Who Controls Your Thoughts?
In 2017, Simon McCarthy-Jones wrote an article about schizophrenia for The Conversation. The piece, he jokes, got read by more than two people, which, as an academic—he’s an associate professor of clinical psychology at Trinity College Dublin—was a thrill. Shortly thereafter, however, he found himself “just gripped by the iron claws of Facebook,” looking over and over again to see who had liked his article, who had commented on it. It was “grabbing my attention, making me think, ‘Check Facebook! Check Facebook!’” he said in a recent video call from his office in Ireland.
Was his thinking being covertly, coercively controlled by external forces (in this case, a big tech company)? The experience got him wondering just what “free thought” actually was. And so he started wading into the murky waters of the psychological, philosophical, cultural, and legal assumptions about what constitutes thought—and how it could remain truly free.
His intellectual quest has exited his head, as much thought eventually does, and now exists in the form of a new book: Freethinking: Protecting Freedom of Thought Amidst the New Battle for the Mind.
We caught up with McCarthy-Jones, who walked us through the history of criminalizing “thought crimes,” the physical boundaries of thinking, and how architecture and urban planning are essential for truly free thought.
The subtitle of your book makes me wonder how you would define the “new battle” for our minds—and if you think that war currently has more
