Consciousness, Self-Knowledge and Intellectual Empowerment
Do Institutions of Thought Block Self-Knowledge & Intellectual Freedom?
Welcome to today’s Sunday Synapse and The Trio of Thoughts:
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.
I define psycho-cognitive as an acknowledgment of the importance of both emotional exploration and rational reframing.
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
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?Name an institution
Think about one belief or “truth” you’ve inherited (family, school, culture). Ask: Does this still help me?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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“we’re really just trying to prove our validity.”
This seems to be a life long struggle to remember that my validity, my value, my self worth is directly proportional, inherent, and self evident to my existence.
Why do I keep falling for the trap of believing other people’s criticism of me, when my logical mind knows that “what other people think of me is none of my business?” I suppose the intensity of the emotional hook just speaks to the strength of emotional trauma attached to these behaviors and beliefs, and there in lies my work.