It's your patriotic duty to question authorities!

The most terrible tragedies of man kind have been caused by unreflected obedience to authorities. You decide what to do. The key to find out what to do is critical thinking. Critical Thinking is them most mature and secure guide to find out what is the right thing to do and what is wrong. Use your mind and get involved.

The critical thinking comunity proposes the following definition for the term critical thinking:

"Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action" (1).

This definition implies that critical thinking results in a guide to your belives and your actions. Thus critical thinking is a way or a tool to find out what to do and what to believe.

As you look closer to this definition you might recognize that the process of generating these belives does not nesessaryly incorporate any values. This means the analysis you do can be done with the intention to achieve aims which are good or evil. So the definition goes on:

"In its exemplary form, it [critical thinking] is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness" (1).

In an ideal world each decision, believe and action of an authority would be perfect. Yet, how do you know its perfect. Which tools do you have to decide if they are wrong or right? How do you know you can trust them?

1. You just trust them because you are loyal (which is actually no decision)
2. You toss a coin
3. You ask the Oracle of Delphi
4. You just guess
5. You start to think critically about the problem

As you try to elucidate which is the best method of decicion making you probably automatically started to critically think about this problem. You most likely started to analyse information which result for example from your experiance. This little experiment should demonstrate that critical thinking is the superior tool for evaluation of problems and decision makeing which is immanent to the human mind. Critical thinking is the superior method because you used it to evaluate all other methods. The importance of Critical thinking can also be derived from the definition of enlightenment by Immanuel Kant:

"Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another.

Immanuel Kant, 1784: What is Enlightenment

We all know this world is not ideal. We all know the authorities are not always as prudent and skillfull as they want to make us believe because authorities are only humans and humans are not perfect. Thus, we have to make up our own mind by means of critical thinking. If we don't, we are either Immature (lazy, coward) or have a conciderable lack of intelligance (stupid).

We have to use critical thinking to review the descisions of the authorities. To do this we have to gather information from independant and turstworthy sources and to evaluate the arguments of the authorities. If we end up with conflicting results we have to find out why. If we are sure the authorities are wrong we have to take action.

For example Democracy is founded on this principle. The gouvernment is controled by the people. If we don't use our own understanding without the guidance of the government we are jeopardizing our freedom.