Are Your Ideas Your Own?

It's not where you got an idea that matters, but how you came to accept it.

Having strong self-esteem depends on being proud of yourself—on feeling proud of the things you do, the values you hold, and the principles you stand for. But for that pride to be genuine, you must know that you deserve to be proud of those things. If you know, even vaguely, that you don’t, it will hurt rather than help your self-esteem.

Unfortunately, many people don't achieve this kind of evidence-based pride, in part because they have not properly thought through many of the ideas they hold—they have never validated them firsthand. Perhaps they uncritically accepted those ideas from family, friends, or school—adopting them secondhand—or perhaps they got them by following their feelings. Either way, they never rationally validated those ideas with their own minds. Somebody showed them the way, but they took the journey themselves.

A seemingly opposite but fundamentally similar problem occurs when some people, in an effort to make sure their ideas are their own, reject any views and ideas that may have come from others and instead adopt the opposites of those ideas—an approach known as contrarianism. This error can come from a well-intentioned motive—the desire to form one's own firsthand ideas rather than adopt the ideas of others—but it’s based on a crucial mistake about what it means for an idea to be firsthanded.

It's Not Where You Got an Idea that Matters, But How You Came to Accept It

Imagine that Johnny, Sarah, and Richard all think that the United States is the best country on Earth. But they all came to this conclusion by different routes:

• Johnny's father brought him up as an American patriot and Johnny feels he should honor his father and take after him. 

• Sarah enjoys living in America and wants to defend her home country, which she loves, against people who argue that other countries do things better.

• Richard grew up in a patriotic family. As a young boy, he accepted their ideas without much thought, but later, he decided to study and evaluate the different social and political systems around the world objectively. He gradually came to the conclusion that America is the best country, based on his findings.

Which of the three people can honestly claim that their opinion—that the United States is the best country—is their own firsthand idea?

Some might be inclined to answer Sarah. She, after all, didn't get the idea from her family. It's based entirely on her own feelings about her home country. 

But the correct answer is Richard. Although he originally got the idea from his family, he now accepts it because he validated it via his own rational thought process. Unlike Sarah, who merely feels that it's true, Richard accepts it on the basis of evidence that he assessed with his mind. That is what makes an idea firsthanded—the use of one's own mind to evaluate it before accepting it. Where or whom it originally came from is irrelevant. If we rejected any idea that originally came from someone else, we'd be left with very few ideas at all and we’d be closed to anybody ever correcting our thinking. 

The error of believing that being an independent thinker means rejecting popular ideas is similar to the error of believing that being independent economically means removing yourself from society and creating all of your values on your own. There is nothing at all wrong with getting values from others—what matters is that you earn them by your own effort, which in the case of ideas means that you validate them with your own mind. Accepting an idea on the basis of feelings without active thought—as Sarah did in the example above—is the opposite of independence. 

The “Queen is Overrated” Fallacy 

This problem applies to many areas of life, and one in which it's most evident is in people's personal tastes, especially music. Some popular musical acts are popular because their style appeals to popular tastes, and some are genuinely outstanding musicians who are popularly acclaimed for it. 

There are some people who will listen to anything that’s popular and uncritically claim to like it (whether they actually do or not), and there are some who will reject anything that’s popular in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the masses. Both approaches are secondhanded.

I most often see the latter mindset when people attack popular musicians and bands known for being highly skilled and influential—common examples include The Beatles, Queen, and Muse—for being “overrated.” There are plenty of overrated popular music acts out there, and plenty of underrated good and important ones too. But a rational, firsthanded evaluation of all the music we encounter should show certain common qualities that good acts share regardless of popularity, and likewise for bad ones.

How Do You Know What’s True?

You cannot know whether an idea, opinion, or principle you hold is true without evaluating it rationally on the basis of evidence. You cannot know it’s true based on feelings, nor based on its acceptance by a large number of people or of people who are important to you. Ideas accepted in this way not only undermine your self-esteem, but undermine your ability to function in reality by disconnecting your ideas from the real world.

Many people I speak to struggle with this because they simply do not trust their own minds to evaluate claims and ideas. They would rather trust outside sources than themselves. This is a critical error. It is certainly rational and proper to turn to experts when you don’t understand something, in order to grow your own understanding of that subject. It can even be proper to accept their ideas in order to make a decision for which you do not have and cannot reasonably get the necessary knowledge, such as an urgent medical decision. But if essential values, principles, and ideas about reality are your concern, you must trust your own mind. The more you develop and use it, the more evidence you’ll have of its efficacy. 

Introspect deeply about the ideas you hold. We all have ideas we’ve held for years that we’ve never critically examined. Make rationally evaluating those ideas a matter of habit. Do not worry about whether or not you got an idea from somebody else. Concern yourself only with whether or not you evaluated it on your own.