I remember my grandma telling me to think for myself. That was, like, 30 years ago or maybe even longer ago. But when you're a kid and your grandma tells you things like that, you really don't understand the true meaning of what she's saying until many years later -- unless you're a genius kid, which I was not.
So you have a consensus that global warming is a fact, and then you have all these people believing global warming is a fact. Then everybody follows the consensus because that's the path of least resistance, or the path of least destruction. Because everybody else supports a theory, if you oppose it then tension arises. You are called things like a 'cook' or a 'denier.'
So it's easier just to go with the flow and believe in global warming.
Recently I asked one of my liberal friends during a midnight chat, "Do you believe in global warming?"
He said, "Yes I do."
I said, "Then why has there been no increase in global temperatures in 18 years?"
He said, confidently, "Because the heat is now under the ocean." He was referring to a study released in the summer of 2014 that showed that the heat has been being sucked into the Atlantic Ocean, and is hiding about a mile down.
Here we are just two guys trying to pass the time; we were walking that fine line of politics, and neither of us wanted to tick off the other (we were both chickens, you might say). So we left this conversation hanging and moved on to something else.
But here is when I started to think about what my grandma said. I started thinking that with all the information thrown at us about global warming and how it is a fact, it would be so easy to believe it all if I didn't think for myself.
In other words, if you go with the consensus, if you take the path of least resistance, you don't have to think for yourself: all you have to do is believe everything that is said.
If there weren't people who thought for themselves and did their own research, we would probably still be living under the British Monarch, and about 90% of us would be poor.
If people around 1950 didn't start thinking for themselves and begin to challenge the medical consensus that asthma was all in the asthmatic's head, physicians would still be treating asthma as a psychological disease rather than an actual disease.
If you do not think for yourself, then you just become another sheep in the herd. If all you want to do in life is be popular, if all you want to do is be liked, then you might be fine being a sheep. But if you want to truly make the world better, you best 'think for yourself."
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