mix, some people are more susceptible to cultural influences, while others are more strongly influenced by personality. No one is one and none of the other. Each person is influenced and guided by a unique mix of traits combined to build character.

It is probably a very good idea to think about your mix.

At the end of today’s article, I will give you a reflective exercise to help you understand your thinking and how it might be influenced.

Getting to know yourself is the single most important skill of our entire lives. Without that knowledge, you can not optimise the choices you are making for yourself.

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This is more important than ever before because, before the forced and stealth social constructions that now come with the technology era, we had fewer external phenomena distracting us, and so, we had more opportunity and time to become attuned to our inner worlds.

We could more easily recognise what felt right and what felt wrong.

Right now, most of us are reacting, rather than reflecting. There is just too much external stimuli available to “keep us busy”. Political campaigns and their media puppeting have spiralled out of control and are now very good at keeping you distracted and unhappy so that they can control your thoughts. It has never been easier to make the status quo do what those in power want.

The importance of human agency

Funnily enough, in all of this, you still have agency. The human mind is interesting as it is very easily manipulated, and especially because humans are so egotistical that they think they are in control.

As science and literature became more accessible in countries with greater freedom, people began to believe that simply having access to information meant they were freely choosing what to believe. But access alone doesn’t guarantee true autonomy because ideas are still and will always be shaped by culture, schooling, dominant narratives, and the invisible structures that guide what we see as “normal” or “true.”

Begin by accepting a very hard truth: the human mind is easy to influence. Unless you actively protect it, it will be manipulated without you even noticing. Stop unconsciously outsourcing your thinking and start to think about how you are constructing your environment and what’s in it. This has a direct implication on your psychological well-being.

Start by reflecting on where you mainly get your information from and why you trust that source so much instead of another. Then reflect on where someone else gets their information from and why they trust that source and not yours. Why do you both trust the sources you have chosen? And why do you accept the information with such confidence? The trust you hold in these sources has a direct implication on what you allow into your social environment and how you choose to set it up. What is good or bad or right or wrong, is up to you to analyse.

If you haven’t explored your mind in depth, you haven’t done self-work yet

We need to move back inward and think about ourselves, our feelings, our actions, the implications of our actions, and the intentions behind them. These are the types of questions and thoughts that lead us to figure out the purpose of our lives. As we reflect slowly, we can figure out what we truly need and subsequently, we know what we need to do next.

When we cannot exercise human agency to direct our lives in the way that we desire, that is where the psychological problems begin. Life is about making sure we belong to at least one place that we can call somewhere “good”. A place that gives us a good feeling. It is pure logic. To find out what is “good,” we need the skill to assess, reassess, and adapt to make things work for us and those we care about.

I observe that almost all of our problems relate to not feeling like there is somewhere we belong. Commit to solving that one problem, even if it takes your entire life, and make sure you protect the place that gives you the precious gift of belonging. Believe me, you are lucky if you have it, and it deserves protection. Your life and sanity depend on it.

Can we really control what happens in the environment?

This can be complicated depending on where you live, the social setting, and the political setting. But we also have an environment that no one can access and we have total control over, and that place in the mind. In the Western world, we largely have the freedom to make choices. Of course, there are members in our society who are in social situations where they have little choice and they need help, but if that is the case, I doubt those are the people reading this letter. If you know of someone like that, help them. We need more community service and less selfishness, too. But that’s for another day.

We do socially construct our environments. That is what culture is all about. It is a phenomenon that is a reality external to our bodies. But in saying that, we construct these environments based on species-related factors, as well as biological and personality-related factors, and also the social conditions in which we have been raised. Basically, it’s not that simple, and nuance matters a lot.

In the modern world, given the number of people talking about everything they know little about—without training in the significance of nuance—we are seeing that people are unable to discuss important ideas with the nuance required. Black and white thinking feels like we are watching our intellectual revolution go backwards.

Since I am a cultural analyst, this means I study what factors are social constructions or based on culture, and how we can analyse what is “real” and what is not. Because I study this so much, logically, this means I should also be able to know that many factors are indeed not social constructions.

The social environment gives you evidence all the time

We participate in socially constructed practices for many reasons. Sometimes we do it because the environment requires it for inclusion, and sometimes we do it because we are pressured or forced. The only way to know when something is not right is by paying attention to social cues and our internal reactions. There are patterns everywhere.

Intelligence is your ability to notice them and figure out what they mean.

When there is a pattern, we need to assess whether the problem is in the environment or whether something is happening internally and psychologically that needs to be understood and worked through. Right now, due to the therapy revolution gone wrong, we began telling people that when the social world doesn’t feel right, we should blame the world and cancel those who made us feel bad. We failed many people by doing this, because the social world is our only source of evidence that helps us reflect on our inner realities and how they have been constructed. We are not always right, and those of us who hold resentment toward the world because it hurt us are often more likely to blame society than hold accountability. We began to let these people shape the social narrative. This was wrong.

Once we begin to learn about our inner errors and work through them, we can slowly become more attuned to our real selves.

No one else can know what is real and what is not for us. This is what self-work actually means. It is up to us to figure it out. When we begin to believe in ideas we are told, without assessing their relevance to our lives and lived experience, this is where we get into trouble. And given our exposure to a world full of irrelevant, non-contextual ideas—without being equipped with the intellectual skills to manage them—we are losing our psychosocial well-being.

Is it nature then or nurture?

It’s both. Stop arguing about it. We have enough evidence to know that it is a mix of all and everything. The only thing we can control is figuring out how the mix manifests for us.

The nature–nurture debate is constant among the lay people, but we can safely say that it is a bit of both at all times. We know, because of how cultures are shaped and how culture shapes people, that nurture is true. We also know that culture is shaped by personality and species-related biological patterns. This is also true. At this point, we turn to nuance and begin to unpack under which circumstances social conditions impact us more and under which conditions biological factors come into play.

For example, when we go to work, we are expected to fit into and accept the culture and perform appropriately to meet those expectations. If we move out of the cultural line, there are often consequences. These sorts of cultural rules and expectations exist in every setting—from the home to entire social behaviours across societies and countries. These differences can be quite large macro patterns or down to micro-cultural nuances. For example, in the West, due to a female empowerment culture, we see that women have many freedoms and equal rights like men do. Whereas in other, more conservative societies, women do not share those same rights, I know this firsthand. I can and want to say this because I came from a culture where women did not have equal rights. Of course, the Western feminists have their own version of truth and often silence women like me who have a totally different view from them, but this is not their perspective; I speak from my lived experience of deep gratitude for Western freedoms. This attitude of mine has seen me succeed as a person in the society I wanted to succeed in.

This is what culture is: it can be very diverse between people and settings.

So, how does biology come into how we shape our environment?

Apart from that, within culture, we have more universal, species-related norms that we all need and desire, and this is often what drives most of what we do. For example, ALL human beings benefit greatly from social health as it is directly related to psychological well-being. We know this because when we study children and those adults who are socially deprived of this, we see the massive and wide-ranging negative impact on their lives. For instance, we all need to be loved, and those of us who did not experience this in childhood have lifelong scars to prove the negative impact of that one universal biological need.

If you just spent all your time unpacking the effects and implications of just one child raised without love throughout their lives, you would learn how to be a critical thinker. You do not need to know about everything at once to be smart. If you simply deconstructed one small idea and reconstruct it again and again, you would do a life’s worth of profound mind-work. Don’t forget to triangulate what you read with what you see. Theory without testing it in reality is futile. I mean, what is the point of information with no purpose?

What about our personality, does that come into constructing our environments?

Yes, of course it does. I, for one am an example of this.

We have personality-related differences, which are technically under the biological umbrella, but just to keep the disciplines separate and not complicate things, personality-related factors are often discussed within psychological sciences.

For example, I was always the black sheep in my Indian community who had settled in the West—seen as the one who resisted the cultural expectations of the elders and older members who set the rules. There were implications, and I took many social risks despite the fact that I was being forced to think a certain way. I needed to abide by these thinking rules to be allowed inclusion in that community. The choice to resist some of those thought-rules and perform alternative behaviors which were criticised as bad, and not good in one community but appropriate in another, I believe, can be largely understood through assessing my personality and psychological temperament. Since my social environment told me one thing, yet I chose to do the opposite, this is evidence that there were other factors at play, which were not able to be simply dumped into the social constructionist basket. I chose to push the envelope because I needed to succeed socially in the Western society I was living in, not just inside my small fringe community.

Some people are naturally more agreeable and compliant, while others have a stronger temperament to fight for autonomy and thus are more willing to challenge social norms, even at personal cost. Social and personality psychology consistently show that individual differences shape how we respond to cultural expectations, and those differences influence the social risks we are willing to take.

Can I figure out more about myself?

Of course you can, and there are many ways to do it. I did it through deep reflective work and truth-telling. I observed myself very closely—the patterns of my automatic thoughts, the associated reactions, and constant unwavering attention to the outcomes of my actions on the people around me. Especially on the people I care about. This helped me get to know myself very well.

There are other ways to begin. For instance, you can take a personality test and find out whether you are more agreeable or less, and how this relates to your social choices. For example, people who score high on agreeableness are typically more cooperative, less confrontational, and more likely to prioritise social harmony. Those who score lower may be more direct, more comfortable disagreeing, and more willing to take social risks. Neither is “good” nor “bad”—but these tendencies shape how we behave in groups, how we respond to conflict, and how we negotiate our place in society. The better we know ourselves, the more accurately we can socially construct our lives to better match.

However, there is a huge caveat to the personality test, and this is why I think deep reflective work might be more powerful and a better way to do it. The literal observable evidence that you see and learn from can teach you more than being told what to think. Once we give ourselves labels, we will also find it easy to make excuses for ourselves.

I say this because when we grow up in cultural environments that suppress our natural traits, our personality does not get the chance to shine. It’s a large trajectory and not always was it traumatic, but when we fall into survival mode, there are other socially constructed factors at play. Instead of being ourselves, we adapt, comply, or rebel just to get through and “survive” the social situation. We first need to work through the issues that happened in our social environments, understand them, and how they influenced our lives, especially our thoughts, and integrate that understanding to heal. Only then can we uncover who we actually are at the core. That’s what the therapy revolution should have done for people. It is only then that our natural personality can express itself without fear, pressure, or cultural punishment.

If we do not know ourselves, we can not make the right decisions.

Get to Know Yourself Activity

Let’s get you started using reflective practice to get to know yourself so you can be prepared in any setting. No one can take you down if you already know your own weaknesses.

You do not know yourself as well as you think you do. Even those of us who do a lot of self-work are still surprised every day. So if you feel very confident that you “know yourself,” you are probably not experienced enough.

I want you to begin by thinking about how you use emotion and how you use intellect in your life. Emotion is very important as it teaches us most about ourselves, as long as we think about it using our intellect afterward.

Here are some reflections I recommend in your journey to increase your IQ about yourself:

I want this to be a nuanced exercise. You do not have to focus on just the big things. It is best if you start small. Think about when you feel annoyed, irritated, frustrated, and bothered. It might be in a relationship with someone or a type of person in particular that repeatedly annoys/triggers you.

Reflect on these things:

Why do I become triggered?

What are the implications of that emotion? As in, what happens next in the interaction?

Are all people triggered like me in the same way by this person, or is it just me? If it is just me and there is no pattern, then why is this? What are the differences between how I feel and how others feel about this person?

Is there evidence to suggest my behaviour is not quite right?

Does my behaviour impact others around me and my relationships with them?

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Origin of “Ideology”

The word ideology comes from the French term “idéologie,” first coined by the philosopher Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy around 1796 during the French Revolution. He used it to mean the “science of ideas” — from the Greek roots idea (ἰδέα, meaning form or pattern) and logos (λόγος, meaning study or discourse).

The Enlightenment thinkers known as the Idéologues believed human thought could be studied scientifically — that ideas were products of the human senses and environment, not divine revelation. So, originally, ideology was meant as a positive, empirical discipline, a way to understand how ideas form.

However, the meaning shifted when Napoleon Bonaparte mocked the Idéologues, calling them impractical dreamers detached from real politics. From then on, ideology took on a negative connotation, implying rigid or dogmatic thinking disconnected from reality.

To me, the idea of false consciousness is crucial, and I think Marx was right in recognising that ideology can and will continue to be used as a tool of control. It is evidently a way for those in power to legitimise their position while keeping others subdued and self-censored. This truth has continued over and over, and we are observing this in real time. It reveals how belief systems can function not just to explain the world, but to preserve who gets to rule it.

Let’s begin with definitions so we can increase the chance of starting on a similar page.

Ideology vs. Social Ideology

Ideology is a broad concept. An ideology is a set of opinions or beliefs of a group or an individual. It refers to any organised system of ideas or beliefs that explains how the world works and what should be valued. There are all sorts of ideologies, and they are formed for different reasons and intentions.

Very often, ideology refers to a set of political beliefs or a set of ideas that characterise a particular culture. Examples: Capitalism, communism, socialism, and Marxism are ideologies.

So, there are political ideologies like liberalism or socialism, or religious ideologies, or philosophical worldviews that all fit here, too. Ideology provides us with meaning, identity, and moral orientation. The types of implicit and explicit questions it answers are: “what is true, what is right, and how should we live?”

It is about what we need to know as individuals, and to answer it fittingly and meaningfully, we need to do it through personal agency, autonomous thinking, and informed choice.

I also want to introduce you to social ideology, which, on the other hand, is more specific. It refers to the shared beliefs and values that shape everyday social life — the invisible assumptions about normality, morality, and behaviour that govern our interactions and institutions.

Ideology can be abstract or theoretical; social ideology is practical and lived. We can recognise social ideology in the way it shows up in what people in a society reward, as well as what they condemn, and expect of one another in ordinary settings like schools, workplaces, families, and online spaces.

In essence, social ideology isn’t just what people believe; it’s the framework that decides which beliefs are acceptable. It can unite societies through shared meaning, but it can also constrain and divide individuals by rewarding conformity and punishing difference.

In short:

• Ideology is the structure of belief.

• Social ideology is how that belief system becomes a lived reality through social norms and practices.

Historical and Foundational Social Ideologies

Throughout history, social ideologies formed a type of scaffolding through which societies defined truth, morality, and belonging. Each era produced and will produce dominant ideas that shaped both institutions and individual identity.

1. Religious moralism:
In early civilisations and through the Middle Ages, ideology was inseparable from religion. The Church defined moral order through divine hierarchy. It stabilised societies but also limited freedom and justified inequality.

2. Enlightenment rationalism:
The 17th and 18th centuries introduced a new faith in reason, science, and progress. The Enlightenment broke religion’s monopoly on truth and gave rise to democracy, modern education, and human rights. Yet it also bred “rational superiority,” dismissing emotional, indigenous, and spiritual knowledge as lesser.

3. Capitalism and industrial progress:
The 19th and 20th centuries were driven by the idea that productivity equals morality. Capitalism reshaped time, family, and value itself — people began to measure worth through output. This ideology still underpins how we define success today and is what has driven the movement to value intelligence as related to productivity or how much money one can make.

Modern and Prevalent Social Ideologies

In the 21st century, new ideologies have emerged — some evolving from the old, others born of globalisation, technology, and identity politics.

1. Neoliberal individualism:
A belief that personal success or failure rests entirely on the individual. It extends capitalism into selfhood — we market ourselves, optimise everything, and call it freedom, even as it isolates us and erodes community.

2. Meritocracy:
The comforting idea that effort and talent alone determine success. It ignores the realities of class, race, and geography, which still shape opportunity and mobility.

3. Identity-based moralism:
Modern discourse often replaces reasoning with identity. It can empower, but it also simplifies complex human experience and punishes those who deviate from dominant narratives.

4. Technological utopianism:
A growing faith that innovation will solve all human problems — from climate to loneliness. Yet it overlooks that progress depends on behaviour and the quality of our human thoughts.

5. Technocracy:
The ultimate trust in experts, data, and technology to manage society. It assumes that scientific knowledge and technical skill are the highest forms of authority, often sidelining moral, cultural, and emotional intelligence in the process. While it promises efficiency and rational progress, technocracy risks reducing humanity to metrics. It values what can be measured over what is meaningful. It has given rise to a modern and new type of faith in systems over people.

How Social Ideology Controls Thought

Social ideology controls thought not by force, but through repetition and familiarity. It shapes our assumptions, and when we rarely question them, then we know it has become intrinsic. It shapes our ideas on what counts as success, intelligence, morality, or sanity. From childhood, these ideas are absorbed through language, schooling, media, and everyday conversation until they appear like “common sense.”

As Michel Foucault observed, power operates most effectively when it becomes invisible. He said that when people internalise rules so deeply, they no longer need to be enforced as they kind of self-apply the rule unconsciously. In this way, ideology doesn’t just tell us what to think, it tells us how to think, but in subtle ways that we barely notice.

It creates the boundaries around what is sayable, believable, and acceptable.

While all this is going on, the mainstream education systems also reward conformity to whatever is the dominant reasoning, and then it is all backed up by popular media narratives that reinforce collective emotions. These are the social patterns that keep the ideological structure intact. What we see is that the important intellectual act of dissent is even now absorbed into ideology by being reframed as part of the “what is acceptable” and “what is unacceptable” debate.

Thus, ideology works less like a dictator and more like gravity: unseen, constant, and shaping every movement of thought until one learns to notice it.

Unnoticed Social Truths

We live under social ideologies without even noticing. I’m referring to the collective assumptions so deeply normalised that they appear natural to us, as though they were never constructed by anything or anyone. That they were our own ideas…very often. We think what we say is novel and. newbut really we were just told to think it by others and their ideological motivations.

Let’s bring up an example of a normalised ideology from history just to make this crystal clear. For much of history, people didn’t notice the ideology of patriarchy; it simply appeared as the natural order of things. Men led, women followed. The same goes for class hierarchy, where wealth was equated with virtue and poverty with moral failure. Even heteronormativity, the idea that heterosexuality is the natural or default mode of being, was long treated as an unquestionable truth rather than an ideology.

Now, before we battle out whether these are ideologies or the natural order of truth, what we do need to understand is that these were the invisible frameworks. The social constructionists would say that these invisible frameworks were too powerful to be seen.

So, as a result of a lot of [qualitative work specifically] in the field of social sciences, we now have a world full of highly politicised social ideologies that we DO notice. Ideologies around gender, race, identity, and freedom are now heavily debated and often publicly performed and moralised via social media.

We are now living in a time where social ideology is no longer “invisible social truths” or “common sense,” they are hyper-visible, and everyone is aware of what is considered “acceptable” or “unacceptable”. As a result of forced ideas, we now pause before speaking. We think: “Should I say this? Is it right to say this?” — instead of simply saying it and learning through discourse and healthy debate. In healthy societies, discourse, that is, open, reasoned conversation where people can express and refine their thoughts, is essential for maintaining social balance and collective understanding. When people start censoring themselves out of fear of judgement or social punishment, human agency becomes threatened, and genuine, authentic dialogue breaks down.

Spiral of Silence

This is a well-documented phenomenon in social psychology and sociology. It’s linked to what German political scientist, sociologist, and public opinion researcher, Noelle-Neumann called the “spiral of silence”…this is the idea that people remain silent when they “feel” or “believe” their opinions are in the minority (even if they are not), leading to conformity and the illusion of consensus. Over time, this creates social fragility, where peace becomes a performative act rather than a genuine result of healthy social discourse and shared ideas.

It is important to know that authentic social ideologies emerge organically from lived experience and shared meaning; they are absorbed into the social fabric through repetition and collective belief. We can observe this dynamic in healthy families, sports teams, and other small collectives that maintain cohesion through ongoing dialogue, debate, and even constructive resistance. Research consistently shows that groups able to engage in open exchange without fear of disagreement or opposition build stronger trust, adaptability, and shared meaning over time.

Forced social ideologies, on the other hand, rely on moral pressure and surveillance; they do not grow from organic consensus as a result of logic and reason; they exist only as a result of fear of exclusion. When ideology must be performed rather than felt, it begins to lose its social authenticity and becomes just another political tool.

This raises a profound question: if an ideology is constantly signalled, defended, and enforced, does it remain an authentic social ideology — or does it become a manufactured one?

Are all ideologies social?

Well, this is where things get interesting — because our interdisciplinary academic and scientific revolution should have helped us answer this by now, ideally without politics getting in the way. Viewing this through an interdisciplinary sociological lens, I don’t believe ideologies are purely social inventions in every scenario. To assume so reflects a dangerously narrow disciplinary bias. Ideologies can also be constructed upon psychological and biological foundations. For example, at their core, ideologies obviously emerge from the human need for stability, belonging, and meaning. These are needs rooted in our neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. Our brains are fundamentally wired to seek coherence and predictability in a chaotic world, so we build belief systems that make social life intelligible. In this way, ideology is necessary, and it functions as both a psychological coping mechanism and a biological adaptation.

Ideologies offer our minds a sense of order and the physical body a sense of safety within the group to which we belong. If we do not have anywhere to belong, that’s when things become problematic, and what we are witnessing today. When people no longer feel anchored in a real community somewhere, identity politics shifts from expressing who we are and advocating for social space to just a need to prove that we exist and are valid. The focus turns inward and becomes about self-protection instead of outward towards cooperation or shared problem-solving.

What is the solution, then?

First, we need to be able to talk about it. We need critical thinkers — people who understand that offence, disagreement, and tension are necessary parts of meaningful discussion. We need courage in dissent, and a society that values it, because protecting dissent is how we protect intelligence itself — and how we prevent things like war and social collapse.

A healthy society can hold many different ideologies — that’s what tolerance and cultural diversity are about. But for any cohesive society, I believe that an overarching shared cultural ideology and respect for this is still necessary to hold people together and maintain peace and unity among its citizens.

I do not think the point is to escape ideology or power at all. What we have learnt is that both are part of how societies function and how we make sense of the world. What matters is becoming consciously aware of how they work through us and our part in it.

Critical thinking is recognising when we are being unconsciously shaped by certain ideas and when we still have agency to choose differently.

Further Reading

Destutt de Tracy, A. L. C. (1754–1836). Éléments d’idéologie [Elements of ideology] (English translation published 2011). American University of Paris. Google Books+2Encyclopedia+2

Destutt de Tracy, A. L. C. (n.d.). Ideology: A science of ideas. In Encyclopaedia article. Retrieved from SAGE-ref entry. sk.sagepub.com+1

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845). The German Ideology (C. J. Arthur, Ed. & Trans., 1970). International Publishers. Marxists Internet Archive+1

McCarney, J. (2005). Ideology and false consciousness. In Marx Myths and Legends. (Creative Commons license) Marxists Internet Archive

Pines, C. L. (n.d.). Ideology and false consciousness: Views from Marx and Engels. PhilPapers. PhilPapers

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The spiral of silence: A theory of public opinion. Journal of Communication, 24(2), 43-51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1974.tb00367.x OUP Academic+1

Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago Press+1

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He is right. We are lonely, and we are not getting smarter.

This article discusses the tensions between collectivism and individualism, how this has come to be, and what we can do on a personal level to regain self-control, agency, autonomy, and social community, and subsequently, our psychological well-being.

Collectivism Vs. Individualism: How We Got Here

On one hand, we have collectivism, the idea that the group comes first. On the other hand, individualism — the idea that the self comes first.

Both have value, but both have also been distorted over time.

In our realities, we care about the people we love or those who bring us some sort of benefit, so we often cooperate to avoid harming them. In harming those we care about, whether it is psychologically or physically, we, by extension, harm ourselves. This aligns with a collective view of reality.

At the same time, within our realities, we each have personal desires, hopes, dreams, and ideas. As a result, we want individual autonomy and agency when making decisions for ourselves.

Logically, and humanly, both matter.

1. Defining them clearly

Collectivism values the group. That is, the society, tribe, state, or family is the core unit of concern. The well-being of the individual is seen through the well-being of the collective. It emphasises cooperation, shared goals, and mutual responsibility. Examples: Traditional societies, many Asian cultures, socialist systems, and indigenous worldviews.

Individualism, by contrast, sees the individual as the starting point. Society exists to protect personal freedom and agency. It values independence, self-expression, and autonomy. Examples: Western liberal democracies, Enlightenment philosophies, American ethos.

At a basic level, collectivism asks, “What’s best for the group?” while individualism asks, “What’s best for each person?”

The problem is that this distinction has become blurred because both systems have evolved and merged in ways that no longer reflect their original intent.

2. How We Got Here

First, we are collective in an evolutionary sense: our brains are wired to be social, to work with others, and to maintain relationships—so we naturally feel drawn to the idea of the collective good. Our psychological well-being doesn’t require many people, but it does require some—a small circle to cooperate, negotiate, and belong with.

If we go back to Karl Marx’s idea of collectivism and unpack his vision versus what actually happened, because clearly, something has gone wrong. Marx matters because his ideas are seminal and remain deeply relevant to what people today call “collectivism.” His work is also frequently invoked in contemporary socio-political discourse.

Marx was not advocating the erasure of individuality; rather, he spoke of freeing people from economic oppression. He imagined a world where collective ownership of resources would remove the alienation that comes from being treated merely as a tool for production. In his vision, collectivism was meant to enable individuality—to create the social and economic conditions necessary for true freedom.

Historically, however, Marx’s critics argue that this ideal was completely lost and that his expectations and assumptions were wrong. This is because that collectivism has been easily co-opted by power structures. This is where the state—or a small group of elite recognise what is going on and take over the collective itself. The result is large-scale social obedience; funny enough, it is disguised as unity and cooperation. Most people are unconscious of this. Under the banner of the “greater good,” individuality—and the agency that comes with it—has often been suppressed.

People believe they are thinking with autonomy, but in reality, they are not.

One example of this suppression is the modern-day hostility toward independent thought or dissent—exactly the reason I focus on this issue so much.

The courage to think differently is fundamental to an intelligent and progressive society—especially when most people agree on something. We must dare to be different. Yet today, in some of the most democratic and peaceful countries, dissent is met with social and political punishment. The lack of support for independent thought has created a culture of conformity and intellectual repetition, where people are socially rewarded for agreeing rather than thinking.

So, what does this all mean?

In modern times, we’ve entered a new form of macro collectivism—and despite appearances, it is neither moral nor communal. We know something is deeply wrong: people are less happy, more isolated, and increasingly suffering psychologically. Mental ill-health continues to rise.

The era we are in is technocratic.

A technocracy uses data, systems, and managerial logic to justify control at scale. Individuals become statistics or variables in a model, rather than subjects with personal agency or autonomy. This is not collectivism in any social or moral sense.

A technocratic mindset believes that all problems can be solved through technical solutions. Its critics argue that it ignores human emotion, individual autonomy, ethics, and democracy, reducing people to data points instead of treating them like conscious citizens.

The problem with technocracy, particularly in relation to social democracy, lies in who holds decision-making power and whose values guide it.

Some examples of the modern macro or state-run “collectivism” / technocratic problems (COVID, WHO, etc.)

• Population metrics over persons: Decisions are increasingly justified by population-level outcomes rather than individual rights.

• In medicine: Public health prioritises statistics (mortality rates, herd immunity) over personal agency, context, and informed consent.

• In politics: Some individuals are implicitly “sacrificed” for the “greater good,” framed as scientific or moral necessity.

And so, here we are today.

3. What it all leads to

Technocracy is a problem as it seriously mimics what we think is collectivism in our reality, but it is definitely not collective in spirit. And despite what we like to tell ourselves, we have unconscious spiritual (unspoken, unsaid, but understood) needs.

Tecnocracy centralises control, but without any feeling of community spirit. It also instrumentalises the individual as an autonomous thinker, but in reality, it does not honour or promote personal agency. We see this right now with what is happening through technological algorithmic control, as well as governments heavily relying on experts as the greatest knowledge holders over citizens, who are merely seen and treated as data points.

What we call collectivism today often means state (macro) collectivism—control justified by population metrics. The humane alternative is communal (micro) collectivism—small, voluntary groups where belonging and autonomy, and psychological safety co-exist.

So, in my view, we must return to reclaiming individual autonomy and be surrounded by a small collective group of those who aid us in thinking well. We have no other choice left for psychological well-being.

But what do healthy collectivism and healthy individualism actually look like?

Healthy collectivism creates belonging and shared purpose, but if taken too far, it produces control, dependence, and the loss of personal identity. This results in people searching for identity and belonging, with nowhere to go. This is something we are witnessing right now in modern Western societies.

Healthy individualism produces autonomy and creativity, but also, if taken too far, it results in loneliness, disconnection, and moral detachment. This is also something we are witnessing in modern Western societies.

So both extremes fail for the same reason because one erases the person for the system, and the other erases the system for the person.

The middle ground is where social dignity and personal agency can co-exist.

4. What healthy collectivism looks like

You can see this most clearly in a family or small, functional group. In smaller healthy groups, ideas are more manageable. Each person is responsible for acting for the common good, but no one’s dignity is sacrificed in doing so. If dignity is sacrificed (and that does happen in unhealthy groups and families), then that’s another story, and the individual will turn, but remember, we are talking about generally healthy group systems. Decisions in healthy groups are often shared and discussed or debated together, and importantly, individuality is respected, and the feeling of belonging is mutual.

This kind of structure represents the balance we need. It is collectivist in function but individualist in spirit. Each person is valued, included, and seen. There’s equality among members, but also space for the autonomy of ideas. What we are seeing is that these individualist ideas controlled by the technocracy have been coming into the historically healthy smaller groups and have torn those bonds apart.

Healthy collectivism elevates individuals through the group. Unhealthy collectivism erases them for the group.

To add, a healthy small collective isn’t tension-free, but because it has psychological safety, and clear norms, as well as reciprocity in many ways, this means debate, disagreement, conflict, negotiation, and emotion can happen openly and be repaired.

5. Why smaller collectives matter

Humans are social beings. This is the crux. We need connection and recognition to stay mentally healthy. The smaller the circle of trust, the greater the depth of safety. A small, close collective, whether that’s a family, a few close friends, or a small team, provides emotional stability and psychological grounding. When things become chaotic, you have somewhere that feels safe. Right now, the world is chaotic, and the individual has nowhere to go to feel psychologically safe.

A psychologically safe place is a place where you can totally express yourself without the need for social performance. You don’t need to prove your worth because the group already validates it by including you. You have a legitimate spot. That validation is what allows for honesty, self-reflection, and the ability to think clearly without fear of exclusion.

6. Individualism within the collective

Individualism works best inside this kind of small, healthy collective. It’s where you can assert your personhood, make decisions, and express agency while still being part of something that values and protects you.

I want a world that realises the value in smaller, close-knit groups where healthy thinking and personal expression can flourish. Social media platforms and pages are the wrong place, as we are interacting with far more people than just a few. It is unmanageable, and so nothing gets discussed properly.

We need others to help us think well, and we need to accept that without resistance, we won’t think about anything new. Belonging somewhere means being able to think, act, and speak authentically within a space that respects—and supports—your autonomy. When collectivism and individualism coexist like this, we achieve what most political ideologies have failed to do: protect both freedom and belonging.

Tip for this week: Join a library and call someone back.

Question: Who, where, or what is the place where you can fully express yourself?

Thanks for reading.

Esha.

Please email me at info@dreshalovric.com for any questions, writing collaborations, co-writing papers, or an exchange of ideas on how we can advance the interdisciplinary knowledge movement.

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Nowadays, in the former role, I have come to be very confident in allowing my instincts to lead as a mother. I have learnt mostly through feeling, experience, physiologically, and emotionally. I observe that it is the exquisite elements of my femininity as a necessary presence. It is not passive. I am proud that it aligns with what biological, psychological, and sociological literature recognises as the nurturing, relational, and emotionally attuned dimensions of care. My pride comes from the fact that it has taken a lot of time to unlearn the wounds of the past and integrate with the woman beneath, who can be all of her as she desires to be.

The bookshelf, by contrast, is a gateway to knowledge. It holds data and patterns about the world. Information that can be turned into knowledge that I can use tangibly if I can aptly recognise the need. It is here that I apply thought intellectually, through critical thinking, reflexivity, and reflection.

Today’s essay will resonate with anyone who wrestles with the tension between what our psychological needs attract us to, like that which is soothing, comforting, or which feels like home, versus the needs of our intellectual mind, the one we use to analyse information for solving problems.

I am very aware that logically, what keeps most people sane and feeling good are the people around us and the spaces that earth us and makes us feel grounded. I’ve come to believe intellect is seldom needed for this. I’ve noticed it’s often the people we might judge as less “intellectual” who bring the most warmth, comfort, and love—where the mind can fully relax, with no overthinking and no need to perform.

This exact phenomenon has often brought me to reflect on the feelings that come with tribe and the feelings associated with intellect, and the constant pull and push between the two. One is socially caricatured as mentally primitive; the other as far too analytical and detached from the natural human mental experience.

Modernity and the mind

This essay is a philosophical reflection of how Western modernity has become obsessed with a form of moral–intellectual purity and how this clashes with the needs of our psychological and social selves.

We live in a fast-paced culture that has almost entirely alienated us from remembering the solace in our psychologically innate, communal instincts and need for small circle belonging. The latter, which I will forever argue delivers us true and healthy inclusion, acceptance, comfort, and the validation we so desperately seek. The caveat—that to find it, we must work hard, even if it takes our entire lives, to find that validation from the right people, in the right circle, and in the right place. Sadly, people are unconsciously and accidentally accepting fast validation, which winds them up superficially being “included” in the wrong spaces.

In our modern lives, two unwavering and powerful mental forces conflict: the psychological mind and the intellectual mind.

On one side, humans have an unarguably deep, psychological, emotional, social, and affective need for belonging— precisely the kind that historically came from tribes, families, and tightly integrated and localised communities. On the other side, Western modernity pushes people toward intellectual purity, a forced allegiance to ideas—relying on the human’s ability to use reason and analysis to defend absolute conclusions and presume the “right” ideas can always be known at the “right” time. The problem, no one has been taught how, and in the data era, these fundamental skills are exactly the ones we learn over years of hard work and mental practice during higher degree research training. Without consciousness of the importance of context, we have a world full of immensely selfish information analysts. This creates very individualistic ideas about right and wrong.

Eight billion systems of thought are heavily problematic. These are the things that create wars.

Now, the more modern and individualistic society becomes, the stronger people’s craving for a tribal belonging feels. This phenomenon is visible and quite obvious through human behavior in digital spaces. Here, an intuitive belonging is felt and acted upon, as deep-seated beliefs materialise in real time. This is a serious issue because what began in the early days as a separate world of online positioning has now infiltrated offline life. The central problem is that smaller, human-created, divisive ideologies are now empowered by simulated online digital collectives. This is to the detriment of our real-life communities and inorganically reconstructs how people organise loyalties, build identities, and form alignments in everyday social interaction in reality.

I believe this means we are simply and accidentally reconstructing our everyday life to conform to what started as algorithmic incentives.

In a strange twist of events, we are living out our digital lives.

We are unconsciously allowing the logics of digital ideas to set the terms of our conduct and belonging in reality. Ironically, the more people seek the belonging they may have inadvertently lost in their realities by belonging to no healthy close-knit groups, the more they risk joining rigid moral or ideological “tribes” that the algorithm sends them to.

Fundamentally, I see this is a deep tension between our psychological need for smaller, collective communities, confused by a socially constructed, intellectually individualistic culture. What has happened is that the tension has expressed itself as altered expectations of all others as opposed to tending more thoughtfully to the errors of self, which we all share as a conscious species. So, now socially we are living less and less with mutual care and reciprocity and more about visible alignment with the ‘right’ ideas, regardless of context, time, or place, or space, or our psychological needs. We are facing psycho-social disruption, but on a mass scale.

A place to belong

So, I believe the greater question becomes, if we psychologically need belonging, how do we find where we are actually supposed to be?

In short: Do it in your reality and do it through love. It might sound fluffy, but it’s not; evidently, it’s what we all need. After you find where you are supposed to be, then trust yourself to learn with your head. If you do not feel validated by at least a few close people, you will continue to be bitter or susceptible to misinformation, disinformation, and problematic and irrelevant ideologies.

I faced this exact tension between the head and the heart when I became a mother because I was simultaneously beginning an intellectually driven social science PhD. This is a reflexive account of the same psycho-social phenomenon. I think all of us in the West are going through this exact issue in various ways, but at an orchestrated scale.

There’s this unnatural competition between our hearts and our heads. The natural existence of emotion, but a forced adherence to attend to logic without being taught how. The madness that comes with the reality that is human chaos versus the order offered by adherence to the scientific method, despite most people not being taught how to interpret or communicate scientific ideas properly. This is exactly the modern challenge: the fact that so many of us ordinary people have access to a world of ideas we do not know how to realistically use. For some reason, we’ve come to believe that one must exist at the expense of the other, when in truth they were always meant to coexist. The skill is in knowing when to use which.

The mind’s spectrum

I move between both every day; it took years of deliberation and disciplined reflection, and I’ve integrated them and know when each should lead. I still get it wrong, though, and this is fine. I do not think we will ever be perfect, and perfection doesn’t assist thought anyway.

For example, my husband of 19 years and I have three young children. All five of us love one another fiercely because of an unwavering development of trust, which we have proven to be the most valuable thing we have to rely on against all the bad things that happen in the world. As a result of this trust, we commit to each other with intense loyalty. Right now, this place, I know, for me, is exactly where I need to be. It is what earths me and brings me the most beautiful things the world has to give a single person. I feel entirely validated by these four people, and I seek this inclusion and acceptance from nowhere else. For me, there is nothing more profoundly beautiful and right than what the people I love and who love me bring me.

At the same time, I grew up mainly in a Western society and amongst its values, in Australia. Due to what I saw as equal opportunities there, I now hold a PhD in social science. However, my Indian cultural background is still important here, as its core values have made me appreciate the importance of kinship, loyalty, and close-knit community organisation. I only learnt the value of this, however, through feeling its significance once I had my own family. When I think back now, my Western intellectual groups and the ideas that were popular at the time attempted to disband my commitment to community and cooperation. There was a clash of values here, as it was seen as traditional and outdated. I always felt this incredible internal cultural as well as psychological problem. They were right in some ways and wrong in others. I absolutely noted the problems of my first culture, but there were pros and cons of both, and I needed critical analysis to figure this out.

But to deal with it at the time and get the job done, I just performed two roles, pretended, and self-censored, mainly as a result.

On the family (or small communal group) side of things, through an integrated effort, my husband and I have built a generally harmonious home supported by a strong local community around our family. Despite all of this being a very evident description of matters of the heart, my education, interdisciplinary reading, and thus my head played a huge role in recognising the needs of the heart. I believe both the consciousness brought by my education and the grounding gifted through my strong connection to community in my upbringing have been the reasons for my mental health and intellectual clarity.

For my family, we feel mentally healthy and physically safe inside this unit. This, to me, is my tribe. There is absolutely no other word that can describe this phenomenon I experience as well as its internal behaviours except “tribe”.

The West’s issue with the concept and use of the word “tribe”

Despite our innate pull toward communities that provide physical and local belonging, the West, caught in its never-ending political conundrums that play and win in the exquisite game of human psychology, has successfully erased the nuance required to understand the evolution of ideas and their relationship with reality.

I recall a few years ago, when Western academia and its surge of what was used as politicised social-science discourse, sparked a brief but intense movement to retire the word “tribe.” Public activism quickly heard about it and, in a flash, armed itself with its own interpretation of “science”, arguing that anyone using the word “tribe” was culturally insensitive or appropriating. They also believed only literal, present-day tribal societies could use it.

Some popular definitions of tribe:

Anthropological: a social group united by kinship, shared ancestry, language, culture, and territory, often with recognised leadership and traditions.

Sociological: a close-knit community or group of people bound by shared values, interests, or identity. A source of belonging, mutual support, and social identity.

Biological/Psychological: humans have an innate “tribal” instinct and the need for belonging, safety, and acceptance within a familiar group. It’s linked to our neurological and evolutionary drive for survival through cooperation and social bonds.

The social movement to stop using the word in the above way cited reasons, produced by a handful of valid and important social science research studies, such as its heavy use in colonial anthropology, and thus concluded paradoxically with “scientific certainty” that the recommendation was to use better terms like “ethnic group,” “community,” or “people” or “nation” instead. While the analysis of problematic historical language is important and contextually relevant, we cannot study ideas within disciplinary silos or allow the social misuse of knowledge. Beyond the fact that those replacement words quite literally don’t carry the same meaning and therefore can’t express how I and most humans feel about healthy families or close-knit communities and small social groups, and how it affects psychological well-being.

As an Australian-Indian and scientifically trained person, I’ve always found the movement itself logically inconsistent and conceptually hypocritical. By forced distancing from the word ‘tribe’—and by extension, the identity of a committed social group member—in an attempt to show respect, they assumed that the West has moved beyond tribal identity and tribal ways. It has always seemed to me like an unconscious (albeit unintentional) ignorance that implies moral superiority.

At the same time, there are other social scientists, including me, who argue that the word still has important analytical value for understanding and describing modern patterns of human behaviour. Particularly, social and community acts such as organisation, loyalty, and kinship are especially used metaphorically as well as literally in contemporary contexts. In fact, in my PhD research evidences this, I drew on anthropological literature on tribal systems to map the needs, loyalties, and expectations of hospital patients and their practitioners as they navigated the profound psychological and social shifts following catastrophic physical injury.

That work showed this consistent divergence between head and heart: the hospital solved problems through head-work—protocols, evidence, science, clinical reason—while patients’ psychological rehabilitation depended also on the relational conditions of community: they wanted to depend on others, to trust, to feel safety, shared understanding, and they wanted leadership and healthy use of power. The institutional logic of medical care is scientific, intellectual, and procedural; the human work of psychological and social recovery is communal and relational. This logic is the same for all of us in society.

I am now confident that I and many other researchers have both the empirical grounds to argue that tribal patterns remain useful for understanding modern human behaviour and, more importantly, we all have the lived experience to show their relevance in practical life. I come from an ethnic community that values what I would call tribal roles—kinship obligations, reciprocal duties, and clearly shared responsibilities—and I also hold the dual vantage point of having lived, grown, and been educated among Western people and academics, and the discourse of the latter, in my experience, often privileges individualist theory over practice. Assumptions are perhaps under-examined empirically and scarcely cross-checked against wide-ranging lived contexts.

For me personally, I believe this is a uniquely valuable perspective, emerging from the intersection of contemporary migration and Western education. It is because I have lived in both worlds that my consciousness of these experiences is unlike that of any other person, and especially of people who write about them from theory alone.

We also must stop the mass politicisation of words and ideas and gross cultural misuse of intellectual ideas.

Our unconscious connections to history

Also, tribe and mother are not taboo words. They hold deep, philosophical (and often unspoken, unconscious) meaning, despite both being socially constructed and reconstructed in our modern world. Somehow, anything tied to typical ancestral repetitions is dismissed in modernity. I’m integrated in who I am biologically and socially—a mother, a member of the human species, a modern human, and an intellectually trained social scientist. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, I struggle to ethically separate the disciplines of biology and sociology.

There is no greater evidence than our collective, psychological reaction to involuntary, non-local ideas—the stuff pushed into our heads from outside our own circles that our brains are not smart enough to handle.

Jungian principles in psychology tell us that our psyches are collectively and unconsciously wired to our evolutionary past. To complicate matters for the brain, cognitive science suggests that this ancestral patterning is re-engaged—and functionally rewired—by the repeated social patterns of childhood (the stories we’re raised on, the roles we’re given, the threats we rehearse). These social patterns set the default states that steer almost all our adult perceptions.

The social construction of intelligence, loneliness, and the biological relevance of tribe and heart

At the core sits a Western obsession with extreme individuality. In Anglophone contexts, the socially constructed version of intelligence has come to mean—almost by default—becoming more individual, especially now that we access knowledge in disconnected silos with no foundations of common ground. We keep learning more, yet we fail to organise that knowledge for shared benefit.

As people take in new, worldly, outside ideas, we’re supposed to adapt and be more tolerant of differences. It’s supposed to make us more intelligent. Instead, we’ve done the opposite by assembling individual value-sets, and since everyone is doing it, we are experiencing a billion wars at once. Ironically, this is regression rather than progress: opposing ideas just because they aren’t your own is modern tribalism at its purest.

However hard we try to outrun it in the name of intellectual progress, the evidence shows we remain bound to our collective histories. Censoring meaningful, useful, and relevant language is poor thinking—anti-intellectual and dismissive of the breadth of lived experience that genuine cultural respect requires. Especially when it springs from studying only a sliver of something vastly more complex.

So I am my literal tribes mother, and I am also Dr Esha Lovrić. The first uses the heart as its most profound compass for direction, and the second uses critical thinking and reason as its driver. In the modern world, somehow, the mother’s heart is treated as a mark of lesser intellect, while science and philosophy are treated as badges of intellect. I blame this entirely on a materialistic Western culture that allowed itself to place value on all things, which breeds money and social power over the needs of the spirit. Eastern traditions can remind us of some of what the West is losing.

The mother and the mind

Both are incredibly powerful, and I absolutely see my unprecedented role in the home. My physical body, that is, presence, warmth, touch, expression, and intimacy, matters, and what I saw, how I say it, and when I say it, matters. Confusing one with the other and not knowing when to use which one is what I think is plaguing the modern Western world, which has far too much information at times when the simple heart is all that is required. When you draw on the heart, you do not need to know what to do; you just know, it is unspoken, unsaid, but understood. Think about all the times your heart is at ease, I can almost bet on the fact that there was no need for the head to get involved.

In relation to my children, I am conscious now not to allow too much intellect to pervert the course of heartfelt motherhood. Children need a mother who loves fiercely. In my therapeutic work with many broken adults, no one needed more intellect. It was always the heart that was missed.

I think we have lost the ability to know the place of the tribe and the place for intellect. Each person’s tribe and who and what constitutes it is unique. It simply means a small network of people—or a place—that feels good, safe, and like home for the heart.

A healthy communal group doesn’t foster anger, resentment, or hate. If you don’t have at least one place like that, find it—it will give you meaning, acceptance, inclusion, hope, and love. And believe me, your soul needs that more importantly than you need to cite evidence-based literature.

Without the felt sense of belonging, you don’t know what it is to not need your head to know. Without knowing the feeling of being totally accepted somewhere, you won’t know what to protect or value, so the knowledge you are attracted to has no contextual relevance. You will simply over-intellectualise and settle for an arrangement of ideas that sound plausible, driven by your vulnerability and intuitive biases.

We need to reclaim our comfort with the human psycho-social needs for place, earthing, and social connection with those we love and those who love us, as well as using our intellectual minds, but only when we recognise the need within our contexts.

Chaos and order

Every day and all day, amongst the constant chaos of big feelings, unprocessed emotions, and the persistent dysregulation of impressionable young and old people, I interact with my family. My reactions to them are triggered mainly through my heart and feelings. There is rarely time to activate the head. Exactly why reading time or quiet talks at bedtime matter so much. Then, daily for some hours, I sit quietly amongst the experience of allocated order and clarity and read just with my head. My reactions are triggered mainly through reflection, contemplation, and reflexivity.

The diverse worlds between my head and my heart persist all day, every day: this is my evidence of chaos and order, emotion versus logic, feeling versus reason, tribe versus science, local versus global, internal versus external.

Funnily, when I exit my home and attempt to interact with a world full of people with their own ideas, their own feelings, their own emtions and their own ideas, I realise that my chosen tribe and the home that houses the most important people in my entire world is in fact the only place in the world that is my place of reason, my place of order and my psyche’s most trustworthy template for what is exactly right.

When the chaos of the whole world becomes a little too exhausting, I am so lucky because I can retreat to the safety of the most ordered place in the world, which is my home. Here I can nestle into the arms of those I love each and every night.

Because of this, I know with absolute certainty and without a skerrick of doubt that I am loved and I am safe, that these people think I am the most beautiful person they have ever seen, and that it has nothing to do with the way I look.

Esha.

Post Essay Notes

This essay starts a conversation on how today’s isolation and our low-quality, surface-level connections in real life are likely to undermine the development and maintenance of our capacity for intelligence. The literature—and the everyday evidence of people embedded in healthy, close-knit circles—consistently points to ongoing, high-quality relationships as one of the best environments for cultivating and preserving the kinds of intelligence the human brain is built for. For me, I draw this strength from the family I’ve created. There is no one-size-fits-all (though there is disagreement about whether biological kinship is required or social kinship is enough); this is simply a reminder to find and nurture a place you can call a tribe—a space where you are validated, included, and able to express yourself as you are—on the journey of personal growth. It is fundamental to your psycho-social health.

This piece is also a triangulated work that intersects my knowledge as a social scientist and individual, my feelings, emotions, and experiences as a social person, and my observations of patterns I think I can see in the world. It is an entirely subjective pursuit of what truth is for me in my reality. I have tried to be as honest as possible about my lived experience. Others have their own versions, which are valid in their context and reflexive use of thought. My argument is that we all experience the world uniquely, and we can not argue which cultural version is right. The version of our own reality is what it is and can not be transferred to another person's experience. My version of tribe is what it is, and has the most spiritual meaning for me in my life and context.

This essay is also evidence of what it means to process ideas through reflexive critical thinking and analysis in context.

You can use reflexive critical thinking for anything you need to think about. Reflexivity is messy and difficult, as we all have different factors that impact our thinking and analysis.

I think the lack of reflexivity and observation and overreliance on believing theoretical ideas without triangulation is failing us intellectually, socially, and psychologically.

Please email me at info@dreshalovric.com for any questions, writing collaborations, co-writing papers, or an exchange of ideas on how we can advance the interdisciplinary knowledge movement.

Further Reading

Social Identity Theory. (n.d.). In ScienceDirect Topics (Psychology). Elsevier. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/social-identity-theory

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2024). The social brain hypothesis – thirty years on. Annals of Human Biology, 51(1), Article 2359920. https://doi.org/10.1080/03014460.2024.2359920

Facione, P. A. (1990). Critical thinking: A statement of expert consensus for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (The Delphi Report). ERIC (ED315423). https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED315423.pdf

Sahlins, M. (2011). What kinship is (part one). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17(1), 2–19.

Gribaldo, A. (2016). A reflection on the gendered implications of what kinship is. Antropologia (n.s.), 3(1), 11–28.

What Kinship Is

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Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.

Finlay, L., & Gough, B. (Eds.). (2008). Reflexivity: A practical guide for researchers in health and social sciences. Wiley-Blackwell. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9780470776094

Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839032000060635

Finlay, L. (2002). Negotiating the swamp: The opportunity and challenge of reflexivity in research practice. Qualitative Research, 2(2), 209–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/146879410200200205

Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959).

(2013). Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. University of Minnesota Press.

***I suggest you search the problems with the use of the word “tribe” in both modern and historical contexts.

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How did we first realise our capacity for bigger, more collective intelligence?

Well, we refer to the Axial Age (c. 800–200 BCE) as marking a mammoth shift from local, tribal thinking to civilisations sharing ideas through written text. Writing linked distant groups. Ideas could be recorded, compared, and refined across civilisations, and this is an early case of collective intelligence.

Reading and especially reflecting across texts revealed how much we held in common at a species level. That widened consciousness, demonstrated human intellectual capacity, and enabled knowledge-building. It also meant humans became interested in not only tribal cultural patterns but also our biological similarities.

Why are social processes important?

I can state confidently, as a sociologist/social scientist, that the patterns behind our social behaviours reveal many things. I can also confidently state that the quality of our social choices and behaviours has a direct relationship with our psychological health. This is called the psychosocial dynamic, and it is well worth studying.

Everyone has social experiences, and everyone has a psychological mind connected to a nervous system. I learnt to study it formally through scientific methods, and now I use that skill to assess what I see through general, everyday phenomena as best I can.

This is literally what our brains are constantly trying to do: determine meaning to know what to do next. Think of it as critical thinking about how social choices shape psychological states, and how those states, in turn, shape social choices.

All you need to practice is observation, self-awareness, discernment, and reason. Easy, right?

What is social, and what is psychological?

By “social” I mean the socially constructed facts outside the body—norms, roles, institutions, incentives. By “psychological,” I mean what’s happening in the body—perception, emotion, personality, and other biological processes. And YOU are best placed to be the expert in your own situation. However, your biases will try hard to block your expertise.

The psycho-social dynamic has always been true, and perhaps historically, we were more attuned to psycho-social discrepancies because we had longer stretches of solitude and silence to notice the self. Today, we face a never-before-done problem on a global, cross-cultural scale. Our brains are stuffed with relentless data and input, which is totally fragmenting our attention. The lines are now utterly blurred between body and society. It has made it harder to sense what’s actually going on inside us versus what’s being pushed on us from outside.

So, critical thinking—stepping out of the emotional, reactive centre and engaging the slower, reflective system—is more vital than ever.

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Why are people struggling to think clearly?

Right now, we live with two pressures at once: a flood of micro-ideas our minds weren’t prepared to process, and a lack of critical-thinking skills to judge what’s worth knowing and how to think about it. In that gap, our biological reflexes, reinforced by historical group identities, take over and overrule reflective reasoning.

Yet reflective reasoning is what critical thinking needs!

When we react emotionally, we’re often protecting what feels comfortable or “right” in the moment. Familiar ideas feel safe, and it is quite reasonable to accept that that’s a normal way to maintain internal equilibrium. Some ideas and behaviours are worth protecting, and we should be brave enough to assert them through reason. But if we defend ideas without reason — using hate, anger, or resentment or bullying tactics — while denying others the same right to feel, know, and think, that isn’t intelligence or reasonable at all (even if it is very human).

These twin pressures — mass amounts of information and very thin critical-thinking habits — create a clash between automatic brain routines and the disciplined thinking required in an information-and-data age. It is harming our social health and, as a result, our psychological well-being.

Think of it as a mass-scale psycho-social mismatch.

But why is this happening?

Well, I observe that one problem in public discourse is that many people can’t tell what counts as valid knowledge and what doesn’t. Also, who determines what is valid? This is a very important question for you to ponder over. Because that very confusion is dividing us socially and harming us psychologically AT SCALE.

It is very important to know that underneath all the cultural divisions sits a visceral, biological need to be seen, validated, and understood.

I think a major driver is the modern trend and politicised battle of the sciences. We’re watching a noisy — and increasingly dangerous — fight between the qualitative method used by social science and the quantitative methods used by biological sciences.

Hang in here with me, because I think you all need to know this. We need more people with raised consciousness about what is going wrong.

What is the difference between qualitative science and quantitative science?

One objectively studies culture and subjective experience, and the other produces science that objectively quantifies human experience.

Qualitative work studies lived experience: this means the meanings behind the words used in people’s stories. It assesses the feelings that might be linked to them, and the specific context that makes them intelligible. Its findings are NOT usually universally transferable; they travel ONLY to micro groups with reasonably similar contexts.

Biological or quantitative sciences (neuroscience, evolutionary biology, physiology, genetics, etc.) map what humans SHARE as a species; these findings are usually more transferable across humans and civilisations on a macro scale.

When we turn tiny differences into weapons, we divide ourselves. The recent habit of treating qualitative social findings as universal truths has done real harm. We need ethical, interdisciplinary intellectuals—people who know the methods and their limits—to teach this well. Remembering our shared human ground helps us unite, and respecting cultural differences is fine—so long as we don’t mistake context-bound insights for species-wide laws.

So, how is all this being used as weapons and by whom?

Political campaigns — and those behind them — are very good at reminding us how easily people can be psychologically controlled. Right now, one side weaponises the biological sciences, the other weaponises the social sciences. They are doing it unreasonably.

Intellectual ideas are being purposefully exploited as tools of loyalty, and this is anti-intellectualism. The ideas intellectualism has been able to produce were meant to elevate the intelligence of humans, but here we are in 2025, and our progress is threatened.

The Axial Age and the sharing of written text also made the scientific method possible: state a claim, record it, test it, invite others to check and challenge it, and keep what reliably works and get rid of what does not serve us. Modern science and all of its methods and disciplines matured through curiosity and collective intelligence.

The social sciences came to the fore in more recent times because, within any society, social systems expose diverse sub-groups who have different experiences that create friction, micro-divisions, and exclusion. So, we study the lived experience of those groups, carefully and ethically, to inform policy and provide practical solutions for people not doing well socially or psychologically.

Sociology shows how culture shapes daily life and identity — what is valued, permitted, or stigmatised — and how that affects mental health and well-being. We use this knowledge to help people understand themselves and work better with the societies they are trying to thrive within.

Biological sciences help us see what humans share at a species level — our basic psychological and bodily needs — and how these arise from biology. They show the capacities and limits we all carry. Those traits interact with socially constructed factors (norms, roles, institutions) identified by the social sciences. As people mix across places and histories, that interplay produces distinct cultural behaviours.

CASE STUDY: MY BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

When I arrived in Australia as a migrant, my family came so we could take opportunities and improve our lives. To do that, I knew I needed to assimilate and learn the local culture if I wanted to thrive intelligently in a new society. I’ve felt the disenfranchisement between my migrant community and the wider culture, and I carried that tension physically and mentally. To rectify the problem, I had to make sense of it. I know the problem from the inside. I lived it.

Perhaps because of this — but also my temperament — I went on to study society and people. Now, as an interdisciplinary social scientist, I believe learning about group behaviour, culture, and diversity alongside biological knowledge helps us understand ourselves and the society we’re trying to succeed within.

I advocate using that knowledge to work together in the spirit of collective intelligence, not the individual, tribal reflex that sits just under the surface of our fragile minds. Sadly, politicians, mass media, and algorithm designers keep exploiting that reflex to divide rather than unite, and many people accept it without noticing. Your psychological tendency toward division and non-intellectual reactivity is being exploited often without you or your loved ones realising it.

What can we do?

We’ve already shown we have the capacity for intellectual thinking. We also have the capacity for critical and higher-order thinking. The difference is whether we learn it and practise it or we don’t.

In our modern societies, critical thinking has rarely been taught as a core citizenship skill now we see the detrimental effects of that. Since those without intellectual rigour are now able to have loud, influential platforms, we are watching social discourse take a huge turn. We need intellectually ethical speakers who lead with reason and self-awareness to come back and take the stage.

Final words

Balanced reasoning matters. Today’s letter is an example of uniting disciplinary knowledge — interdisciplinary collaboration — where we integrate thinking in the spirit of intellectualism and deeper consciousness first scaled in the Axial Age. It is also the most human way to engage with knowledge: openly, flexibly, and with an eye to nuance, overlap, and limits. This is why disciplines arose in the first place — as organised reflections of human experience and the ways we make, test, and present ideas.

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Welcome back. This week, I begin with a reflection on (funnily enough) how easily the pendulum swings between what is taken to be right and wrong. What is considered “correct” usually depends on the orientation of people’s biases—biases shaped by their historical moment and the context they live within.

You can test this yourself quite quickly—whenever someone speaks, consider how their underlying motivations might be connected to what they choose to say.

When we first look at the intentions behind what we hear—before judging the reliability of information, status, or apparent credibility—it often reveals the values that guide the speaker.

Words can feel most convincing when they mimic what we most want or need to hear in the moment, and it is in these times that our scrutiny matters most.

So this week, I want to bring attention to the fact that we are becoming entirely unreasonable in our collective assessments, and I urge you to spread the word and lead the way in our intellectual revolution. I believe that once this age of unreason passes, we will return to reason. Yet in this new era—defined by unprecedented ways of supplying and accessing information—we have little understanding of how our collective consciousness will evolve.

But for now, without reason—and without reasonable people—we place ourselves at the mercy of the unreasonable. And that, my friends, is something to avoid at all costs.

THOUGHT 1: QUOTES

1. “Emotions are themselves forms of judgement or belief, embodying ways of seeing the world.” by Martha Nussbaum, in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, 2001.

2. “Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings; it cannot restrict the freedom of critique through any prohibition without thereby harming itself and drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion.” by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, 1787)

1. Martha Nussbaum argues that emotions are not the opposite of reason but a form of evaluative judgement, carrying our beliefs about what truly matters for human flourishing.

2. Immanuel Kant is often regarded as the father of critical thinking because he insisted that reason must examine its own assumptions and submit every claim, even its own, to rigorous critique.

THOUGHT 2: Age of Unreason

Reason and Civilisation

Most of us want to live in a civilised world. We want to create spaces where we can go and feel good. Rarely do we like to be around unreasonable people with unreasonable ideas.

We like to think we live in a civilised world. But it seems that on a universal scale, we are losing the ability to use reason.

Whether in intellectual or emotional pursuits, reason matters in every scenario. Clever human beings who came much before us found it to be the most meaningful intellectual tool, enabling us to move beyond impulse and bias to reach judgements we can defend and live by.

If we do not use reason, we are at the whim of our impulses—and it is only through reason that we can assess whether an impulse is right or wrong.

I believe humans have the capacity to know that civil behaviour is better than the uncivilised kind, so this knowledge means we collectively try to strive to treat others well. We also believe in creating safe social spaces where we don’t kill or wound because we have long used our common sense to know that, collectively, this type of harmony and civility matters.

For a long time, we have known that healthy social relationships with friends, family, and community are directly tied to healthy minds and long-term mental wellbeing, so we sought out and protected these connections. From this personal knowledge grew a collective understanding—that cohesive and civil behaviour on a larger scale could sustain whole societies. It was this foundation that fuelled the great civil movements and the ongoing fight for basic human rights, social achievements born of our best application of intellectual reason. But now we see that all that hard-won progress is unravelling, and it’s happening at a very fast pace.

I believe it is because we are entering the age of unreason.

Science, Faith, and Contradiction

Ironically, we think ourselves so smart that we have reached this point of civil reason by stepping away from the church and its supposedly embarrassing religious doctrines. We came to see the church as anti-science, anti-reason, and far too “unreasonable” to imagine that traditional religion could still guide our way. We grew certain that the church’s way of thinking was simply not credible enough.

Why? Because science is for the “smart” and “civilised,” isn’t it? While the church—so the story goes—is for those who can’t think for themselves. We like to believe that civilised minds use methods of thought reserved for the privileged and the rational—we think so highly of ourselves that we believe we have minds that, since our departure from the church, we could never fall victim to dogmatic doctrine.

We like to tell ourselves we’re less religious now—and smarter for it—because we believe in science and know how to engage with it.

We do not believe in the church, yet—funny enough—we’ve mostly swapped one popular faith for another and are just as devout in our multiple new convictions: veganism, atheism, conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, capitalism, environmentalism—any-ism.

If we get down to its soul, the phenomenon is the same, but nobody really notices since they are heavily focused on emotion, as opposed to reason.

Cultural Oxymorons and Intellectual Paradoxes

What strikes me as most ridiculous is how quickly we embraced reason and rationalism as the highest form of thought. Yet that very rationalism has given rise to a kind of “science” that misuses social science to claim authority over universal cultural truths.

Social science itself is important because it helps us understand the cultural behaviours that shape the way we think. It shows how we can be blinded by social systems and structures, and how these forces influence our ideas, beliefs, and sense of identity. At its best, it reveals how deeply social life shapes who we are as people.

The phrase “universal cultural truth” is, by definition, unreasonable—an oxymoron.

Universal truth implies something that holds everywhere, for everyone, independent of culture. Cultural truth implies something that is true within a particular culture and shaped by its unique history, practices, and values.

For example, the nuanced cultural practices in your home may differ from those in another household, just as the cultural and social rules of one group may differ from those of another. Each community and society has innumerable social groups. Each group develops its own micro-rules that are often subtle, unspoken ways of being that cannot simply be transferred elsewhere.

Believing that we have factually and irrefutably found undeniable universal cultural truths creates a built-in tension: a truth may be cultural, or it may be universal, but it cannot coherently be both.

By definition, if something is cultural, that makes it context-dependent and not shared by everyone. If something is universal, it must apply to all humans regardless of culture. This means it is no longer a social fact.

The irony is there: while we discuss culture, identity, and experience, we persuade ourselves that we are speaking in the language of pure reason and objective truth. Yet these supposed truths are themselves social constructions, drawn from social science. The result is a paradox—it cancels itself out—because it is unreasonable to believe that all people think in the same way.

So now we come to how the rational and reasonable spectrum of sciences, which genuinely teach us a great deal but is instead being politically and media exploited as instruments of power.

Why are reasonable people who think about our longer-term view not leading our countries? Political parties, whether left or right, rarely sound reasonable, fair, or rational. Their focus is not on educating citizens or raising collective intellectual capacity, but on securing elections and clinging to power for the short-term; they will be there.

I believe it is possible to raise the overall consciousness of people through strong ethical leadership. Leadership that values open thinking, questioning, debating, disagreeing, and engaging in healthy discourse about the ideas we encounter. Instead, we have created a form of cultural authoritarianism and grounded it in social science.

What we now see is a split: the political left claims authority through social science rooted in cultural truths (which are rarely universal), while somehow empirical science and so-called universal truths are thrown into the right-wing arena. Universal or unchangeable truths connected to human beings are increasingly labelled “traditional,” and anything traditional is automatically cast as right-wing. This is odd, because science, curiosity, and intellectual progress, the very practices that fuel discovery and knowledge, have always been a left-of-centre pursuit.

Strangely, we now find empirical rational truth, and those who believe in the church as forced into the same category. Yet perhaps these points point to something deeper and more sophisticated than we realise…that spiritual needs are in fact universal, shared by all humans, and may even be a biological reality. What is striking is how little progress we have made in advancing our understanding of spirituality (the unknown and unmeasurable realm of the mind) since the grand Western rejection of the church. And since people are deeply emotional about science and what is considered “right,” we can’t even speak reasonably or fairly about the possibility that humans have spiritual needs that science may never be able to explain.

Final Thoughts

And so we arrive back at reason itself. Reason is the ability to assess what is reasonable. It is reasonable to recognise that people have different modes of thought, shaped by their cultures and experiences. It is also reasonable to accept that science, through its different disciplines, has used methods to reach conclusions worth respecting.

Reason also means recognising the difference between truths that are cultural and context-bound, and those that are universal and shared by all humans. But it is just as reasonable to think more deeply about human beings and our subjective spiritual needs, parts of our consciousness that science, and no other person, can ever reach.

The age of unreason will only deepen if we continue to abandon reason. Use reason in your daily life. Allow reasonable conversation. Be reasonable. Define what is reasonable. Recognise reason—and allow reasonable points to be made, especially when people use reason to make them.

Even if we begin only within our own circles, we can still lead a much-needed revolution in reasonable thought.

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITIES

Let’s go back to today’s quote in Thought 1.

Quote 1

Nussbaum is saying that emotions already contain a kind of reasoning: when you feel anger, love, or grief, you’re making an implicit (internal, unspoken, felt) judgement about what matters. Your emotions are often connected to your values.

To “use reason” with emotion means:

• Notice the judgement inside the feeling. Ask, What beliefs about values are my emotions expressing?

• Check that belief with evidence and reflection. Is the value I’m ascribing accurate or fair? Do others have different beliefs, and are they also reasonable? What makes something reasonable and fair?

• Adjust if needed. Let reason refine or correct the judgement. Your emotion becomes a guide to your felt experiences, and by knowing this, you will not allow that emotion to be used as a blind impulse at times when it is not right to do so. By respecting emotions, you will also be able to orient reason to those personal intrinsic emotional needs.

Quote 2

In this quote, I take Kant to be saying that despite our belief in our own reason, reason must keep turning its critical eye on itself. You can’t just assume its conclusions are right.

To “use reason” with this idea, you could:

• Examine your own thinking. Ask, What assumptions am I making in this argument?

• Test those assumptions. Look for counterexamples, alternative explanations, or evidence that might weaken your position. Patterns and evidence of counterexamples are everywhere, yet most of us don’t see them since our biases blind us.

• Stay open to correction. Accept that even your best reasoning can be improved or overturned. It can!

We practice reason by letting it question its own methods and conclusions, and this is so that our thinking remains trustworthy rather than self-protective.

In short, we don’t treat emotion and reason as enemies because once we let reason uncover and evaluate the judgements our emotions already contain, we can understand them and integrate them within our reasonable understanding.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781/1787).
→ Kant examines the limits and structures of human reason, distinguishing between what we can know through experience and what lies beyond possible knowledge.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2001). Upheavals of thought: The intelligence of emotions. Cambridge University Press.
→ Nussbaum argues that emotions are not irrational impulses but forms of cognition that reveal what we value, making them central to ethical reasoning, justice, and human flourishing.

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Share Sociologic by Dr Esha Lovrić

Today’s letter explores how we separate and categorise knowledge to understand what it is, where it comes from, and its potential for truth. This is the starting point for thinking critically about any type of information.

THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE

“There are different kinds of knowledge, all equally necessary to the perfection of human life: knowledge of what is true, knowledge of what is good, and knowledge of what is beautiful.”
— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

THOUGHT 2: The Foundations of Knowledge

Modern humans are in what I call an epistemology crisis; in everyday terms, we can call this a knowledge crisis. Epistemology is academic waffle, and usually, I try not to use these words in regular conversations about everyday information and knowledge, but you, the modern human, and those who rely on you, now need to know these concepts. Epistemology matters because it shows how knowledge is created and used. These ideas shouldn’t be gatekept behind academic walls—we’re at a turning point for intellectual freedom, and I want us to be part of it together.

So our ability to recognise how to turn information into knowledge is a skill we have to develop. During the intensive PhD period, for example, we’re trained to do exactly that through critical thinking.

The Foundations Of Our Thoughts

We all use some sort of epistemological grounding for information we believe to be true. This has always happened. While we each have our own cognitive propensities that shape our interests, what we believe often depends on culture and other socially constructed facts. Our community, society, or the people we rely on for information are good at convincing us of what should guide our foundations for thinking for most of our lives, especially in early life. These, then, turn into values and beliefs. This is normal and very common—everyone has some kind of basis that anchors their thinking. And there are also important reasons for that. But we will unpack that further later.

Epistemology is the nature of knowledge, that is > how we justify what we believe to be true.

For example, some good questions to guide us to explore the root of the knowledge we seek and rely on might be:

• How do we know what we know?

• How can we tell whether our knowledge is reliable?

• How do we know if our beliefs are justified?

Today, many people are also experiencing knowledge confusion (an epistemological war) due to the clever tricks of mass media, which know exactly how to exploit human emotions and while most people are none the wiser. If we are taught how to think, or why to think, then we do not need to lose.

The modern knowledge war looks like this: some people believe the notion that all things they can see, witness, and feel are more likely to be socially constructed ( external to people, minds, bodies, and brains). Because of this belief, they may downplay the role and contribution of biological knowledge. Others might argue the opposite ideas—that human behavior is entirely driven by biology and evolution (internal, neurological, body, and brain), and they might reduce the contribution of socially constructed facts and other social processes that influence our thoughts and ideas.

Let’s look at some real human-created epistemologies that we use in academia that guide how we understand knowledge:

Empiricism

• Core idea: Knowledge comes mainly through sense experience—seeing, hearing, testing, observing.

• Focus: Observation and evidence.

• Example: We know water boils at 100 °C (at sea level) because repeated measurements confirm it, or you know fire is hot because you have been burned and literally felt it.

Rationalism

• Core idea: Knowledge can also come from reason and logic, independent of direct sensory experience.

• Focus: Deduction, mathematics, logical principles.

• Example: You can know that 2 + 2 = 4 or that a triangle’s angles add up to 180° without measuring any physical object.

Positivism

• Core idea: Only knowledge that is empirically observable and scientifically verifiable counts as real knowledge.

• Focus: Applying the scientific method and rejecting metaphysical or untestable claims.

• Example: A scientific law is accepted as knowledge only if it can be tested and confirmed through experiment.

Social Constructionism

• Core idea: Much of what we call knowledge is built collectively—through culture, language, and shared habits—rather than discovered as fixed facts of nature.

• Scope: This umbrella also includes feminist standpoint theories and post-modern perspectives, which examine how power and social position shape what counts as “truth.”

• Examples:

  • The idea of money has value only because we all agree it does.

  • In hospitals, decisions such as which symptoms are checked first or which patients are treated as more urgent follow agreed practices, not purely biological or medical facts.

  • Dress codes by season: the idea that you “must” wear black to a funeral or white to a wedding—there’s no natural reason, it’s a shared custom.

  • Table manners: using cutlery in a particular way, or thinking it’s rude to slurp soup—these are agreed social rules, not biological needs.

  • A woman may notice patterns of gender bias that a man might miss, simply because her lived perspective reveals things his cannot.

BUT it is important to know that epistemologies and knowledge often intersect and overlap all the time.

For example, the way we understand postpartum depression can be seen through several lenses:

• Socially constructed, because modern societies have fallen into a social system where mothers are raising infants largely on their own. These changes in modern systems might be one reason we see an increase in postpartum depression and increased anxiety in new mothers.

• Based on empiricism, as medical studies and clinical data show, the biological and hormonal changes after childbirth contribute to a higher probability of mood disorders.

• Grounded in positivism, which holds that only knowledge confirmed through observable, measurable evidence—like clinical data on hormonal shifts and mood patterns—counts as reliable.

• Supported by rationalism, since even before large-scale studies, we can reason that humans are a highly social species, so isolating a new mother is likely to create stress and emotional strain.

This example shows how one human experience is explained at once by cultural norms, biological evidence, logical reasoning, and cross-cultural observation—different epistemologies overlapping in practice.

There is also an epistemology less common in science (but very common in philosophy) and therefore often misunderstood by people still exploring how to gain and validate knowledge in life. Philosophers call this “mysticism” or spiritual epistemology. It asks whether spiritual or religious (awe, qualia) experience can itself be a source of knowledge. The claim is that people can gain genuine knowledge of God (or the unseen, unexplainable, the unmeasurable), ultimate reality, or the nature of consciousness—through direct spiritual experience, meditation, revelation, or inner insight. Examples:

• A Buddhist monk who, after years of meditation, claims to know the “self” is an illusion.

• A Christian mystic, such as Teresa of Ávila, reports an encounter with the divine as real knowledge of God’s presence.

• Indigenous traditions where visions, dreams, or shamanic journeys are treated as a way of knowing truths about the land and community.

The way we think as humans, and how we access and interpret real-world knowledge, is almost always built from a mix rather than any single way of knowing. It draws on our biological realities, psychological tendencies, cultural influences, and the spiritual experiences that shape how we make sense of life. This is interesting to say the least!

Before we could hear ideas from all parts of the world simultaneously, we grappled with them mainly in our local contexts, among people whose views were often similar to ours, or if not, they were usually just a little beyond our zone of understanding, so our brains could manage it. Now, with the data revolution, we regularly encounter ideas that might be epistemologically foreign to the families and friends we spend time with, creating a tension between broad intellectual exchange and the views of our own “tribes”.

An epistemology or knowledge crisis happens where, despite having so much information and knowledge at our fingertips and the chance for more intellectual expansion than ever before, people can no longer tell which information is true, which part of life it relates to, or how to use it. As a result, each way of thinking is clashing with the others.

Many intersecting factors construct our lives, and it is up to us to take the time to recognise what those are.

1. Personality propensities—such as temperament, character traits, and habitual patterns—need to be first understood, guided, strengthened, tamed, and nurtured. (Personality is part of our psychological wiring and therefore sits within the biological domain, but often it is separated for ease of understanding.)

2. Biological needs, from basic physiological drives to the influence of genetics and neurochemistry, shape our choices, behaviours, feelings, and overall needs.

3. Social experiences—the relationships, people, cultural norms, religious beliefs, values, and shared expectations and habits we grow up with and are trained through influence how we think, feel, and act.

Because of the different ways humans think, our academic pursuits have mirrored that. They were never created to replace one another; our intellectual pursuits in each domain were to extend and learn more.

CASE STUDY

I am going to give you a personal example of how to use critical thinking across a balance of epistemologies to understand my experience of being bullied as a child. My family played a large part in how I viewed that treatment.

Throughout primary school, I was bullied, and everyone close to me in my South Asian cultural community insisted it was racism. Racism certainly exists, but the pattern I lived through was more complex: my bullies were also children from difficult homes, and I know my own temperament and behaviour played a part since I had problems outside of school too. I could see that, evidently, my Indian friend, who shared my cultural background, was treated with respect by the same bullies. That simple observation is empiricism: noticing the evidence right in front of me. I began to think about what I did that was different from what she did.

Looking back now, social constructionism explains how both my community and my bullies’ families were shaped by cultural narratives and social conditioning about what counts as “racism” or “status.” Rationalism helps me reason that children who suffer at home often pass their pain on, and bullies bully, so their bullying was not simply about race.

I didn’t know these terms as a child, but the experience shows how observation, logic, and an understanding of social forces can work together to reveal a truth far more layered than any single explanation. And because I chose this way of thinking, I’ve been able to move forward and succeed, while many I know who keep blaming racism for every setback still reach for excuses instead of starting by testing these automatic assumptions.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that humans can apply critical thinking well to phenomena that are non-human and non-emotional, but when we turn that lens on other people and their ideas, I see that critical thinking alone is not enough. In these circumstances, the best of us often easily revert to emotional responses, and our intellect takes an immediate back seat. Those with emotional intelligence (EQ) do better because EQ helps us recognise our own biases and where they might come from.

Much of the conflict we see online is really a clash of these ways of knowing—and of the social conditioning behind them. Our families, communities, and cultures shape the habits of mind we bring to every argument, as well as other parts of us, as we have ascertained. Even academics and scientists are trained in the particular epistemologies of their disciplines.

Seeing this for what it is helps us recognise that many arguments are not just about the facts, but about the different kinds of knowledge people draw on to “see.” Spending time talking about these different ways of thinking—about the big sources that feed our thoughts—is time well spent. I urge you to try it.

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITIES

This week’s exercise: Spot the way of knowing

1. Pick one everyday claim you’ve heard recently.
   For example:

   • “Drinking two litres of water a day improves concentration.”

   • “Teenagers are more influenced by friends than by parents.”

   • “Fed is best.” (relating to breastfeeding vs. formula feeding).

2. Ask yourself:
   – What type of knowledge is this claim built on?

   • Empiricism: backed by research or repeated observation?

   • Rationalism: worked out by reasoning or logic?

   • Social constructionism: a belief we share because culture says so?

   • Positivism: confirmed through measurable, scientific data?

   • Spiritual/mystical: drawn from inner or religious experience?

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Share Sociologic by Dr Esha Lovrić

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The Book’s Idea: The Little Prince is about a young, otherworldly prince who travels from planet to planet, meeting a series of characters, each representing different human traits and flaws. Through his encounters, the Little Prince explores themes of love, loneliness, responsibility, and the search for meaning. It emphasises that true understanding, deep appreciation, and meaningful human cognitive connections come from emotional insight (emotional intelligence) rather than mere physical sight (quantifiable evidence).

The Author: Before becoming famous for his literature, Antoine worked as a commercial pilot and flew reconnaissance missions during World War II. His experiences as a pilot, mainly solitary flights across deserts and oceans, deeply shaped his reflective and humanistic writing. He had to use his intellect to fly the plane, yet his heart led him to make sense of his journeys.

As we reflect on Antoine and his journey towards the invention of “The Little Prince”, I want to bring attention to how much Antoine’s silent, reflective periods mattered to orient his head and his heart. That story has had a profound philosophical effect on human beings all around the world, regardless of culture, religion, background, identity, or circumstance. Its impact illustrates the interconnectedness between all humans in its deepest sense.

Social noise and millions of ideas are simply distractions when they are heard without time to connect to the consciousness that can process them. Antoine spent hours with his head and his heart alone, looking at the world below from up above.

HEAD AND HEART

Humanities Struggle Against Reason

This piece is about the human heart and its power.

I will look at recent events in America as a lens for the struggle between head and heart (aka reason and emotion).

The human heart needs to feel right; until it does, it cannot be quieted.

I am far away, nowhere near U.S soil, and usually I protect my mind from the constant bombardment of terrible news, divided America, and the media’s self-serving constructions of reality, but this week I cannot look away.

America is falling apart at its systemic seams. Its heart is broken, and its head hurts.

People do not know how to feel about any of it or what to do.

It is hard to continue speaking with reason as opposed to just choosing instead to sit and stare at the horizon, and just lean into the feeling.

To name a few of the back-to-back events which have pulled at America’s heart and silenced its reason, are the political assassinations of Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman in their home on June 14, 2025; the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on August 22, 2025, by a man with a long criminal and mental health history; the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, shot and killed just a few days ago on September 10, 2025, while speaking at Utah Valley University; and another school shooting at Evergreen High School, Colorado, on the same day, yet another shocking, painful addition to the unimaginable string of weekly school shootings thanks to America’s peculiar (and politicised) relationship with guns.

Why should the world care about America?

Well, first, it’s in most of our feeds, which means it’s in most of our minds. So, we need to make sense of its culture since it forcibly bleeds into all of our lives. For a long time, America, or at least its progressive Western values, has been regarded as a beacon of hope toward the intellectual benefits of free speech, open expression, and human rights. These are often seen as important values on which the advancement of modern civilisation depends. Many neighbouring countries have, sometimes unconsciously, adopted these ideals because they promise the freedoms and opportunities that underpin a more open society. Collectively, we hoped that it would help us be seen with more individuality and to treat one another better, and to live more civil lives.

**Research in sociology and public health shows that when societies grow more individualised, that is, less community-oriented, rates of loneliness, anxiety, and political polarisation start to rise, while trust and civic engagement decline.

Usually, I choose not to write opinionated pieces about politics, as it easily inflames division and is not conducive to the balance of thought humans are capable of. But this week, it feels wrong to write a letter without bringing attention to and paying respect to those who have lost their lives as a result of this crazy cultural war, as well as what people are desperately trying to make sense of.

Bad things happen everywhere in the world, and we must not ever forget that we usually and unreasonably care mostly about what we see more often, since it evokes feelings. But recently, a string of major events has shaken those who once trusted in what were long seen as the guiding ideals of the West, and many are unwilling to accept that this might be the path we are now taking.

So, people are asking where to go from here. Up? Down? Back?

Social tensions are at an all-time high.

The human heart does not often sit quietly in times like these. In these times, our intellectual mind struggles to find a place at the front. When things no longer seem fair or rational or reasonable, our raw primal human instinct takes over, and we become mad, angry, upset, unfair, irrational, and sometimes unreasonably violent.

We react based on how we feel, and we cannot think clearly.

It is a shame because, with wider access to science and education, we have been realising our human capacity for intelligence and civil conduct, drawing on logic, reason, and emotional intelligence. We have been slowly refining the way we speak and think: to try to be tolerant, fair, flexible, coherent, brave, factual, aware, and to consciously cultivate all the cognitive traits that deepen our connections with one another in our path to understanding the logic behind human diversity and ideas.

Despite all that, we observe, our intellect and reason can be thrown out in a flash.

Except maybe this is what it’s all about. Just like Antoine tried to illustrate as he wrote The Little Prince, that for humans, matters of the heart can never be intellectualised, no matter how hard we try. The human spirit is far too entrenched in a deep, unexplainable need to be oriented by the heart, and so the heart must find its place in the world. If we do not do this, and we risk allowing the wounded heart to guide us, then we are instead making choices driven by pain and resentment rather than by clear judgement.

How do we rationalise to heal our hearts and understand what is happening in America?

When I think about why this is happening to America, and try to rationalise it intellectually, I can see the long chain of events in the system of things that might have brought it here.

If we go back to the rise of free speech as a democratic ideal, to the right of anyone to stand for political office, democratic freedom seems to have been the best thing we have had to enable every voice to have the opportunity to be heard. Layered over this is the country’s unresolved history of slavery and segregation. This is all calculatedly inflamed by the tight grip of media and political campaigns that keep these wounds raw and fuel partisan divisions just to predict the same voting patterns. At the same time, the rising tide of Western mental health struggles, driven by an epidemic of loneliness, and that issue is colliding head-on with the widespread availability of firearms.

When the mind is in chaos, psychological turmoil erodes rational thought.

It is important to know that social and major media popularise ideologies that serve political campaigns and economic gain; they are not there to deepen public understanding and nurture intellect. Their motivations are to provoke strong emotion so that the intellectual mind is suppressed. It is a proven evidence-based psychological marketing strategy for mammoth economic gain. They are smart, and they are greedy. So here, the powerful and rich and clever use calculated headwork and intelligence to agitate the hearts of ordinary people. And people really get agitated.

People just cannot see this because the pull of the heart is so powerful.

All of this brings attention to when our outside worlds are not aligning with the needs of our inner world. When this happens, we are less likely to be rational and reasonable or use critical thought.

The same freedom that has allowed us equally to feel we have a right to be seen and heard also has had the capacity to become a mental monster.

We have not been taught how to pause long enough for clear thought to catch up with raw feeling, so our reactions begin to define us more than our reasoning.

To watch America drift towards a culture that cannot tolerate dissent is unsettling. Only because there are probably so many more terrible acts to come before this will end.

So, what do we need?

This far into my work, where I think a lot about how we behave socially and why we do these things, we need to really think about in what conditions we perform best as well as the worst.

So far, in my view, the most reasonable, fair, and influential people share a pattern. They use critical thinking to decide which information is worth turning into applied knowledge. At the same time, their respect for critical thinking and ability to apply intelligence makes them aware of the need to build emotional self-awareness, which in turn strengthens emotional intelligence. Critical thinking helps them make intelligent decisions; emotional intelligence helps them work with people intelligently. All of this aids in strengthening their social intelligence (the clarity in how they see social facts connect). They see more clearly because they use multiple intelligences to view the world with a little more objectivity than usual.

In my eyes, the real modern-day culprit is the intolerance for disagreement.

An intelligent civilisation sees differences of opinion as disagreements that require fair debate and discussion; an unintelligent or at least very unhelpful and socially unfruitful approach is responding to differences in opinion as if they were a biological threat.

We have begun to pressure others to validate us not through the strength of our character, the fairness and human logic in our words, or the ethical substance of our social achievements, but simply by forced acceptace of us, as we are, the way we are, even when what we do is seen as wrong, unjust, lazy, careless, selfish, or unfair to others who have an equal right to be heard.

As a culture, when someone resists our ideas, we take it personally because we have tied our identity to those ideas. And human beings are deeply in desperate need to have an identity and to feel belonging. We are deeply social, hence the need for an outward identity, and that is tied intrinsically to our basic biological needs to be accepted and included somewhere.

The rising and multiple social identities we have created seem to be deeply problematic socially for us as a collective, united, and peaceful citizens, because there are too many people with too many ideas, and all are intolerant of other ideas. We are simply pitting one identity against another, group against group, person against person, and so everyone is in disagreement all the time.

When our social position (or identity) is challenged, even in words, we do not like it, and we take that as a personal threat to who we are. And since we value ourselves so much more than anything else, we have become intolerant of disagreement. We view disagreement as a rejection of us, as opposed to realising the profound intellectual opportunity to think more about why the resistance exists in the first place.

This is bad.

In short, we need our ideas to be challenged if we are to think.

If you want your intelligence to mature, you must accept that there will be people who trigger you emotionally, but this strange, primal discomfort will give you the opportunity to reflect and consider what is happening intellectually.

And we need not resort to killing or violence when we hear words we do not like.

Whatever happened to the lesson we teach our children, almost universally dear adults? “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

The words are not literally true; words can, of course, hurt our feelings, but it is a cultural shorthand for the importance of emotional resilience.

We need emotional intelligence to be able to know when to activate critical thinking for human problems. The Western world, with its celebration of equal speech, has become almost drunk on the desire to be heard, everyone speaking at once, each believing their voice carries greater moral weight than another’s. When we turn values into political weapons, we risk stopping the very thinking those values require.

I don’t have to agree with everything people say—and I don’t. Do I have strong opinions? Of course. Do you? Of course you do. I’m often irritated, annoyed, even enraged or unsettled by some ideas. I also fantasise about deleting people from my life permanently, and sometimes I do (after thinking about it). But despite my feelings, I know intellectually that those voices must exist if civilisation and our collective intelligence are to prevail. I need them to provoke me emotionally so that my intellect is forced to step in and make sense of what is being said.

Without that kind of provocation, we will not think.

And if a person is only using words, I know that friction is not a physical and biological threat; my intellect tells me that, and I dust myself off and prepare to face another day of potential interaction with idiots.

We need people who will challenge our ideas and offer different points of view to keep our minds working. When we no longer respect the value and need for our thinking to be tested, we stop being forced to think.

In America, emotions have been given such a dominant front seat that reason is now often left behind. The heart is not the enemy, and emotions are not either. They are the differences that make us human, and they guide us toward compassion and justice, and empathy. But we need emotional intelligence to understand the ways of the heart, and we need our human intellect to even reach that sort of sophisticated understanding about human cultural complexity.

Final Thoughts

History suggests that societies eventually rediscover a balance. During the Great Depression, the poet Carl Sandburg captured human resilience when he wrote in The People, Yes (1936):

“The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold and go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.”

I do not think Sandburg was being naïve or primitive. He knew people could be deceived and divided, but he also believed that after turmoil, they return to what steadies them, that is, community, shared values, the grounding “rootholds” that make clear thinking possible again. It is that capacity to recover our footing, to let the heart feel, and then call the head back into the conversation.

Many non-Western societies thrive on shared and collective values today, and despite life’s hardships, they return at the end of the day to homes where hearts try to unite and the intellect is put away for the evening. The West has often viewed this as backward, primitive, or dismissive of important intellect, and yes, to an extent that can be true, but it still gives us much to consider about how we balance matters of the heart and matters of the head. If we do not continue to fight for that internal balance, I am afraid we will all end up feeling like America does today.

Thanks for reading my thoughts.

Today, I have no activities or links for more services or recommended books. It just feels wrong. Just sit in now and think about what and who heals your heart and where in the world you are when everything feels exactly right. Go there today.

From my heart and mind to yours,

Esha.

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Welcome back. Today, I am going to write about the importance of flow for our minds to breathe.

Today’s trio of thoughts:

THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

In “I know Why The Caged Bird Sings” a book written by Maya Angelou, 1969.

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist, singer, dancer, actress, and civil rights activist.

She’s best known for her series of seven autobiographies, the first of which, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), brought her international recognition. That book tells the story of her early life, exploring themes of racism, identity, resilience, and the power of words.

Beyond her literary work, she was active in the civil rights movement, working with both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Over her lifetime, she became a cultural icon for her wisdom, artistry, and ability to capture the human experience—especially themes of struggle, hope, and liberation.

Maya’s work was in relation to the civil rights movement in America, but so much of her work can be understood also in relation to the mind.

Her famous metaphor of the “caged bird” is most directly about racial oppression and the longing for freedom. The “cage” can be understood more broadly as the many ways humans are restricted: physically, mentally, socially, psychologically, and spiritually.

Our journey is in finding ourselves first. If you want to, that is.

THOUGHT 2: Those Who Enable Flow

It never ceases to amaze me how much intellectual potential we carry, and how society is so effective at narrowing it. Sometimes, these boundaries may be necessary, so we focus on the job at hand or finish a specific task, or meet a defined goal. But beyond those specific instances, as humans who have access to the modern world, we have access to an abundance of knowledge that can help us know more. Do more. Be more.

We are both disablers and enablers. We are restricted and we restrict. As we become aware, we can try and reduce our instinctive and selfish human tendency to restrict the thinking potential of others. We can do this by enabling the flow of others.

We can also be better thinkers and have so much capacity, but we need to put ourselves in positions to be able to enable ourselves the opportunity to become better thinkers. And if you are in charge of others, whether they be little or big, it is your job to inspire the best in them.

There are ways to do this.

To think, we need to be allowed to do it. And we have many external social factors in society as well as in our internal biological wiring, that hold us back and keep us the same.

We are all being held back by our pasts, our social settings, and our mental wiring.

IN CHILDHOOD OUR MINDS STILL REST

Our thinking habits are deeply entrenched. It doesn’t mean they are all wrong; they just ARE for a reason.

I am going to share my story, which, like yours, started when I was a child.

Looking back, I can see how much my environment—and the people in it—limited my thinking opportunities.

Now, as a mother of three, I’m acutely aware of how easily I could either support or restrict my children’s own thinking potential if I react unconsciously, without pausing to consider (second-order critical thinking) what might be right or wrong in that instance. I am always trying to catch myself between giving them the structure to feel safe, but encouraging the freedom to keep going.

As an adult, I have spent many years trying to allow myself to find the core me, because I know that is where my strengths lie, and that is where yours do too. Slowly, as I have found myself, I can be unapologetically me. It is liberating to know that I have so many strengths that I didn’t know existed because I was too busy trying to be the person the world wanted me to be.

There was no question that I was raised in a very loving household. And that was most important. There was love—and there was a lot of it. My parents cared about my brother and me deeply, and we felt that.

But they were also part of a very strong cultural unit. And the tradition of that deep cultural embedding was to do most of the thinking for their children. The community we were part of—Indian—was also very much a familial umbrella, where the family as a unit, but also as an extension of the community, did the thinking for you.

There was little encouragement to explore the individual mind. It was often the collective mind that mattered, and of course, that makes some valuable sense if you are part of a unit that needs to work together and for one another.

NEW IDEAS

But to be better than you are, we must explore new ideas.

And new ideas happen as we encounter something new with the old. That is, as we interact with the felt and known self, with the novel things happening in the world. This is where the magic happens.

Growing up, if I had a question, the answer would simply be told to me. I am naturally an extremely outwardly observant and curious person, and so as a child, if I showed any beginnings of curiosity, the gap in thought was quickly filled with whatever the fastest adult in the room thought was the best answer. The answer was usually culturally appropriate and turned towards the way they thought I should be turned.

Culturally, as a general experience, there wasn’t much encouragement to explore the mind. The ideas they decided were best were passed down and around, keeping everyone in a tight little community of thoughts and beliefs…and values.

Now, this serves many psychological and social benefits because we need to feel like we belong, connect with people and places, and that we are included somewhere by some people. We need to see ourselves in others and recognise a familiar face and words of comfort. I suspect this is why the feeling of home feels so damn good. So parents and communities have many ways of doing things to make sure the people they love and care for stay close and don’t get the type of bright ideas that move them away from the tribe…from home. There are, of course, negatives to this because it doesn’t create the conditions for ideas to come in and be explored. When ideas are explored, we expand, trigger synapses, and we can benefit hugely from this mental expansion.

What’s interesting is that cognitively and intellectually, we have the actual neurological capacity to do it. Many of us barely do it, though.

It is the social setting that often limits us. What we need to ask is, does this way of thinking still serve us?

Being a migrant meant I was also part of a larger society that did not share these micro-community rules (they had their own), and I became too curious about the games other people were playing.

Curiosity always got the better of me, and now, when I look back, it served me very well (despite finding myself in many tricky situations). I followed the unknown paths many times and worked it out. But because I had never been taught how to explore my mind and its ideas, I didn’t really do it for many years. No one gave me the tools to explore my mind’s full capacity. No one said I could, no one asked me questions in a way that showed me that there is so much more where that came from.

At university, I was given the tools to open up my mind. For the first time in my life, I was given the chance to take an idea, read about it, intersect it with other ideas, and take the chance to practice and create innovative thought. This was the most mentally enriching experience I have ever had. It was like someone took the cap off the bottle. Everything poured out.

I could think about anything.

FLOW ENABLERS

I often watch closely to see who enables thought to flow and who limits it. We are all part of groups and systems that either expand or restrict our potential. We know the people who, in conversation, make us feel free to speak openly and fully. And we know the others—the ones with whom we fall into petty conflicts, where every word feels like it must be measured, where we worry more about saying the right thing—or avoiding the wrong thing—than actually thinking together. Our fullest selves emerge when we are in environments that allow us to express, explore, and stretch our thinking further and further.

Of course, we all need some rules of thought—otherwise we’d never reach agreement or solutions. But there must be balance, and, as with everything, there is nuance. Intelligence lies in recognising that nuance. It is never black or white. We need the freedom to think openly and with flow, but also the discipline to direct ourselves, to face the right direction, rather than being pulled off course by every passing thought or idea.

BUT HOW WILL YOU KNOW WHAT IS AIDING AND WHAT IS HINDERING?

Well, you are the best guide. But be careful of those pesky instincts that might push you to be offended instead of being open and reflective. You need to judge what is happening for you in the environment and how you can operate within in.

Pay attention to the feeling it triggers. Do you feel able to share openly and move with the natural flow of the conversation—building, creating, and syncing with others? Or do you feel the need to hold back, hesitate, and measure every word in case it’s taken as wrong?

The environment itself can be the guide. Notice what it allows you to do. Notice which people bring the best out in you and observe what they do to enable that. Observe what shuts you down.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: put yourself in spaces—and with people—that give your mind room to breathe. That’s where flow begins.

Note: This is one idea for today. Another important part of triggering good thinking is being asked challenging questions. Like anything, it requires nuance. We need flow, and we need questions that trigger reflection. When a conversation feels restrictive, that’s when emotion takes over and pulls your focus inward; it stops being a space for innovation, creativity, and intellectual progress. Instead, it becomes a place that redirects your attention to your own internal triggers. And that’s a matter for another day.

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITIES

Reflect on the following:

Are you someone who enables the people around you to stretch their thinking?

You can know if you are that person by thinking about how often you move with the flow and how often you become distracted and might interrupt the flow.

Do you often put rules around what should be and what should not? Do others agree with your rules? Why are these the rules to begin with?

Are you in environments where thinking outside the box is encouraged?

Do you feel you want to do more, but you are being limited?

Are the people around you bringing the best out in you, or are you feeling boxed or caged?

Readings and references

Caged Bird, a Poem by Maya Angelou

https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/caged-bird/

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihály Csikszentmihályi

This is a great book in PDF form about creativity and flow, and I’d encourage you to read it.

The book shows how creative lives balance paradoxes like discipline and play, solitude and collaboration, and explains how social and institutional settings can either nurture or suppress innovation.

It gives a strong foundation for understanding how humans spark creativity within themselves. We all have it—the ability to think innovatively. And it’s not limited to physical inventions. It’s just as much about the inventions of the mind: inventive thoughts, fresh perspectives, new ideas. The phenomenon is the same. What we need is flow and interconnections between the self (biology/personality/character), the social setting (context/environment), and what we know (knowledge/intellect).

https://inspiredbyislam.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/creativity-flow-and-the-psychology-of-discovery-and-invention-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-z-lib.org_.pdf

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Please note that I undertake all of this public work voluntarily and at my own expense. I do this while trying to work to make a living as well as look after my young family, so I cannot offer all of my work for free. Some of my services are paid. However, I promise you I will never place my regular Sunday Synapse Newsletter under subscription or behind a paywall. It will always be free. I share all that I know there. I am also around in the comments to have chats when I can. Thank you for being here with me. I am so grateful to you all.

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Today’s trio of thoughts:

THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE

“Social intelligence shows itself abundantly in the nursery, on the playground, in barracks and factories and salesrooms, but it eludes the formal standardized conditions of the testing laboratory. It requires human beings to respond to, time to adapt its responses, and face, voice, gesture, and mien as tools.”
— Thorndike, 1920

We can observe those who are socially intelligent as they can navigate the world with more ease. They seem to understand people and their ways; in doing this, they make better social decisions, or at least they are not suffered so easily by the social practices of others.

THOUGHT 2: Understanding Society and Its People

Critical Thinking + Emotional Intelligence = Social Intelligence

To make better social decisions, you need to understand the self as well as how you assess the world.

To do this, you need critical thinking (CT) plus emotional intelligence (EQ).

I think the best chance you have to live a good social life is how well you recognise when and what to adapt or when to change something in your environment. This enables a healthy connection between psychological and social health—and vice versa. If you’re experiencing psychological or emotional chaos internally, there may be things in your social world you haven’t yet addressed. If parts of your social world aren’t meeting your psychological needs, it will eventually show up in your mind and emotions.

How do I know if something is wrong?

There are cues everywhere in society about this. The relationship between you and society is with you. Observe it.

Lean into the self and let it guide you; let it alert you to what needs attention. Your emotions will try and blame the world, your CT skill will help you identify it. Our EQ and CT immediately reduce when we are upset. We can not think clearly.

When we shout, scream, blame, or attack—those reactions are usually the body’s stress response and the raw, primal self speaking. Afterward, we feel guilt, shame, and this is our body telling us we went against our own values. We can not always control this always but we can try to.

Psychology shows us that CT is a cognitive skill: the ability to slow down, question assumptions, and regulate emotions. We know that our history and how we were raised contribute to how we respond to conflict. Neuroscience goes further and tells us that when we pause and reflect, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for reasoning—steps in to regulate the emotional impulses of the amygdala (the part that controls our emotions). Knowing this information helps when we are thinking intellectually about human behaviour and the social behaviours of humans.

So, what about sociologically? How does the social world connect to this?

Our social world and relationship with it, our practices, movements, expectations, jobs, and communities all interact with the self. These social processes are the external phenomena that interact with internal phenomena. As a sociologist, what I want you to see is that your social world is deeply and intrinsically part of this process. The cues, patterns, and relationships around you are what will help alert you to what is working, what is not, and what you may need to do. Sometimes you adjust and change to evolve, other times you change something in your environment. But at all times, you need to stop, think, and negotiate the facts with feelings.

Now, the issue for most people is first knowing what requires slow, critical thinking, as well as how to actually react and respond.

What is the right thing to do when something is not going well?

Let’s say you are having a problem with another person. You are getting into small, petty frictions with them. It’s annoying. Your amygdala is going off, and you feel emotional, angry, and frustrated. In these circumstances, it is very hard to slow down and think before you speak.

Just know that this primal feeling is your intuition popping up, and it’s hard to control it, and it will answer first if you don’t have time to engage the critical thinking part of the brain. This will happen often, because we usually don’t have the time to pause and respond—especially in situations that require a response in real time. The thinking and reflection can happen afterward. You may ask yourself:

• Why did I react that way?

• What in me is triggered by this type of interaction?

• What am I transferring into this interaction?

• Why is this person behaving that way?

• What are they countertransferring?

• What is their role? Personality type? Social facts?

In the psychotherapeutic sector, which I have written a lot about in my own scientific research, this process is known as transference and countertransference. But when you break it down, what it really means is that we are constantly transferring and countertransferring parts of ourselves into the interaction. And if it’s a situation of friction, we get locked into that back-and-forth—transferring and countertransferring from our intuitive centres.

Ok, but I am a critical thinker and have emotional intelligence, though?

You have the ability for both, but you won’t do both effectively all the time.

What many people think is that if they learn CT or increase their EQ, they’ll be able to handle these situations better. And yes, that’s true to a certain extent. But even if you are the world’s best therapist, cool and calm, or you have exceptionally high EQ and CT skills, you will still have moments of complete emotional chaos where there’s simply no time to activate the tools in your toolbox.

So what do we do with all of this?

It’s a reminder that living well is not about avoiding friction or eliminating difficult interactions. It’s about using those very interactions as social cues to think: to notice what is happening, and why it is happening, to understand it. When we know how our mind and body operate together, we have more control over our responses and reactions. When we begin to see these dynamics—why people behave the way they do, and what is unfolding in the moment—you can start to think much more objectively about the situation.

Critical thinking allows you to pause, analyse, and step back from your raw reactions. Emotional intelligence helps you recognise the psychological processes—your own and those of the other person—in real time. Together, they don’t magically solve your problems, but they do give you the ability to see why some things in your social world are working and why others are not.

What is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to recognise what information you can use to adapt and improve. Social intelligence, to me, is the way you observe, draw on, and apply information to your life and your world socially, to improve it. How well you adapt to a changing social environment reflects how well you are able to apply and use your intelligence.

I think critical thinking is intelligent thinking, as you need to draw on the intellectual part of the brain. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is more about understanding the psychological processes of the self and of others—how history, experience, and biology shape a person. It is also intelligent thinking.

There’s plenty of academic work that shows how our environment, social histories, and biological realities shape our neurological conditions and, in turn, our thinking and how we choose to interpret and respond. This is why I believe CT—pausing to consider what might be true, especially about human beings—actually supports the growth of EQ. The two are powerful when practised together, though I think we need to learn critical thinking to heighten emotional intelligence, and this takes time. Those who have matured their EQ usually have done so through careful reflection on their thoughts, ideas, and biases, consciously learning about humans and their complexities.

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITIES

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking

STEP 1: Recognise knowledge gaps

The first step is recognising that there is information you don’t even know exists. Trust me—you know very little about most things and maybe a lot about a few things. This is why those who truly begin to learn and read become more and more humble about what they think they know. They crack the code of knowledge: there is so much of it, and the realisation humbles them at the thought that they ever believed they “knew” something.

You can recognise these people. They are careful with their words: may, could, must, perhaps, it has been written, I heard, my observation is… Those who have not yet cracked this code often come across as very certain. You can identify both types of people quickly.

Remember—it is the gap in knowledge that is of interest, not what you already know. Your perspective will always be partial, no matter what you are talking about or how educated you are on the topic.

Step 2: Question assumptions
Most of our thinking runs on autopilot, shaped by habits, culture, past experiences, and biological preconditions. Critical thinking requires you to believe that this is true, that your mind will try and play tricks on you, and so instead of trusting yourself so much, you will pause and ask: What assumptions am I making here? Are they true, or just familiar?

Step 3: Test perspectives
You are not critically thinking if you just go with what you already know. Sure, for some things—like buying shoes or deciding what to make for dinner—you don’t need to ask anyone else. But when it comes to assessing credibility or quality and “truth”, you almost always need more data.

This doesn’t mean you need to conduct a scientific study every time you have a question. It means being okay with the fact that you may not know enough yet or may never have enough to come to a final conclusion—and being patient or simply closing it off at that. For example, if someone is telling you their version of events, you probably need more information before deciding how true it might be. What is true for one person is not for another. Your opinion on the matter is not quality if you are basing it on limited, one-sided information. Drawing on your intelligence, you’ll recognise this and listen with a grain of salt.

Critical thinkers are very good at asking questions and staying curious. This is very effective for mental health.

Step 4: Reflect after action
Critical thinking doesn’t stop once you’ve made a decision.

Things will go right and things will go wrong. Your social environment—and the people in it—will signal whether your decisions were good, bad, or a bit off. Use that feedback as a prompt to reflect: look back at what worked, what didn’t, and why. Without good reflection, the same errors repeat.

Reflection only works if you’re aware of your biases. That’s the hard part. Bias is excellent at convincing you that you’re right and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the other person is wrong—but test that before you settle on it.

Step 5: Activate reflexivity
For EQ to mature or deepen, you must activate reflexivity during the reflection process. This is the one that I talk about a lot. Doing all of the above will assist you in improving your CT as well as your EQ, but reflexivity is the critical part if you are trying to use CT for human phenomena.

Reflexivity during the reflection process is a deeper layer of thinking where you turn the lens back on yourself—not just analysing what happened, but also examining how you shaped what happened. When you can do this consistently, you are rewiring your brain, and you will increase your EQ and CT potential.

Here’s what it is:

• Reflection = looking back at an event to see what worked, what didn’t, and why.

• Reflexivity = questioning your own role, assumptions, and biases in that event, and recognising how your perspective influenced the way you interpreted it as well as contributed to it.

For example:

• Reflection might say: “That conversation with my colleague went badly because they were defensive.”

• Reflexivity adds, “But what did I do that may have triggered that defensiveness? Did my tone, choice of words, or assumptions about what they meant play a role?”

So reflexivity is about owning your position in the interaction—how your history, experiences, and biases colour the way you think and act. It’s not about blame.

Practice these steps over and over again and slowly gain some control of your mind.

References and readings

Thorndike, E. L. (1920). Intelligence and its uses. Harper’s Magazine, 140, 227–235.

https://gwern.net/doc/iq/1920-thorndike-2.pdf

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. R. (2004). Emotional intelligence: Theory, findings, and implications. Psychological Inquiry, 15(3), 197–215.

https://aec6905spring2013.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mayersaloveycaruso-2004.pdf

LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. Simon & Schuster.

Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249.

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Please note that I undertake all of this public work voluntarily and at my own expense. I do this while trying to work to make a living as well as look after my young family, so I cannot offer all of my work for free. Some of my services are paid. However, I promise you I will never place my regular Sunday Synapse Newsletter under subscription or behind a paywall. It will always be free. I share all that I know there. I am also around in the comments to have chats when I can. Thank you for being here with me. I am so grateful to you all.

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THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE FOR REFLECTION

“Human existence is, ab initio, an ongoing externalization. As man [sic] externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself.” — Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology.

THOUGHT 2: THE SELF VS. SOCIETY

The self is often in conflict with society. I have yet to meet someone who tells me everything feels right, always and forever.

It could be an immediate environment (home, intimate relationships), a community (church, family network, hospitals, sports centre), or a larger social environment (country, government precincts).

In my work with people, I often look at where the self sits deep down, and what it takes to bring it out again. What can we do to help us rise, and what pushes us back down?

Watch these patterns and how they connect; this is logical intelligence. Notice how we feel or how others feel and their connections; this is emotional intelligence.

When I began training as a social scientist, I was introduced to a way of thinking called social constructionism. Then, I taught it and wrote about it scientifically for years and years. Keeping such a sharp focus on this ONE idea has led me to some of my best critical thinking, as well as taming my problematic intuition.

It is simply one of the many brilliant approaches for thinking critically (and specifically sociologically) about society. What it allows us to do is ask which aspects of society are socially constructed—that is, formed through repeated behaviours and everyday practices in our environments. This can include the way schools operate and teach, the ideologies and values our parents and communities raised us with, the behaviours permitted at work, the influences on how we think, such as priorities set by governments, and, very importantly to our modern lives, the media we consume most of the time. These repetitions turn into social habits, and as humans, we absorb them unconsciously. Over time, they shape what we think are our own thoughts and our own behaviours.

What matters here is that these “social norms” can also distort our sense of reality.

I think this is a crucial conversation in today’s information climate, where people are often arguing intuitively rather than critiquing intellectually the reasons behind human behaviour. Critical thinking gives us the ability to pause and use our intellectual minds to assess the evidence available to us. As a species, we know we are capable of higher reasoning, and we do not have to rely solely on primal intuition or emotional impulse.

This was groundbreaking for me, because when I applied critical thinking in this way to my environment, I could use my intellectual mind to analyse which factors might be socially constructed. It helped me see how much of society and our social interactions determine what is considered “thinkable.”

When will we think about it?

For example, unless something is seen as socially necessary, we won’t think about it! You can see this everywhere—people only engage with certain ideas if they recognise some worth in doing so. Most, however, will avoid activating the intellectual (critical thinking) mind around a topic once they’ve already decided what they believe, preferring to hold on to that “truth” as it is.

Social constructionism can be intellectually liberating, but like any framework of thought, it can also become limiting depending on the depth of self-awareness of those who use it and their conscious motivations.

It is most definitely not the only valid way to think. It is just one framework—useful for identifying what is socially constructed, and by contrast, what is not.

The problem is that today it is often co-opted politically and by the media, because it is both politically popular and it is easy to trigger people emotionally, and it helps make a lot of money. Using it drives powerful social and political campaigns as it convinces people that society and other people alone are always to blame, rather than encouraging us intellectually to also look at the full spectrum of the self as well as society. As a political move, it is masterful! But the result is that our collective intellect has been thrown into a kind of madhouse.

Just as a reminder: if any of us go to a therapist to sort out our lives, a good therapist will help us analyse our world and understand how our past has shaped our perceptions—so we can reduce anxiety and stop placing all the blame outside ourselves. A bad therapist, on the other hand, will have us walking out angry at the world. And that makes no sense for psycho-emotional health and well-being.

So what might help?

We need to start learning how to use our brains intellectually as a basic standard. As a collective, we have not yet entered the era where governments, societies, and communities advocate for shared intellectual life. We are still shaped by the old obedience model of the industrial age. But in this new age of information, we have the chance to raise our collective intellect and consciousness. But we cannot rely on intuition until we first use intellect to recognise how it also tries to disorient us. Once we know this, then we use that same intellect to orient it, so that our intuition becomes something we can trust.

For those who want to use social constructionism for personal benefit, it should be seen as a clear and powerful tool to apply critical thinking to themselves, people, and society. You can use it to analyse yourself, your thoughts, your home, the people in it, your workplace, colleagues, and the wider society and those who shape it. Here, though I need to warn you to be careful, analysis paralysis and the Dunning-Kruger effect are real. Don’t turn critical thinking into a form of aggressive criticism, which we are seeing a lot of people doing right now. The way to avoid this is by using curiosity as the driver to learn to understand.

In doing this, you can begin to separate the things that are possible to change, the things that are harder to change, and the things that are essentially fixed. What becomes clearer is the difference between what is socially constructed (patterns and norms that can be unlearned or reshaped), what is psychological (habits of mind and neurological wiring that are more difficult—but not impossible—to rewire), and what is biological (the fundamental structures of the body and brain that are, for the most part, fixed).

Why should we bother?

The reason this matters is that much of what we struggle with as people comes from a major mismatch between the social realities we live in (or have lived in) and the psychological, emotional, biological, or spiritual needs that go unmet. I am convinced this is the source of most of our problems—everything else is just noise.

If you are living a social life that feels like a good fit for your mental health, happiness, and overall well-being, but you still find yourself easily triggered or frustrated by others in ways that spoil your days, it may be worth reflecting on which personality tendencies or behavioural patterns are contributing to this.

Psychology teaches us that while core personality traits remain relatively stable, our responses and coping strategies can be reshaped over time. Neuroscience teaches us that our brain wiring is difficult, though not impossible, to reconfigure with sustained effort. Sociology teaches us that we are not only shaped by environments but also to think about our capability of reshaping them by adjusting our social settings, relationships, and daily practices. We can create conditions that support the best in us. The latter can help with coping and then neurological rewiring over time.

Finally, figuring out which factors in our social world are socially constructed is a private, lifelong personal task. As you do this, you will begin to slowly uncover who you are at the core. Remember, the point of social constructionism is not to tear down all the social norms that have been shaping you and be left with bitter and resentful attitudes. It is to understand how they shape you, to see which ones can stay because they align with who you are, and which ones need to change, or are doing you a disservice. It is about testing, reflecting, adjusting, and adapting.

Once you strip away the ones that no longer serve you and “find yourself,” the next part begins.

You need to decide what you, at your core, want to do with this cognitive freedom. You can now construct your life into anything, so what will it be, and what principles will guide the choices you make in reconstructing your world to reflect what you truly want?

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITY

Think about what lies at your core. This isn’t easy, and it may not be immediately evident, since you’ve spent a lifetime participating in social experiences and absorbing externalised ideas that cloud your sense of self. But look for patterns.

When do you feel most at ease?

Where do you feel most at ease?

What sorts of people are there? What are they like, and what do they talk about?

What gives you a sense of calm, belonging, and comfort?

What are you drawn back to, and what do you try to stay away from—and why?

Academic References

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2011). Brain plasticity and behaviour in the developing brain. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 20(4), 265–276.

Non-Academic but Evidence-Based Reads

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

The ideas in this book connect with this week’s article’s themes of social construction + neuroscience + psychology, but readable for a wide audience. It’s engaging and gets at that core tension of the self in conflict with society, intuition vs. intellect.

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THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE FOR REFLECTION

“In their capacity as performers, individuals are concerned with maintaining the impression that they are living up to the many standards by which they and their products are judged.” Erving Goffman, Sociologist, (1959, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life).

---

THOUGHT TWO: Consciousness, Self-Knowledge, and Intellectual Empowerment

All I know is what it feels like to be me. I can only express that within the limits of my language, my grasp of fact and fiction, and the reach of my consciousness. But even before any form of expression, I must spend time examining what is shaping and clouding that consciousness itself.

Much of my writing and reflection centres on what it feels like to be me. In sharing this, I hope to encourage you to fight just as hard to reach what it feels like to be you.

We are often far removed from the raw core of our own experience, and we rarely allow ourselves to truly feel it. We are reminded of it all the time, but we quickly bury it by keeping busy or burying our heads in the biased sand.

Why we do this is a hard question…attempting to answer it for ourselves might be a worthwhile psycho-cognitive endeavor.

Our sensitivity to the environment often shows itself most evidently in how we become caught up in a petty interaction. It’s not just us being annoying or difficult—though that is obviously also true, we’re really just trying to prove our validity.

For example:

• Psychologically, when our sense of self is challenged, we justify ourselves (“I’m right, they’re wrong”) to reduce discomfort, and proving validity functions as an unconscious (Freudian) defence of self-worth.

• Biologically, validation activates dopamine pathways, making us repeat behaviours that regulate stress, regain psychological safety, and restore social status and ultimately self-worth.

• Socially, as identity is constructed through interaction (Goffman), we determine our self-worth by comparing ourselves to others; proving someone else wrong stabilises our standing, reinforces hierarchy (Foucault), and protects our identity as it is.

This self-assurance confirms we are “okay” and “right,” allowing us to move forward with confidence. Now, psychological confidence doesn’t seem to be something you would need to ruffle the feathers of, but it’s only useful if it aids you; if the same patterns keep resurfacing, that is the world reminding you that this false confidence is coming at a hefty self-destructive cost.

Inner Noise

Once you know what you are made of (nature/nurture/how much mind/how much matter), the internal conflict might begin to slowly quieten. Most of our barriers to pure, raw, and beneficial thought arise because we are clouded by a history of intersecting social experiences and biological factors we still have yet to understand.

When we encounter social phenomena, they often trigger thoughts and memories connected to our pasts too quickly for us to catch. The chance to challenge and understand these automatic reactions comes in the quiet, reflective periods when you are alone with your mind, or when reflective questions are effectively posed.

Our psychological tendencies and neurological wiring—including the memories and associations you’ve built over time are likely to be driving your emotions and reactions. Our ability to call on intellect is what allows us to question and resist those automatisms.

Of course, socially driven factors such as stress, emotional exhaustion, trauma, life worries, mental ill health, and more all act as barriers to our ability to call on intellectual resistance. But this is exactly why we are here inside this newsletter.

Has Science Taught Us Everything We Need to Know?

We can do as much research as we want via the hard sciences—quantifying, measuring, calculating, and observing patterns to explain what human beings are and why they act as they do. But these methods can never capture what it actually feels like to be an exact person. Or why we experience life so differently from one another.

Perhaps the closest we have come philosophically is in the humanities and the qualitative traditions of the social sciences, where we attempt to qualify, rather than quantify, human experience. What this means is asking a person to narrate, in their own words, how it feels to be them, using language—to share their experiences and describe themselves. The researcher listens or hears this through a certain lens, and then they interpret what they think the words mean.

Even then, the task is impossible, because meaning is always analysed through the lens of the interpreter. And in this sense, we are all researchers—each of us filters what we hear through our own history, assumptions, and perspective. So once again, we are no closer to grasping what it truly feels like to be another. Only I can know me, and only you can know you. Beyond that, we can claim confidence in very little.

It is then up to us to do the self-work and integrate our parts.

Institutions of Thought

One way to begin is to challenge the institutions that have shaped and taken hold of our consciousness. There are layers upon layers of ideas and concepts that have built up over us since childhood, creating a dense covering of the self, so much so that we no longer know where we end and where something else begins.

Through the social processes we engage in over a lifetime, we inherit and internalise many institutions of thought that cloud our ability to truly know ourselves.

A sociological PhD trained me to critically analyse the socially constructed institutions of thought that accumulate over our lives and work to suppress our authentic selves.

When I obtained my formal paper-PhD, it was representative of having proved to be able to think critically about sociological phenomena, BUT it was not until later that I tested those skills outside my faculty. I began testing the ideas across disciplines and other models of thought, critiquing all that I thought I knew, not just with the knowledge I specialised in (even the ideas I was mostly exposed to and most coherent with were up for challenge).

Even with a PhD, critical thinking is usually confined to a narrow discipline. Intellectual advisors come from the same small pool, urging you to think critically—but only within that field. Step too far outside and you are told to return to the “correct” epistemology. You leave training with powerful cognitive skills, but once you take a job to put food on the table, those skills are used only in your niche. There is little time for interdisciplinary thought, and allegiance to your field becomes another institution of thought that filters how you see the world.

Cognitive Supervisors

In regular life, it can take a lifetime to build these skills because no one is pushing, reviewing, or guiding you. Today it’s even harder. We’re isolated, yet convinced we have all the answers. You have to try and be your own supervisor, mentor, and peer reviewer. That means trying to create a board of advisors in your head, each with different styles and experiences. If we could do that naturally, we’d be fine. But often, we only learn to think critically over time when repeated patterns and evidence prove that we didn’t know what we thought we knew.

We all have numerous institutions of thought that have shaped how we see the world. I think it is a worthwhile intellectual and psychological endeavour to assess ideologies that are walling in your thoughts and ideas. It is also worthwhile to explore why you find certain ideologies more appealing than others.

I have written previously about liminal spaces and identity vulnerabilities as one reason why we may be more susceptible to certain ideas at certain times in our lives. But many variables cause us to maintain allegiance to certain ideas. They are not all wrong, but make sure you have tested them before you claim a universal truth.

Critical Thinking as a Tool To Orient Intuition

Critical thinking about empirical facts is a useful way to use knowledge to challenge our disoriented intuitions and to learn what makes us think the way we do. Often our intuitions are fundamentally tied to our biological and personality factors, as well as how we have been deeply neurologically wired due to our developmental years and what we were exposed to.

It is only you who can assess the reliability of your intuitions. As you use critical thinking—that is, second-order thinking, slower thinking to think about your perceptions, this reason and logic will help you understand yourself. Over time, you will be able to learn about how it is that your mind operates both intuitively and how those intuitions drive your perceptions.

Once you have used logic and reason long enough, you may begin to feel confident in constructing a world that aligns with what you feel is your most honest, pure, authentic self.

Three Ways to Test Your Institutions of Thought

1. Catch a trigger
   Think of the last time you felt offended. Ask: Was this my raw self reacting, or a learned ideology filtering the feeling of offence?

2. Name an institution
   Think about one belief or “truth” you’ve inherited (family, school, culture). Ask: Does this still help me?

3. Test an intuition
   Recall a strong gut reaction you had this week. Ask: Is this intuition rooted in fact, habit, or something that happened in my history?

There is no right or wrong from this position. You need to be the analyser of whether the intuition or idea is serving your needs or it is no longer useful.

References and readings to explore the scientific-ness of how we are:

**Note: Use this type of empirical knowledge and intersect it with your own experiences and your observations to identify what might be true for you.

Psychological

• Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

• Freud, A. (1966). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. Karnac Books. (classic, ego defence mechanisms).

Biological

• Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 6(5), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:5<178::AID-EVAN5>3.0.CO;2-8

• Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.03.010

Social

• Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor. (face-work, identity in interaction).

• Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. University of Chicago Press. (symbolic interactionism).

• Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872675400700202

• Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction. Pantheon Books. (micro-power and social control).

• Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press.

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Please know that I do all of this public work for free and in my own time. I do this while trying to work to make money for a living, so I can not offer all of my work for free. Some of my services are paid. However, I promise you I will never place my regular Sunday Synapse Newsletter under subscription or behind a paywall. It will always be free. I share all of what I think there. I am also around in the comments to have chats when I can. Thank you for being here with me. I am so grateful to you all.

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Between Worlds: Identity, Vulnerability, and the Power of Critical Thinking

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a year ago · 5 likes · Matthew Facciani and The Sunday Synapse by Dr Esha

Today’s trio of thoughts:

THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE

“Every identity… is my identity only in contrast to another identity.”

— Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993)

This thought emphasises how identities gain meaning. To know how you are different or distinct can only occur through relational context. This is a key point when thinking critically about cultural frameworks.

THOUGHT 2: Can We Apply Critical Thinking to Culture?

“WHO” is right? If someone is right, then someone else must be wrong, right?

We create and participate in cultural practices at every level, in our homes, our workplaces, our communities, across society, and now, unprecedentedly, on a global scale.

At the most basic level, humans have biological, psychological, and social needs—food, shelter, belonging, meaning, and identity. The ways groups of people solve these needs become customs, rituals, norms, and eventually, culture. These contribute to our sense of identity and meaning.

There are many reasons culture exists, and many reasons we establish certain norms. Thinking critically about those reasons is what critical thinking about culture is.

How are identity and culture linked?

Identity is intrinsically intertwined with culture. Culture provides the framework for how we see ourselves and others. Through cultural norms and values, we learn what is acceptable, what is admirable, and what is taboo, which becomes embedded in our personal identity.

Identity is socially constructed. It forms in interaction with others who share (or challenge) our cultural worldviews. We feel like we belong when we are accepted into a culture or environment that accepts us as we are. Often, those who have been socially excluded or may not have felt like they belong could be more susceptible to accepting belonging even when the groups are not right for them. Their biological and psychological needs override their intellectual and critical thinking ability regarding what may be best for them.

Safety and belonging are core biological and evolutionary needs. Culture provides a shared system that tells us where we belong, who protects us, and what makes us safe.

As the human brain is wired to seek patterns, predictability, comfort, and safety, culture gives us those patterns through rituals, roles, and social norms, helping the brain reduce uncertainty and threat. Social exclusion triggers the same part of the brain as physical pain. So, when identity is challenged or rejected, it’s why it feels like a biological threat!

So, can we think critically about culture and identity, and who is right then?

Critical thinking about empirical facts is different from critical thinking about sociological realities. The former is primarily intellectual, concerned with what is more right or more wrong based on observable, reproducible evidence. The latter, though similar, often deals with metaphysical or value-laden ideas, and while social science attempts to qualify these, ultimately we can only make interpretations.

Personal meaning is harder to assess using fixed scientific standards of right and wrong. It can only be evaluated through context, subjective reasoning, and social logic. In that sense, everyone is living out their lives in a way that makes logical sense for their circumstances. Makes sense, right? Ha! If only we were so tolerant!

So, what does this mean for our highly multicultural, interconnected, and digital world?

We now live in highly multicultural spaces, especially in societies historically shaped by dominant Western models of thought.

Due to declining birth rates and decades of skyrocketing economic and productivity demands, people from vastly different ethnic, cultural, social, and political backgrounds are now intermingling in the same environments. This has implications for which ideas enter society and how culture shifts and adapts.

Usually, there is a dominant macro culture—shared by the majority—that tends to set the overarching values and norms. Alongside it exist smaller cultural groups whose values may differ, but, due to their smaller numbers, do not shape the mainstream. As a result, a single society can hold multiple layers of cultural values, often in a kind of hierarchy of needs, desires, motivations, and social practices.

When there is space for these ideas to interact, a deeply human form of critical thinking can emerge. Critical thinking, at its core, is the ability to look at ideas from multiple angles (often referred to as perspectives). However, this is especially challenging for most people because our biases tend to limit our perspective to our own and those relevant to our cultural contexts.

We’re currently facing an unprecedented challenge: we’re interacting with nearly every idea in the history of human existence, daily, and at lightning speed through digital consumption. How we interpret, categorise, allocate, and apply these ideas in our local contexts, and the implications of that process, will be fascinating to observe.

So, what? I am happy to accept all others in my spaces as well as their ideas.

Are you really willing to do this, and better yet, do you do this?

Those who recognise this challenge understand that the intellectual part of our minds will often automatically resist broader understanding.

We apply critical thinking in our lives to observe, with evidence, what is functioning well and what is not; to examine how social norms and inherited values shape our perceptions of right and wrong; and, ultimately, to engage in the philosophical task of discerning what is worth preserving, what must be reimagined, and what should be ethically let go. Easy right?

What’s significant from a sociological perspective is that critical thinking involves examining the emotional responses we carry as this guides how we feel and the reactions we will have.

In most social contexts, what individuals perceive as right or wrong depends less on fixed truths and more on the meaning, context, and logic they’ve applied, whether consciously or not. It’s incredibly useful—both relationally and for developing emotional intelligence—to try and understand why someone has adopted a particular view.

This becomes particularly important in multicultural environments. When people from vastly different cultural and social systems come together, so do their internal frameworks for making sense of the world. Their beliefs about what is acceptable, respectful, harmful, or sacred are shaped by histories and contexts that others may not share or even understand.

This is where applying critical thinking to culture becomes essential, not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a psychologically beneficial one. When we understand our culture and where we sit within the broader social framework, we’re better able to come to terms with our own choices, needs, and desires, even when they differ from those around us.

This shows awareness of contextual identity—how individuals locate themselves in relation to society, which is foundational in both sociology and psychology.

This kind of analysis is exactly what builds psychological resilience and confidence. Critical thinking may help people navigate their own values in contrast to others’ by weighing up the reasoning and logic behind them. This should build clarity and confidence, and this is important for personal autonomy. Basically, it should help you become confident in your choices and establish coherent reasons for them.

It's why I now argue that while critical thinking is an intellectual exercise, emotional intelligence, despite the word intelligence, seems to be fundamentally a psychological one. It is important to acknowledge the cognitive nature of critical thinking, but also to emphasise the emotional and psychological process of emotional intelligence. I position both as essential but distinct in the human experience.

In a highly multicultural world, the complexity lies in thinking carefully about the culture you were raised in, what you value, what those values mean, what might need to change as you analyse the new cultural environment and your need to adapt, and what new perspectives you might want to adopt, along with the logic behind those changes.

Multiculturalism brings a richness of difference, but also serious complexity. People carry with them a diversity of cultural norms, beliefs, values, biases, and ideas about what is right and wrong, all of which are unique from one person to the next

Diversity can create confusion and tension. I implore you right now to think about the conflicting conversations you have had with people, as well as who those people were and are. At the same time, diversity and the different ideas that come with that offer an opportunity for deep reflection, central to critical thinking as well as developing emotional intelligence.

Not all differences must be reconciled, but they can be understood (intellectual empathy). When we apply critical thinking to culture, we’re not looking for universal agreement! We are looking to understand for what purpose do the differences exist. It offers an opportunity to discuss the good and the bad, and each culture has plenty of both.

On a larger scale, when we try to apply critical thinking to these cultural ideas, we examine the logic behind them, assess their internal consistency, question their consequences, and consider whether they serve human flourishing across different contexts.

But this leads to a deeper question: how do we begin to decide what is right or wrong, what to keep, what to let go of, and what to challenge or adopt?

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITIES

Consider the difference between what you’ve been told to think and what you’ve actually experienced in your life. The data you hold from living, observing, and doing.

On one hand, there are ideas you've inherited (heard most, read most, thought about most) about what is “right.” On the other hand, there are your actions, your observations of others, and what actually plays out in practice/reality. Reflect on both. Try to make sense of where these “truths” align and where they conflict.

Can we apply critical thinking to cultural divergences? Are we psychologically disciplined enough to hold space for a wide range of ideas in our communities, some that you would never accept or advocate for yourself or in your home? Or are you the type of person who allows all ideas and expressions of self to exist in the home?

While we are on the topic, what sort of culture have you created in your home? What are the rules, your non-negotiables, as well as the short and long-term implications of those rules on the people in the home?

What are the implications of living in a society shaped by multiple cultures, identities, values, and belief systems?

Do you have many friendships with people from very different cultural backgrounds?

If not, why not?
If yes, how many and how close are you?

Do you know what they really think about big topics? Or are they conforming/self-censoring around you? How do you know if they are/are not?

Do you agree with their beliefs and values? Do you even know their beliefs and values? Who are the people in your life whose beliefs and values you DO know all about?
What happened?

References and readings

Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1089134

Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bruce Hood (2012). The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.

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For More Products and Services Click Here: https://stan.store/dreshalovric

Please know that I do all of this public work for free and in my own time. I do this while trying to work to make money for a living, so I can not offer all of my work for free. Some of my services are paid. However, I promise you I will never place my regular Sunday Synapse Newsletter under subscription or behind a paywall. It will always be free. I share all of what I know there. I am also around in the comments to have chats when I can. Thank you for being here with me. I am so grateful to you all.

MOST RECENT PODCAST:

Misguided: The Newsletter

Between Worlds: Identity, Vulnerability, and the Power of Critical Thinking

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Esha Lovrić—social scientist, educator, and advocate for critical thinking—about how life transitions and emotional vulnerability shape the way we interpret the world around us…

Listen now

a year ago · 5 likes · Matthew Facciani and The Sunday Synapse by Dr Esha

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Welcome and thanks for coming over to Substack with me! You will continue to receive the Sunday Synapse right from here moving forward.

Please comment when you feel moved to, share your feedback, and add the bright (new/fresh/or even old ideas with a subtle new spin) that come to you as you read. And remember — keep your biases in check as you go! There’s no immediate danger in these words, so do not allow your automatic mind to beat you in this game. Sharing our ideas is an opportunity to learn together, teach one another, and activate the incredible thinking that comes when your brain engages with new ideas.

Share this article if you think others are in the right context to hear the ideas in this publication.

Let’s get into our Trio of Thoughts!

THOUGHT 1: A QUOTE FOR REFLECTION

“Psychological distance is all about creating mental space between yourself and the problem by looking at it objectively rather than emotionally.”…this is from psychologist Nick Trenton’s book The Art of Letting Go: Stop Overthinking, Stop Negative Spirals, and Find Emotional Freedom.

A problem can also be a confusing idea, a moment of uncertainty, a string of words that require deeper comprehension, or an actual literal life challenge.

Start to think beyond flat, surface meanings and stop becoming distracted by stupid things that most people easily become stuck on— look at what the words and messages could mean.

Nick writes his books in a way that is more user and reader-friendly for those who would prefer a non-academic heavy text.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE: HOW DID WE FIND OUT ABOUT THIS?

One of the most significant historical shifts in human intelligence and awareness — and proof that we have deeper, more complex consciousness — came when ideas began to be written down and shared across civilisations.

Once ideas existed in text, rather than only in oral form, we could examine them with greater depth. The written word gave us psychological distance — time to reflect, question, and think. This was a mammoth development in our understanding of human cognitive potential. It showed us ideas could be recorded, preserved, and transmitted across time, place, and minds. Ideas could now travel, no longer confined to the immediacy of spoken exchange. Ideas were innovative (new/fresh ways of looking at the same thing), and so, they iterated.

**This was also the early beginnings of how the scientific method was later established.

Psychological distance is simply the space between you and the thing you’re thinking about. You probably know all about it since your best thinking probably happens when you have time. Take a moment to reflect on the knowledge/wisdom you already possess about this psychological phenomenon.

THOUGHT AUTOMATION

Cognitive distancing allows you to become detached from any initial unconscious, automatic emotional responses. You might think you are in control, but in many circumstances, you’re not really. By creating critical cognitive distancing, you can think clearly and activate second-order, more effortful critical thinking to then think about the type of response that will be best for the scenario.

To remind you what you’re up against with your automatic thoughts: if we were raised in environments where people in our homes or social spaces were emotionally reactive, explosive, and embodied negative emotion, we weren’t often given the time, space, or psychological distance to think things through. We weren’t taught how to sit still with our thoughts. This inevitably shapes how your nervous system holds emotion, and unsurprisingly, it shapes how you respond — and what triggers you — in adulthood. The good news is, you can rewire this.

Before that life-long commitment in trying to re-wire our problematic inuitions, though, when we are talking in person with others, and especially when it is a conversation where tension or the emotional temperature is high, our automatic reactions will beat us to it. In these circumstances, where the emotional intensity of the exchange leaves no room for psychological distance, we are more likely to react intuitively (how we have been wired to feel and ultimately “think”) and voice “ideas” that are automatic, and likely not well thought out. This is why we might often regret what was said or cringe at a later time about what we wished we didn’t say.

REWIRING THROUGH REFLEXIVITY

In those psychologically triggering times, the moments of post-discomfort are the perfect opportunity to rewire your automatic thinking patterns. This is the period where we analyse what we said, why our body is physically reacting negatively to what was said, and where those thoughts may have come from. This is the chance for reflexivity — a phenomenally powerful self‑awareness practice that will bring great cognitive benefits over time. This is what great therapists will help their clients do. Also, we all need our inner therapist. Activate that therapist inside, and make sure they slowly improve their practice and learn to become a good critical thinker.

Reflexivity: Means developing an awareness of how you think. What guides your thoughts, values, biases, and assumptions? It’s essentially the metacognitive process of thinking about your thinking, but with an awareness of the influences behind it. Because we judge others based largely on ourselves, it is therefore a very important task to make sure you are the best judge of ALL others. If you are going to judge others, you better have figured out the quality of your judgments.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE AND INNOVATIVE THOUGHT

Psychological distance, made possible by the development of written text, allowed ideas to evolve as we applied the thoughts of others to the knowledge we already held. In this way, ideas could truly innovate, because it is in analysing the ideas of others against our own that new and original thought is born.

We are all capable of innovative thought because each of us carries a lifetime of experience (the good, bad, and ugly), evidence, observations, opinions, and suggestions. Every time we encounter new knowledge, it interacts with where we have been and who we are — it intersects with what we already know and have lived. It’s right in this meeting point, where new information intersects with old knowledge… we have an opportunity right there to take time to come up with fresh and original thought. This is exactly how the great thinkers have done it. In this space right here. The data you hold as a subjective person is vital as you attempt to make sense of what is.

EXCEPT OUR BIASES AND DEEP WIRING ARE TOO FAST

What tends to happen, however, is that our biases will attempt to quash innovative thinking. New thought is often unconsciously threatening, and usually we don’t sit around with a bag full of new ideas — we are usually simply regurgitating what we have heard. If we are open to new knowledge and are not cynical or inflexible, then we might have the chance to come up with some groundbreaking ideas.

This is likely what happens to those fortunate enough to remain so open to their experiences of the world that they encounter the profound, embodied sensation we might call enlightenment.

Enlightenment comes after a person goes through the destructuring of the structures of thought. It’s like you have come to realise how your ideas, thoughts, and sense of self have been put together. Enlightenment isn’t about adding more thought or knowledge, but dismantling the rigid mental structures that filter and limit awareness.

When you go through this, suddenly this self‑awareness helps you let go of all the petty social constructions you have placed as barriers to your thought. You suddenly realise that you are in control — and always have been, at least in a psychological sense.

The only way to do any of this well is to ensure your life is filled with plenty of opportunity for psychological distancing. A very important part of academic training is sitting with the mind alone, for hours on end, reading ideas with plenty of time to think. The ideas are often complex, and we have a reason to think about them because if we don’t, we lose academic credibility. So we push ourselves to try and understand difficult ideas — ones that challenge us. It’s in this slow process — the re‑reading, the deconstruction — where the good, effective, and truly transformational thinking happens (after a lot of challenging and bad thinking too).

This is not a new idea by the way; long before the digital age and the constant externalisation of every thought, humans spent much of their lives sitting with their minds. It’s the same principle that underpins the practices of Buddhist monks, yogis, and meditators — turning inward, sitting still, and creating the space for clarity to emerge.

So take this little publication as a small reminder: use silent time, when you have it, as a gift. Hear ideas, listen to people, talk, share — but take the silent times with the certainty that they really matter too. In this modern era of digital dominance, that’s becoming harder. While we have greater global access to a lot of very good information, we also need time to think about what we are interacting with and what it means.

THOUGHT 3

ACTIVITY TO IMPROVE MENTAL HEALTH, CRITICAL THINKING & OPPORTUNITY FOR INNOVATIVE THOUGHT

Make sure you have time alone every day with your mind. Get used to that feeling, even when it is uncomfortable. Start with just a little, and increase over time. It could take years, and that’s okay; there is no rush.

Some extra things:

Recently, I was a guest on Dr Matthew Facciani’s podcast called “Misguided” (click to check out his excellent work).

Matthew is a fellow scientist who studies misinformation and explores how our social and psychological forces shape how we see the world. We talked about identity transitions in life and how all people go through uncertain periods in life where our identity shifts, and is in a type of limbo before meaningful transformations occur. Our conversation explored how, in these psychologically vulnerable phases that are called liminal phases, we are at an elevated risk of believing ideas that may not be right for us, and what the impact of that may be.

Listen here:

Misguided: The Newsletter

Between Worlds: Identity, Vulnerability, and the Power of Critical Thinking

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Esha Lovrić—social scientist, educator, and advocate for critical thinking—about how life transitions and emotional vulnerability shape the way we interpret the world around us…

Listen now

a year ago · 3 likes · Matthew Facciani

If you are a parent, check out my course specifically for you. It is suited for you as a parent who would like to learn how to use the skills you already have to nurture socially relevant, organic, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence in your children.

Check out more information about it here:

The Intelligence Code For Kids: A Parent’s Guide

For more services, click here:

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Please know that I do all of this public work for free and in my own time. I do this while trying to work to make money for a living, so I can not offer all of my work for free. Some of my services are paid. However, I promise you I will never place my regular Sunday Synapse Newsletter under subscription or behind a paywall. It will always be free. I share all of what I know there. I am also around in the comments to have chats when I can. Thank you for being here with me. I am so grateful to you all.

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Liminality refers to a transitional state where individuals exist between two defined stages or identities, and where previous structures of identity are challenged.

We all experience liminality in our lives, and we are all at risk of emotional exploitation inside these phases.

In particular, this piece explores the global social phenomenon where individuals I refer to as performative elites, exploit vulnerable members of society who are navigating these liminal life stages. However, this article is relevant for all people who want to know how to navigate life’s vulnerable phases.

Let’s start with who or what performative elites are:

Performative elites can be recognised by their high levels of political power and social privilege, which allow them to exercise very vocal forms of free speech. They can be anyone. Perhaps you have one in your home, at work, or in the social spaces you frequent. They can be local, or they can be people you do not know personally.

We have many performative elites whom we do not know the pesonal private details of, but who have a strong influence over how we think and what we think.

Some of the public and popular performative elites are easy to identify. They often publicly criticise social hierarchies, but interestingly, only those positioned above them, and usually through a narrow, single-disciplinary social lens. This is immediately problematic and holds double standards because ethical knowledge and science itself are not rigid; it is open, flexible, and inclusive, the very conditions they claim to advocate for.

What remains either entirely outside their awareness or completely unexamined is that they simultaneously replicate the same oppressive behaviours toward those beneath them. The problem is, this cognitive contradiction is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

6 traits of performative elites:

1. High social credibility and economic power, associated with holding top degrees, multiple credentials, or prestigious social roles.

2. Vast social platforms, strong media presence, public influence, and a large and growing group of followers.

3. They often come across as educated and articulate, but noticeably use language that presents their beliefs as the only and “correct” ones.

4. They are rigid in their ideas, unfairly biased, and inflexible toward other schools of thought or interdisciplinary knowledge.

5. Their public campaigns or statements do not directly help those they talk about who are in need; instead, the movements effectively serve to elevate their own influence and power.

6. They ‘unconsciously’ reproduce the same power dynamics toward those they claim to help.

Let’s Unpack Liminality: What is it?

Liminality is a key anthropological and sociological concept. It describes a transitional phase in life during which a person’s identity is in flux.

Flux refers to a state of continuous change or uncertainty in who we are. It’s the “in-between” where our sense of self is malleable, open to influence, and still under construction.

All people across time, place, and culture experience liminality. It connects evolutionary behaviors, psychological processes, and cultural practices, offering an inter- and cross-disciplinary view of the human experience. It has been used philosophically to observe and understand human tribal behaviors, offering credible insight into modern-day human practices.

In this article, I argue that it is the people in liminality who are particularly susceptible to further and more aggressive political, social, and emotional exploitation.

During liminality, people are often fearful and uncertain. Performative elites prey on these vulnerabilities to fuel and radically accelerate social movements. Social justice and activism are vital, but movements must be shaped and led by those grounded in the lived experience of oppression, not by outsiders. True liberation can only be achieved by the oppressed themselves.

The problem becomes how to define who is oppressed. Many people who believe they understand and can define the experience of oppression no longer live the day-to-day realities of oppression. The question begs: Can those who have not lived the realities of those they claim to fight for the rights of truly be trusted to lead their liberation? I argue that they may have bitten off more than they can chew… or understand.

When are we vulnerable?

Generally, a vulnerable person is someone whose social, economic, physical, psychological, legal, or informational circumstances leave them ill-equipped to resist external pressures or protect their well-being. We are vulnerable when we feel isolated, alone, unsure, or lack confidence to make certain decisions and trust in our thinking.

In this article, I’m referring specifically to those experiencing a temporary, disorienting phase marked by acute psychological and informational uncertainty, often associated with identity vulnerability.

How are the structures of our identity formed?

Our identity is a dynamic, multi-layered construct arising from the interplay of:

• Biological foundations (genetic makeup, physiology, neurochemistry)

• Personal history (memories, emotions, achievements)

• Social roles and relationships (family, work, community)

• Cultural and symbolic systems (language, traditions, belief systems)

Together, these elements coalesce into a continually evolving sense of self that both shapes and is shaped by our lived experiences and environments. So, naturally, certain life experiences may temporarily destabilise our shifting identity as we try and figure out what is best for us. While you may like to believe you are or can be completely void of an identity structure, to be wholly objective as a person is virtually impossible.

So then, why do we find ourselves in liminal spaces?

When we are socially vulnerable, we may enter liminality.

We all enter liminal phases many times throughout our lives: onset of motherhood, fatherhood, parenthood, adolescence and puberty, migration, starting a new job, illness, injury, grief, and so on. It is a period of great uncertainty given the suspension of the personal power afforded by the identity a person once constructed, established, knew, and felt grounded and empowered by.

Liminality is the literal threshold, boundary, or line between two places and spaces in time. It is the place where one thing ends and something new begins. For example, the precise instant a woman becomes a mother at the birth of her first child, or the moments, months, or years following a catastrophic car accident which irrevocably transforms one’s physical capabilities and thus social roles, or the time required in a young person’s life as they navigate a complicated adolescent identity transition phase.

It is the ambiguous state that occurs when you’ve left behind your old identity but haven’t yet fully claimed a new one.

Logically, this phase is marked by profound psychological vulnerability as well as emotional and intellectual discomfort.

Despite the fragility inside liminality, such passages are essential for humans, as they open up an unparalleled opportunity for personal transformation and the question of what identity truly is. Often, the newly forming identity needs to be socially and contextually relevant.

In periods of deep uncertainty, we must afford ourselves the time and space for critical self-reflection, allowing us, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, to reassess core beliefs that our old identity may still hold on to. As we reassess, old values and beliefs are completely shaken and often aggressively shifted. Sometimes they may be totally replaced with a new perspective on life, its meanings, as well as ideas around identity construction.

External interference will derail the process entirely. This is because they offer no authentic meaning for us or our local setting.

When input from contextually irrelevant sources is enabled access it further complicates an already complex transition. As a result, the individual begins to harbour social and situational resentment, and, most perilously, develops resentment toward themselves, instead of progressing toward full integration of their emerging identity. This can instead trap individuals inside perpetual liminality, lost in the bitterness that society has failed and abandoned them.

In our modern-day information-saturated era, we are all at risk of emotional exploitation because of the flood of contextually irrelevant ideas continually disrupting our lives at each turn.

So let’s discuss... is it really exploitation though?

The exploitation is not happening through obvious, physical abuses like forced labour or human trafficking, but rather a more stealthy, unseen psychological identity exploitation.

Exploitation is the act of using someone or something unfairly for one’s own advantage or profit. It typically involves one party taking disproportionate benefit from another’s labor, resources, or vulnerabilities, often without adequate compensation or regard for the exploited party’s well-being.

When the non-oppressed performative elite is leading a social movement, I argue that this is of psychological harm to the vulnerable person/s in liminality. This is because their authentic identity struggle is being weaponised to advance the personal agenda of people already holding positions of social power.

The central problem is that these “saviours” are almost fully removed from the frontline realities of everyday life. Instead, they exploit and manipulate people’s deepest insecurities and uncertainties, drawing them into identity-political narratives while remaining entirely disconnected from the struggles they believe they understand.

But can we really be harmed inside liminality?

During liminality, we are psychologically exposed and raw. It can be a dark place, and it demands we become one with our evolving identity, but this is a delicate and fragile process that takes time, reflection, humility, flexibility, and patience.

Before entering a liminal phase of life, we were familiar with our bodies, routines, and social practices. These normative practices sustained a coherent sense of self. Liminality begins when all that stability is shattered, leaving us suspended in time.

Bridging this gap requires actual lived experience, collecting contextual data, and testing what it truly means to our actual lives. This assists us in transforming the information we gather into knowledge we can apply. Throughout this period, our psychological adjustment is still in progress.

For all humans, psychological resilience builds over time as we become used to the conditions of our environment and our internal limitations and opportunities, but only if it is not rushed or disrupted by outside actors.

Moreover, the wider the gap between former social lives and life-roles and the expectations associated with the new role, the more effort and the more complex the philosophical reflection and literal transitional journey will require.

This is precisely why liminal nomads are especially prone to physical, political, social, psychological, or spiritual manipulation and exploitation.

Okay, but how do identity politics and liminality connect?

Because performative elites have the backing of strong social capital and thus an associated social confidence, their movements can be very outspoken and particularly aggressive. This approach can easily capture the attention of those social members uncertain about their social identity and unsure which path to follow.

A person may be particularly susceptible to such exploitation because liminal phases frequently involve a suspension of previous levels of social power. People literally feel disempowered in this period. Suddenly, a set of compounded ideas, embodied by group identity, offers to fill the void with gifts like knowledge, power, companionship, comfort, and belonging.

While the basic cause may seem noble, movements that offer a ready-made identity narrative are risky as they bypass the important need for critical self-reflection. In their unprocessed emotional state, liminal individuals are especially easy to manipulate by recruitment tactics that capitalise on human confusion and emotional vulnerability.

All of these offerings are compelling, producing emotionally and spiritually electrifying, and even enlightening sensations. Such experiences can be easily mistaken for objective truths or moral imperatives. But I urge you to remember, the cognitive discomfort that stems from our knowledge gaps means unprocessed biases will prematurely guide us to accept ideas that may not be right for us.

Sociologically speaking, rushing or forcing yourself through periods of cognitive uncertainty short-circuits the reflective work you need for true self-definition. Authentic transformation demands a slow, steady, reflexive integration of change on your own terms, not on the terms of someone else’s subjective life agenda.

So, who are the people who are the real problem here?

While we should hold all people equally accountable for bad behaviour, I do not believe we should blame those solely in liminal spaces who have adopted strong political ideology. They have simply been used as pawns by other people and require intellectual empathy. We can achieve this by becoming conscious about which performative elites are leading these causes and, rather, hold them accountable.

The performative elite are the epitome of social privilege.

They are inherently different from the people they claim to be advocating for, because, despite occupying positions of power, they have either never experienced transitional vulnerability or have long since lost sight of it.

Often, those who haven’t lived the struggles of the truly oppressed, and who assume they can speak for all forms of diversity, end up imposing their own narratives and silencing the very voices they claim to support.

Philosopher and seminal author on conditions of cultural oppression, Paulo Freire warned of this dynamic in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, showing how unexamined privilege can recreate oppression under the guise of advocacy. It’s dangerous when individuals elevate their own subjective hardships as if they represent every form of oppression, because it is not possible to truly relate to struggles they’ve never lived.

When you assume you know, you risk not knowing much at all.

It may be that those in liminality uncover injustices that prevent them from transitioning as they wish. This organic self-understanding is powerful and can fuel the individual’s desire to lead a movement grounded in their own knowledge and self-awareness. It is from this position that true self-liberation and integration can occur.

Final note

When identity politics acknowledges this dynamic, it can shift from exploitation to genuine emancipation. This can create strong, well-adjusted communities that guide their members through transition while respecting their capacity to redefine themselves on their own terms, increasing the chance of meaningful community identity integration.

My final note is that the world needs intelligent and holistic interventions that look at health and well-being at an individual, psychological, and social level. We do not need dichotomous and self-serving people leading social liberation movements.

What to do if you are in a liminal space right now:

1. Recognise the Phase

• Name it. Acknowledging you’re in an “in-between” state diffuses the anxiety it brings.

2. Limit External Noise (very important)

• Temporarily mute or unfollow social-media feeds, newsletters, and “cause” groups as well as limit contact with people who feed more uncertainty than clarity.

3. Lean on Trusted Anchors

• Share your questions and doubts with the few people who allow you to speak openly without judgement but who will advise you truthfully and gently, grounding conversation in shared lived experience, not abstract theory.

• Try not to invite too many opinions and share too much of your vulnerability with too many people, as this will just confuse you. **People will talk and share opinions; this can not be avoided, but you do not have to take on all ideas as your own.

4. Engage in Critical Self-Reflection

• Lean into all the emotional, psychological, emotional discomforts you feel. Reflect on them. Ask yourself patient, curious questions like: Why is this affecting me so much? What is missing here? What do I need right now?

5. Gather Contextual Knowledge

• Resist the urge to adopt global non-contextually relevant narratives; instead, filter ideas through the lens of your own reality. Talk to people around you. Notice patterns in your world. Think about what you want to work for you.

6. Reintegrate Intentionally

• As you begin to develop confidence over time in your reintegrating identity and new social role, you can begin re-engaging with broader networks and ideas at your own pace. You are now confidently armed with your new self-definition in mind, this is a place of social and psychological power.

• Re-assess as you go. If you need to take a step back, do it. There is no rush.

• Bring your new knowledge back into your community, offering guidance to others entering their own liminal spaces. The community cycle continues.

Thank you for reading. I studied liminality and tribal practices during my PhD and utilised this theory to understand the social phenomena I was researching at the time. I write mainly about social issues and how to build social intelligence and psychological resilience using critical thinking.

Please sign up for my weekly FREE Newsletter, The Sunday Synapse, here:

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Please share this article within your circles in the movement to share education and knowledge for the betterment of society and modern world health.

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THOUGHT 1: AN APHORISM

"Emotional intelligence grows through perceiving and responding thoughtfully to life's emotional challenges—not by avoiding them."

— Susan David, psychologist, Harvard Medical School researcher, and author of Emotional Agility.

THOUGHT 2: THIS WEEKS LESSON

Critical Thinking MatureS Emotional Intelligence

You should let your emotions guide you. But only trust yourself to do this if you're emotionally intelligent enough to understand your emotions:

• Where do they come from?

• Why they exist?

• How they will either aid or defy you?

The more critical thinking you apply to your thoughts, the more your emotional intelligence will increase over time.

Critical thinking > Emotional Intelligence > Mental Health

Your mental health will improve as you increase your emotional intelligence.

Balancing Logic and Emotion

Where many people talk about learning logic and reason and others discuss emotional intelligence, I am a strong advocate for balancing logical and emotional intelligence.

We need to listen to our emotions to help guide us to make choices that make us feel good. We also need logic and reason to understand our emotions and what they mean.

When you learn how to effectively understand your emotions logically, it's called emotional intelligence.

Why Emotions Can Block Better Choices

The biggest reason why will NOT choose to make better thinking choices is emotional immaturity or vulnerability.

Firstly, I want to remind you that emotions are not bad. AT ALL. They are part of all humans and without them, we would not be human. Your unique feelings, thoughts, and ideas are the difference between you and another person. So you should protect that with all your heart.

BUT we must learn to use our emotions to guide us in the ways we need to succeed as:

• People

• Individuals

• Members of families and communities

Emotions are a very important human trait and make all the difference between us and the modern world's threat to emotional intelligence… AI and the digital world.

The Modern Problem

As a sociologist, I look at what social processes impact our mental health and subsequently the choices we make. The biggest socially detrimental problem we have right now is that the world is losing the ability to develop organic, socially relevant emotional intelligence. Why? Due to the amount of time spent online. As humans, we all have emotional sensitivity and awareness—how those emotions manifest is dependent on:

• Biology

• Psychology

• Social upbringing and environment

All of these factors determine whether we use emotions effectively or to our detriment. However, due to fewer socially relevant interactions and increased online interactions, people no longer place themselves in situations that mature their emotional faculties.

Emotional Intelligence and Social Success

This issue is a large-scale global problem because our social success depends heavily on how we:

• Allocate our emotions

• Understand the social environment we aim to succeed in

• Relate to people

• Understand logical social sequences and social processes that we need

Emotional intelligence can be directly correlated and measured by assessing:

• How well you know and can help yourself make emotionally healthy choices

• Your understanding of other's emotions and the health of your social network

• Your ability to healthily negotiate relationships and life based on this knowledge

Being intellectually aware of how humans operate automatically increases your chance of social success across various domains and sections of society. We learn this through practice in our lives as we experience different situations.

How Emotions Block Critical Thinking

If we are not emotionally mature, these emotions will block our understanding, and when we start at the wrong place, we can't move forward. People struggling with their emotions also struggle with clear thinking, unable to get past acute emotional responses.

Critical thinking is reduced when we are:

• Stressed

• Worried

• Depressed

• Anxious

• Angry

• Mentally unwell

• Busy

Whatever the emotion, it blocks good thinking because our brains are preoccupied with an issue. In order to help activate cleat thinking we we must attend to the issue that is causing our emotional blocks. Our brain is busy dealing with something that needs resolution, signaling clearly: "Hey, I am worried, so attend to the worry."

People who avoid attending to their emotional worries increase their risk of anxiety and ongoing mental health issues.

Managing Emotions for Better Decisions

What should we do when we are emotional, especially if we want to think critically?

First, we deal with the emotion. We can't think critically if clouded by something affecting our decision-making.

This affects all of us: workers, family members, leaders, directors, presidents.

What we can do to assist with developing our emotional intelligence is to work through our problems and start by categorising emotions. So we move them into places where they can be:

• Held temporarily

• Deferred for later addressing

• Immediately dealt with and closed off

We use logical thinking to assess the validity of our emotions and their impact on our decisions. The better we can do this, the greater our chances of ongoing life improvement.

How to Develop Emotional Intelligence

We mature our emotional understanding by attempting to use reason, logic, and flexibility in assessing what is happening. Usually, we do this organically by interacting with people in our social life. We learn logical and sequential cause-and-effect lessons by:

• Doing something in a social setting and observing the outcome of that choice.

• Watching other people's behaviours and observing what happens due to their choices.

We can observe patterns and try to devise logical understandings of how things work in society, within our family, and in our own behaviour and emotions. Recognising these patterns allows us to logically attend to our emotions, helping them mature and develop.

Consider the example of bullying:

Perhaps someone you or someone you know is being bullied. It may be at work, at home, anywhere. The natural emotional reaction might be to become upset, develop resentment, not understand why it's happening, and remain emotionally triggered by bullying in the future. It is easy to develop angry feelings towards your bully. The people around you depending on their own emotional maturity will give you advice that is either helpful or detrimental.

NOTE: It is normal to become upset. You also do not need to tolerate bullying. You should take logical steps to address the bullying. But that is a separate issue to how you will attend to your emotional mind.

Developing emotional intelligence involves attempting to understand why this behaviour is occurring and what may be causing it. This means separating the emotional feeling from logical understanding.

For example, if you're a parent of a child being bullied, talk openly with your child about why some people become bullies. Avoid simplistic explanations like "they're just jealous," or “they are just mean”, or “stay away” because this doesn't help your child understand the emotional complexity behind bullying behaviour.

Instead, focus on exploring the deeper reasons behind why people behave this way, helping your child develop a more mature and insightful emotional perspective as this develops emotional intelligence.

It is particularly cognitively sensible and helpful, however, to think about why human beings behave in anti-social ways, what causes them to attack those they view as weaker, and what social processes and underlying social dynamics are occurring. As we use logic to observe and take notice of social patterns we can use that to understand the world and make more informed decisions.

This awareness could also enable you to:

• Recognise unhealthy or toxic social patterns early and take proactive steps to manage or avoid them.

• Build empathy and compassion, helping you relate to and understand the emotional struggles of both victims and aggressors. (For example, in my line of work, to improve the conditions which create aggressors, I need to be able to empathise with them).

• Develop resilience, as understanding reduces emotional reactivity and enhances thoughtful responses to difficult situations.

• Improve communication, because being aware of emotional dynamics leads to clearer, more socially aware interactions.

• Empower effective problem-solving, as deeper awareness equips you to handle social conflicts more intelligently and constructively.

Rather than taking bullying personally, emotional intelligence provides you with a perspective that understands both the bully and the victim as people. This is how you move from subjective reaction to objective analysis.

I want to add what Susan David, the person I chose for this week’s quote would say about improving emotional intelligence. She raises the concept of “emotional agility”. According to Susan, is about developing the flexibility to thoughtfully navigate your emotions. Rather than being driven by impulsive emotional reactions, emotional agility means observing emotions openly, understanding what these emotions signal about your values and situations, and then choosing your response intentionally. Being emotionally agile allows you to step back from strong feelings, view the situation clearly, and adapt your behaviour effectively.

Read more about Susan’s work by exploring her book:

David, S. (2016). Emotional agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. Avery.

Click to see Susan David’s Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/susandavid_phd/?hl=en

THOUGHT 3: ACTIVITY

Critical Thinking Activity to Improve Emotional Intelligence:

Think of someone in your life who has experienced emotional difficulty or vulnerability. Bonus points f it is someone closer to you because this means you have an emotional connection with this person. This emotional connection means you may have biases that might cloud your logical judgement. I want you to try really hard to remain fair with the facts you know.

Reflect on the following points thoughtfully:

• What do you know for certain about their situation?

• What do you observe?

• What do you NOT know or fully understand?

• Can you make any healthy assumptions?

• Be careful not to make unhealthy assumptions based on your own biases.

• What life events, historical facts, or present facts have contributed to their emotional state? Consider social, psychological, or circumstantial factors.

• How might this knowledge change your emotional reactions or interactions with this person?

This exercise encourages logical thinking and promotes deeper emotional understanding and empathy. Happy Thinking!

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Why?

Because I want mothers to succeed and to be able to be allowed to experience motherhood on their terms, not on someone else’s.

Right now, in the Western world, sometimes too much thinking is the problem.

Now, these days I am both an experienced mother and a sociologist. The latter has meant I am trained to analyse the external social factors which could be contribute to our well-being or lack thereof.

Of course, the social environment I create at home is important as a mother. But in the early days post-baby this is not relevant. The physical body and the psychological mind are of acute relevance to attend to.

As a mother, I am thinking about more than just sociological factors. I am thinking about my role as a woman, a female, my body, and what it just went through to sustain and deliver life. This means I am thinking about my biological abilities and needs, and the biological needs of my children.

When I became a mother for the first time, I entered the biggest liminal space of my life—a complete transformation was about to take place, and I was suddenly thrust into an in-between state where nothing felt stable. This was not wrong. In fact, it was so right.

Uncertainty fuels excellent questions.

A good question is always a gateway to trigger good solutions. However if one does not have time to find the answers which match the problem we are in trouble.

For me, motherhood would eventually become a masterclass in being human. I am still on that journey.

A period so raw, so emotional, so vulnerable, that every fear, bias, insecurity, personality flaw, and errors in my character would rear their ugly head—fast.

The times we think about our thinking usually coincide with moments in life when we are faced with thought dilemmas.

There’s rarely a reason to reflect on how we think—unless something isn’t making sense unless our emotions are in direct clash with what we think we already know.

That’s when we realise: we have thinking work to do.

So, one of the most significant cognitive growth periods of my life was when I became a mother. Three times over.

And the most profound was when I became a mother for the FIRST time.

A mother in a Western society.

That last part is a very important point.

The Overload That’s Breaking Mothers

We are witnessing something unprecedented in history: women are entering motherhood at a time when information is infinite.

There are books on motherhood—endless books of ideas by other mothers. By non-mothers. Men. Doctors. Nurses. Sleep consultants. There are books other people have read and recommended—endless recommendations. Endless solutions. There are experts, blogs, studies, and forums—an infinite stream of knowledge and advice. What comes with so many perspectives naturally is infinite contradiction.

We are being told a thousand different ways to do the same task, all while experiencing one of the most hormonal, identity-shifting, and emotionally chaotic periods of our lives.

When we are facing ambiguity and have even more ambiguity piled on top of us, we might get buried alive. And many new mothers are experiencing just that.

All this is happening while being in the most vulnerable state, trying to concentrate and comprehend with barely any sleep. New-motherhood is a sacred time. In such a vulnerable period, we need to take care of ourselves.

In the modern world, with so much data and information forcing their way into our spaces, no wonder we are pushed to our ultimate psychological limits.

It was the most cognitively vulnerable period of my life.

And to make it worse, this information overload is happening at a time in history when mothers are also living in the most isolated, individualist post-birth experience ever.

No village to guide us.
No multi-generational homes full of mothers before us.
No lived examples around us to witness and build confidence every day.

Just books, opinions, and a society that has decided for us what the "right" way to mother is.

This is a perfect storm for psychological chaos.

Motherhood Is Supposed to Be Gentle

It is a sacred period of bonding between a mother and her child, her body having just emerged from the profound act of bringing life into the world.

At that moment, she experiences not just birth but also death—the death of the self she once knew. She is no longer childless. She is a mother.

If not yet by practice, then by pure definition and truth that she bore a child from her body.

Now, she must learn what it means to be that word in the way she knows how. And in the early days, how can one know what one has never known yet?

Except one thing is for sure, which only time and wisdom can teach us…this young mother doesn’t realise it yet, but she already knows how.

She needs time, grace, and patience to settle into it, to become one with the word itself.

But in the Western world, that natural process is interrupted.

Cognitive disruptions pour in, pulling her away from the most innate, intuitive, and natural transition a human can experience.

The Cognitive Burden of Motherhood

Critical thinking is what we use when we need to process the value of information. It is effortful. It takes mental energy. It requires weighing pros and cons, assessing risks, and sorting through competing knowledge.

It is, quite literally, cognitively taxing.

But there is another way humans think.

Intuitive thinking.

Intuition is what we use when we don’t have time to process or compare facts—it is feeling-based cognition, a fast-track mental process that, for most of human history, was our primary survival tool.

Now, we live in a world where we don’t need to use intuition as much—we’re safe, we don’t need to dodge spears from opposing tribes, we have information.

But I argue that in motherhood, we absolutely still need it. During this period of physical and psychological vulnerability, we have an incredible power of intuition and connection with our child that we can use. However, we are now not encouraged to use that. We are encouraged to learn, to know and understand, and make sure our baby is safe. I only recall the anxiety that came with all of that. In the end, all that information did not make things clearer, it made things very, very unclear instead.

When we are too overloaded with information and it is too cognitively burdensome, we can implode.

The War Between Knowledge and Instinct

When I reflect on the hell I went through as a new mother, I realise now:

I had a beautiful, natural, organic ability to make the right decisions for my baby.

Nature had already given me the skill.

But I lived in a world where knowledge was abundant and information was endless.

I was socially scouted into a reality where motherhood was not my own experience to create—it had already been constructed for me.

And that clash between what I already knew inside of me and what I was being told from the outside?

That is what was psychologically and emotionally debilitating.

I believe this is why we see such high levels of postnatal stress, frustration, and sadness in mothers today.

It’s not just exhaustion.
It’s not just hormones.
It’s the trauma of being forced to mother in a way that feels unnatural to us.

The Balance Between Thinking and Feeling

I am an advocate for critical thinking when we need it.

I am also an advocate for intuitive thinking when it is the more effective tool.

By the time I had my third baby, I was a confident mother.

I used both intuition and knowledge. I chose what was relevant and ignored the rest. I was finally the mother I wanted to be.

The Real Cost of “Doing It Right”

What we are losing in the modern world isn’t just community—it’s our organic abilities.

The expectation to “follow the science” has stripped mothers of the natural intelligence they already possess.

Getting the “right” information is clouding our ability to trust our ability to make the right decisions if we just stop, sit still, and think without distractions.

Thank you for reading. Please share this article if you liked it.

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