Think Before You Speak, Read Before You Think
Fran Lebowitz
With the constant bombarding of media and a transfusion of ideas being showered upon us, the chances of misinformation are high. We may believe what we see and what we hear, but fact is, it may not represent reality at all. Psychological studies show that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, meaning, the ways our brain interprets what our senses see may not represent reality. There is always an incongruence between what we perceive by our senses and what we interpret in our brains. And if our interpretations are not close to objective reality, our beliefs and opinions are also clouded by judgement of interpretation. In that case, what we speak is also unreliable. What then, is truth? And how do we search for it?
The wise would say that it’s important to think before you speak. Your impulsive speech is a manifestation of the immediate interpretations, however subjective they may be, of your mind. But when you have had a chance to mull things over, you can analyze them in retrospect. You can better understand the fallacies of your own mind and take into account the perspectives of others. A great example of this would be the sunk cost fallacy. Suppose you are in your home library, reading a book you bought recently. You’re halfway done with it, but are absolutely not enjoying it.
The rational, logical thing to do would be to set that book down and pick another that is more enjoyable. But the mind and its impulses trick us into believing that since we have already made a considerable investment in the book – in terms of money, time and effort – it would be silly to put the book down. But in fact, the previous investment you have made has no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the book or your enjoyment levels from it. Your past investment shouldn’t deter you from dropping an unprofitable venture. All the ruckus could go away if only man thought before he spoke or made decisions.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. What is the quest of truth in a world were humans have access to only a limited spectrum of subjective thought? The wise say thinking before speaking, but there’s a step even more crucial than that. And that is reading before thinking. As I demonstrated before, our speech heavily relies on our thoughts, and millions of factors influence our thoughts. Our backgrounds, childhoods, workspaces, frame of mind, personality, education and likes and dislikes, to name a few. And the only way to get past these influences and move in the direction of the absolute, objective truth is to take into account perspectives other than ours. To learn to look at things in a holistic way, instead of looking at it in bits and pieces. As the believers of the gestalt route say, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
This requires a kind of systems thinking. Systems thinking goes beyond what looking at things with a narrow, limited gaze and looking instead at the bigger picture. It involves discarding petty, restrictive perspectives in favour of a bird’s eye view. And the best way to practice systems thinking would be to read books. Reading books voraciously and madly, devouring them whole, being greedy and obnoxious in their consumption.
This is the only way of gaining easy access and entry into another’s perspective, of forsaking your own views for a moment and accepting those of others. And books do this through the best way possible – through empathy and compassion. By prompting you to feel what you don’t organically feel and by making you sensitive to characters, books allow you to think from another’s perspective. And the more you read, the more perspectives you add to your mindset, ultimately resulting in a rainbow of perspectives.
So, the quest of truth is this – read before you think, and think before you speak.
