I have a dense filter placed between my brain and my mouth, between my brain and the tips of my fingers, between my brain and my wandering, curious subconscious, when it comes to the expression of ideas and opinions that are, ostensibly with great shame and contempt, my own.
Lately, I have been more deeply exploring new areas of literature, mainly comprising of historical surveys, stoic philosophy, and political essays by disparate figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Peter Thiel. For my university course in entrepreneurship, too, I have been assigned an array of academic articles from business journals like Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, excerpts from seminal business books such as Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, combined with, per my own assignment, entrepreneurial essays by esteemed venture capitalist Paul Graham. Common amongst this group of seasoned academics and practitioners is that their methodologies, strategies, models of thinking, and guiding principles have, through writing, effectively changed popular thought in that field.
I face these trailblazers with awe, dumbstruck as to how they were able to one, generate and express a novel idea in writing that can then be widely implemented by practitioners of varying experience, and two, have the confidence and conviction to publish said idea for everyone to consume, study, analyze, accept, reject, debate, and berate.
For business, one may argue that novel avenues of thought are merely intended to fill pot holes on the ever-spanning road of business that many a daring entrepreneur decides to take. A failed proposal is inevitable and par for the course in the iterative realm of business. What about expressing ideas in areas of greater sensitivity, like politics, society, race, and religion? With business strategy, you may be shrugged off for an outrageous proposal based on its quantifiable inefficiencies, but within the field of politics or race, your views, your opinions, have an near guarantee to deeply upset a slim (or potentially large) group of people who share certain views which oppose that of those you expressed. To many, this is no problem at all. To me, it poses a considerable one.
What exactly do I fear?
To express extremely heterodox views, views so controversial that I will be ostracized from parts of society that I take part in or barred from those that I do not, is one part. I am not so sure that any of my views reach far enough into the dark depths of the bedless sea of human thought to constitute ostracization, but how can I be so sure? It’s difficult to know what everyone is thinking. It’s quite difficult to know what anyone is thinking at that. Edgar Allen Poe’s “believe nothing you hear, and one half that you see,” tends to act as my guiding principle when engaging with others and their expressed thoughts. I rely on Poe’s words to aggressively aid in the circumvention of the tendency hardwired into my brain (and I assume, that of most others, but of course, I can’t know for sure) to accept that which I am hearing as ground truth.
In rejecting Poe’s principle, if my views evolve into ones that appear to stray from most of those which I am perceiving through my personal interactions, then surely I am destined for failure in my attempt to express my evidently iconoclastic perspective with the futile, underlying intention of its acceptance and adoption. In accepting Poe’s principle, I attest that the public proclamation of a belief is inherently disconcerted, or to take it to an extreme, a categorical lie. In this acceptance, an opportunity is realized: to extract the undisclosed, either consciously or subconsciously, beliefs of a substantial group of people through a structured, compelling delivery of them is not only possible but potentially even noble.
The risk for such a pursuit is tantamount to its reward. In an attempt to uproot an established belief or practice, or even act as the catalyst to the conversation that eventually results in an uproot, a freethinker may find themselves the bearer of fervent backlash from both the institutions that benefit from the incumbent ideas as well as the ordinary actors, the ideological foot soldiers, who identify with the institution enough to simultaneously act as both protectors and enforcers of its values. The following conclusion presents itself: an agitated reaction from this ideological body would indeed be a positive indication for the freethinker. If the consequences of the novel idea being proposed were so insignificant to the people in power and so dismissively tolerable by the mass population of its targeted demographic, chances are that it was not a very novel nor substantial idea in the first place. Worse, the weakness of the idea could boost the opposing dogma in the very direction of its momentum. Disruption, the alternative, is surely a positive indication for the freethinker.
Upon reflection, I am fully capable of comprehending these expressed ideas as I write them down, but still have difficulty processing the painful tumult I experience while arguing an opinion in a direction opposite that of my companions, family, and ideological contemporaries. Though I will rarely waiver in my belief that what I am expressing is the truth, or perhaps more realistically, merely my truth, I do feel inclined to alter that which I am expressing in order to no longer disrupt the consensus and decorum of my social and cultural environment. Effectually, lying will reveal itself as the path of least resistance in the dense swamp of unadulterated human thought. Pleasing the people is not a pursuit by which the freethinker can reach the prized truth which they seek. It may, however, be the only way he may definitively avoid social ostracization.
The most blatant root of this fear of expression and the subsequent self-imposed restraint that is paired with it is my religious doctrine. Islam is fundamentally based on the Divine revelation that was delivered through the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him, a phrase that Muslims pair with his every utterance, out of reverence), known as the Quran, as well as the narrated teachings and stories of the Prophet (pbuh) known as the hadith. The former is a timeless ground truth, the foundation of the religion where direct, divine commandments and prohibitions receive no conjecture. The latter is treated how other historical documents generally are—the closer the source of narration is to the Prophet (pbuh), the more authentic it is deemed. The practice of Islamic jurisprudence, known as fiqh, involves applying these two types of text unto society and its governance.
As a fallible human being capable of sin, with my admittedly fallible mind capable of sinful thought, the prudence I am practicing in regard to the expression of new ideas and opinions that I have developed based on the limited interactions of my twenty one years of life is not unfounded. If an ostensibly innocuous idea that I express goes against the doctrine by which I live my life, even if that fact is unbeknownst to me, I am accountable for spreading such blasphemy—I bear any sins which are to result from my expression, so it be followed by only one person.
Full disclosure, Islam does not employ this principle in order to discourage or repudiate free thinking, rather quite the opposite; the religion encourages the seeking of knowledge, so much so that any pursuit of science or philosophy with the underlying intention of advancing society towards a better understanding of the world we live in and transitively, of God, is deemed as an act of worship. My hesitance to express my own opinions and philosophies in relation to societal issues, politics, and the human psyche is one that is rooted in my insecurity in my Islamic erudition.
Attaining only a minimal classroom education in Islam, most of my education has been from practices passed down through family and friends, watching and reading lectures and articles posted onto the Internet, and reading an English translation of the Quran. Although my level of knowledge on the religion is sufficient enough to practice the five core pillars and avoid the more glaring major sins, there are still subtle moments in my daily life where a vigilant area of my subconscious activates, spawning the feeling that I might be transgressing a particular principle of my faith. The feeling is discreet yet compelling; affably concerned yet markedly subversive. It is a subconscious defense mechanism, protecting me from the severity of divine disobedience while, in tandem, disrupting my confidence in the decisions I take in my life, causing me to question and reevaluate them. Contemplation is neither harmful nor uninvited, but when these uncertain feelings arise often enough to where I am completely discouraged to pursue practices that are fundamentally encouraged in Islam, it starts to become detrimental.
I am no longer willing to stand idly by while this destructive habit of indecisive inaction inhibits my God-given, inalienable right to think. Moving forward, I plan to engage in expressing my opinions and thinking deeply on topics of interest, all in writing. In writing, because I’ve bought into Paul Graham’s theory that “[w]riting doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them.” That is to say the less time I spend documenting the intricacies of my thoughts, the less intricate they will ever be. It is absolutely paramount that I forestall the stagnancy of my mind.
It is also plainly apparent to me that a private, blasphemous self-reflection, one that is based in genuine curiosity and achieved through free exploration, is not terminally blasphemous—it, after all, is a thought reached by, in this example, an inquisitive servant of God. Perhaps it is then the responsibility of the freethinker to cross reference their conclusion with the Quran and the hadith of the Prophet (pbuh), and find the logical disconnect in their work. Only when the blasphemy is mended, would I think it to be permissible to spread one’s work throughout society, so that it may actualize its ultimate, intended effect of enlightenment, be it spiritually or scientifically.
A question naturally arises asking whether the mandatory accordance with Islamic doctrine acts as a cage restricting the domain of the freethinker so that their thought is no longer even free but so that it may, more crucially, reside within the metaphysical bounds proscribed by God, or if it acts as a foundation of stepping stones from which the freethinker may propel himself toward the sole entity that any and every thinker is ever seeking: the Truth. Perhaps this entity too, we may simply replace with God.
The answer to this question is one that I do not have, and one that I am ardently trying to investigate on my own. What I do now know, though, is my ability to explore the far-reaching corners of my existence with the single distinguishing feature of humankind, a free mind, is not one to be squandered and tamed, but one to be leveraged and liberated.
In reading this essay, you have witnessed, and therefore taken part in, the liberation of my own thoughts through a forgiving process that involves a retrospective evaluation of the ideas that I have generated prior to publicization, rather than a prophetic repudiation of what I may or may not think. For as we established, there is no way of knowing one’s own thoughts until they are deliberately documented. The masses will expectedly be upset by my words just as the realization of its heterodoxy begin to dawn on them. Perhaps only while I remain steadfast on the path in search of the Truth, will He help liberate the shackled groupthinkers of society so that my ideas rooted so deeply within them may bubble up from within, bridging the moat that once separated our beliefs.