Last Thursday I was talking to my friend and she was telling me about something that happened to her the previous day. "I was walking down the street in downtown," she said, "and it was like ten at night so there were people everywhere, slender beauties so pretty as if they walked straight out of posters. Looking at their perfect bodies and makeup and expensive clothes suddenly made me feel inferior. I started to peek into every window I pass by, checking my reflection to see whether my makeup looked fine, whether my dress made my legs look like tree trunks. I did this secretly because I didn't want people to notice my insecurity. However, what I always feared happened eventually: I heard the voice of a little boy asking his mother what was I doing when I was sneakily peeking into one of the shopping windows I passed by. I was pretty sure that nobody really noticed what was happening there but still I felt as if at once all eyes were on me. The attention was unbearable. I was so embarrassed that my mind just went blank. What I am supposed to do?" She paused a little then continued: "And then the most incredible thing happened. The little boy's mother looked and me, shushed his son and said: 'You mean that beautiful girl in the red dress over there? I have no idea.' " She paused again, and just when I thought she was probably going to say something like "heartwarming stranger helped me stay positive", she surprised me by becoming emotional and saying: "Do you have any idea what the unintentional 'beautiful' she used did to me? It made an unbelievably huge difference in just seconds. The next time I looked in a mirror, I stopped seeing the imperfections, instead I saw a 'beautiful' girl with long hair and a red dress and all the flaws just vanished! For eighteen years I have been taught to think critically, to form my own thoughts, yet this women changed my mind using one single word. Are we really in control of own thoughts or these thoughts are actually just a combination of others' views?"

After this conversation I couldn't help but relate to my own experiences. I found that she was right. For years my education aimed to teach me to think independently, to form my own thoughts by gathering and logically analyzing information, to make my own judgements ---- and I had, indeed, always regarded myself as a critical thinker. I believed that I became an atheist because I myself never experienced any supernatural incidents in my life, so I drew that conclusion upon my own reasoning; I believed I practiced figure skating because I watched Winter Olympic Games and fell in love with this sport, of course, on my own will. However, I never thought about whether I became an atheist because of my own wisdom, or because of the fact that I came from and grew up in a country that few practiced religion (I lived in China for the first 16 years of my life) and simply complied to the community I lived in; I never thought about whether my decision to figure skate was made according to my own judgment, or it was actually because that all my best friends practiced figure skating and I just didn't want to be left out alone. All these decisions I made, how many of them were the actual "me" doing the thinking, and how many of them were actually, to at least some extent, just an internalization of other people's opinions that we receive all the time?

I realized that, from a long time ago — long enough that I wasn’t conscious of — I had started accepting the societal notions as my own thoughts without noticing it. Such acceptance underlying my thought process manifested in every aspect of my life and effected me in ways I couldn't even start to enumerate. I relied on a wall that others built and if without it, all my so-called "logic" or "critical thinking ability" would just tumble into pieces.

Of course, this article is not to say that all of our thoughts are just copycats of other's viewpoints and that we should stop thinking altogether because it is meaningless. In the ancient times, Aristotle believed that the final goal of forming arguments and debating is to pursue the ultimate truths and the ultimate virtues. This goal shall be always kept in our minds when we think and reason. We should always base our arguments on enough first-hand evidence instead of merely extracting other people's point of views. Moreover, we should always be aware of the fact that our reasoning and logic are prone to the impact of the environment we live in, the mass media, and many other influences. As long as we keep sticking to the rules above, we might, someday, come close to the final goal ---- finding the ultimate truths.