It is because we are immersed in a veritable sea of information—an exponential and unceasing expansion of bits and bytes. Assessing its many sources, veracity and meaning has become practically impossible.

So as the supply of information is inexhaustible we are not. We have less and less time to deal with ever more information. To dignify and excuse our lack of focus and frustration we say we are multitasking. But none of us really multitask. We serially task and most of us do it badly. Multitasking is a myth—a euphemism for distraction—for self imposed attention deficit.

I have no statistics to cite (although I’m sure I could find some online) but my observation from the perspective of 59 years of living suggests that in the United States logic and reasoning are rapidly being abandoned in favor of hunch, cant and dogma.

This is frightening and understandable. The overwhelming task of finding meaningful and irrefutable truths in the mountains of conflicting and contradictory information—the heaps of decontextualized facts and factoids—has predisposed us to those persons, institutions and organizations that offer to do our thinking and fact sorting for us. How easy it is to rely upon guru BABABABA or the alleged inerrant word of some set of holy scriptures. How easy it is to say, “I don’t understand it but those real smart scientists, they got it all figured out.” How easy it is to click on Google, Bing or Yahoo for an instant answer, any answer—preferably the answer that confirms my hunch no matter how goofy or profound it might be.

Our freedom of thought is the freedom least exercised and most often surrendered without a fight—most likely because freethinking can be terrifying and lonely. It often takes the thinker into uncharted territory and raises questions that can’t be answered with a keyword search.

Freedom of association, movement and acquisition can be denied by circumstance or the actions of others. Not so the freedom of thought. It remains a choice.

So it is that informed consent is impossible without freedom of thought which is what makes meaningful focus, discovery and creativity possible.

© Michael M. Smith 2009