Page 38 - Liberating Liberals V2

The Mental Prison Break
liberated from often falsely exclusive categories such as capitalism and socialism, atheism and theism, and even liberal and conservative.
These happiness gains shouldn’t require extra effort. Instead, it’s our lack of faith in following freethinking to its conclusions, come hell or high disillusionment, that cause us to make conclusions prematurely — and defend them like absolute truth. We merely need to be more confident about our freethinking, and have fewer inhibitions in pursuing it. Author Arthur Bloch observed that “A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.”27 Freethinking’s gifts may be boundless and exploring freethinking may be limitless.
And freethinking insights can spread like wildfire once their logic becomes obvious. It’s a Ken Keye’s “hundredth monkey” type transformation whose momentum becomes apparent only when it happens.28 An example is gay rights. In the very recent past LGBT people were not even given a hearing, much less access to the most basic human rights. Now
gay rights are the law of the land. The rapidity with which gay rights have progressed — in part by big boosts from TV sitcoms like Ellen and Will and Grace — exhibits how quickly an idea can circulate given today’s technology combined with the flexibility of the freethinking brain.
Conservatives fear that civilization has a Hobbesian fragility and that it’s nowhere more
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