You may wonder why I chose the tagline, Question while you can. Well, it started out with the fact that I’ve always enjoyed taking a contrarian point of view. As a young person, perhaps it was to vex a sibling or an authority figure, but now as an adult, I’ve come to discover the importance of not accepting conventional norms “just because” and to train myself to see value in all viewpoints, especially the uncomfortable ones.
At first it was more of a past-time or to provoke a spicy response, but then I awoke from my slumber during the pandemic. There I saw the honest exchange of ideas being suppressed, labeled as “misinformation” and therefore censored, for the sake of the general good. I found this too eerily familiar to what the Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about in his Gulag Archipelago. What shocked me the most though was that this time, censorship was not the instrument of an authoritarian government, but rather, self-imposed by a free people. Taking this thought to its natural conclusion meant that Solzhenitsyn’s book perhaps was not just a historical narrative, but rather a warning for the future.
In the business setting, I’ve also seen that respectfully questioning those labeled experts or tenured leaders can be, sadly, “career limiting” exchanges. The great irony is that recently, many corporations have institutionalized programs to create psychological safety in the pursuit of a free market of ideas, which have contributed exactly to the opposite of their intended objective. Whether critical thinking is limited by fiat, “unnatural” career selection, weariness of being a lone voice in the wilderness, or self-imposed censorship, now, more than ever, it’s important to question.
Twistymind 