Being Yourself and Being Your Better Self

Cultivating the humility to recognize both the positive and negative aspects of acculturation, and exercising the critical thinking necessary to attach ourselves to truth that exists beyond ourselves.

Pixexid, Ralph.

I once took an excellent class in critical thinking at Southern Utah University. Years later, two principles stand out that help me stay measured in my consumption of political material and in how I attempt to engage in responsible political dialogue.

The first, which I hope to write about in a future piece, is a list of six bad habits that stand in the way of critical thinking: 1) The Mine-Is-Better Habit, 2) The Face-Saving Strategy, 3) The Unreasonable Resistance to Change, 4) Demands for Conformity or Non-Conformity, 5) Self-Deception, and 6) Over-Generalization and Stereotyping.

The second, which I will further elaborate upon in this piece, is the idea of acculturation, understanding that each of us has a perspective that is unavoidably limited to our own experiences and knowledge and often, more than we can perhaps comfortably admit, connected subconsciously to the cultural atmosphere in which we were raised than to conscious, rational decision making.

This idea of acculturation is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, acculturation is an important aspect of raising a healthy and functioning adult. When we are children, we don’t have the ability to reason through a whole lot. We haven’t developed the skills necessary to engage in critical thinking. We are at the mercy of those who are raising us, principally our parents, secondarily other authority figures such as teachers, religious leaders, and extended family, and thirdly those, such as friends, siblings, etc., with whom we choose to associate and develop friendships.

A healthy process of acculturation involves the cultivation of habits, norms, mores, and values, among other things, that establish a baseline upon which we can grow not only into healthy adults but responsible citizens. This process of acculturation is even more important in a free society, where citizens are expected to be free agents within a sphere of liberty.

This principle of positive acculturation is something I often alluded to while serving a Latter-day Saint mission in Ohio when I would quote Proverbs 22:6, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." 

But another scripture I would often cite, Mosiah 3:19, reveals another form of acculturation, a negative kind: "For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever." The reality of human nature betrays the fact that, no matter how we try to raise our children, no matter how we try to inculcate positive virtues and responsible behaviors, our own shortcomings and weaknesses are also going to imprint themselves upon our children.

This is where the development of critical thinking becomes so important. This is where a self-recognition of one’s own history of acculturation, a confession of ingrained biases, and an acknowledgment of the limits of our limited perspective are crucial to engaging responsibly in the public square.

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One such important principle is recognizing what Karl G. Maiser suggests is the difference between “being yourself” and “being your better self.” On both the right and the left, for example, we’re increasingly seeing the development of a cult of authenticity. On the left, we’ll often hear the phrase “speak your truth,” while on the right, figures who simply “speak their mind,” even if what they say is ugly, brutish, and unadulterated, have come to be valued over those who are thoughtful, circumspect, and cautious in voicing their unrestrained or half-baked opinions.

I saw both these phenomena on the college campus. Often, both left-leaning and right-leaning students would grow hostile to the application of critical thinking in weighing and measuring their views or in the use of the Socratic method by instructors in attempts to help students fully consider their views. “How dare you challenge my truth!” the left-leaning student would say, “This is verbal violence against my very identity, against who I am!” “How dare you dismiss me!” the right-leaning student would say, “These are the views I hold, and the views of millions of Americans! What right do you have, you elitist, to challenge me!”

Both of these responses demonstrate an uncritical mind, a failure to confess that, while we are rational beings, we are nevertheless, in many ways, the products of our circumstances and that it falls to each of us to determine which traditions we should cling to and which new ideas we should consider in order to find our place as independent individuals seeking higher self-awareness and more positive impact on the world around us.

The goal is not authenticity, to simply “be ourselves” as if we each exist in a vacuum, personifying “truth” however we want to conceive it. The goal is excellence, and that requires growth predicated upon critical thinking, the application of reason toward a conscious choice of who and what we want to be and what constitutes becoming our better selves. We must discover objective truth that exists outside our limited experience, acculturation, and biases and then alter our base selves to align ourselves with that truth.

Justin Stapley received his Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Utah Valley University, with emphases in political philosophy, public law, American history, and constitutional studies. He is the Founding and Executive Director of the Freemen Foundation as well as Editor in Chief of the Freemen News-Letter. @JustinWStapley