Transcription
Human civilization is built on pyramids. And I'm not just talking about the stone ones baking under the Egyptian sun, but invisible structures, hierarchies of thought, layers of meaning, and levels of thinking that range from the most basic impulses to the heights of true revelation.
And yet, despite the astonishing tools, knowledge, and information available to us today, most people never climb past the very first steps. In school, in politics, in culture, and especially online, the majority of society still operates at the lowest layers of thinking, remembering, or more accurately, simply regurgitating everything that they've been told. Not thinking for themselves, not questioning or examining, just echoing words without the weight, opinions without origin, beliefs without understanding.
And here's the terrifying part. Most people don't even realize there are higher levels of thinking that you can ascend. Why have we all forgotten how to think? And what happens to a society when no one wants to think beyond the surface? These are the highest levels of thinking and why society is stuck at the bottom.
In 1956, an educational psychologist named Benjamin Bloom unveiled something that he called the taxonomy of educational objectives, a structural hierarchy on how humans learn, think, and process information. It was originally designed for teachers, a way to help students progress from basic memorization to deeper, more sophisticated forms of thought. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that this wasn't just a framework for classrooms. This was a blueprint for human cognition itself. A kind of mental pyramid that reveals why some people develop clarity, perspective, and wisdom, while others remain stuck, repeating what they've been told without actually having any deeper understanding of those things. And the fact that he made it a pyramid and not just a staircase meant that Bloom accidentally created the perfect metaphor for modern society.
Because today, most people are stuck at the very bottom of that pyramid. And the higher you go through the levels, the fewer people there are. For those who don't know, here's a brief explanation of the pyramid. At the bottom, you have remembering, which is simply repeating the information you've been given verbatim. The next is understanding, the ability to explain ideas in your own words. Application means using the information to solve simple problems. After that comes analysis, the ability to compare, contrast, break things apart, and see the hidden structure behind ideas. Evaluating allows you to form judgments and determine priorities. And finally, at the very top, you have creating, the rarest level, where you take everything you've learned and synthesize it into something genuinely new. A fresh idea, a new model, a new perspective that didn't exist before.
Unfortunately, most of humanity never reaches level four, while some never even reach level two. But the crisis isn't just that people fail to reach the top. It's that they don't know they're stuck at the bottom. They believe that they're thinking simply because information is passing through their minds. It's like riding shotgun and convincing yourself that you're the one steering.
Now we live in an era of unprecedented access to knowledge. Uh, the entire sum of human history is available in your pocket. And yet, that paradox is painful. The more information that we have, the less we seem to understand. We confuse awareness with comprehension. We confuse memory with intelligence. We confuse noise with depth.
To understand this crisis and the path out of it, we have to start with the foundation. Level one, remembering, the age of regurgitation. This is where most online discourse lives. It's the land of slogans, sound bites, TikTok commentary, and inherited opinions. It's the cognitive equivalent of fast food. It's all pre-cooked, pre-chewed, pre-digested. There's not really any thinking required. You just have to repeat what you saw. That's why you can scroll for 10 minutes and see 50 people expressing the same hot take in slightly different words. It's why political debates devolve into a shouting match between people who don't actually understand the very talking points that they're repeating. It's why misinformation spreads faster than truth. Truth requires you to think. Falsehood only requires volume. Level one thinkers believe they're engaging, but they're merely parroting. They've outsourced cognition to influencers, tribes, pundits, and algorithms. Theirs is a secondhand experience. It's a borrowed mind. They are, in a sense, intellectually asleep while imagining themselves fully awake.
Level two, understanding, the illusion of comprehension. Some people climb one level higher. They can explain an idea back to you. They understand the words, the definitions, the basic structure of information. But this is still a fragile understanding, one that collapses the moment life becomes at all complicated. This is where a lot of online debaters end up. These are people whose ideas only work on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Once you introduce any sort of nuance into the conversation, their entire argument collapses and their worldview becomes threatened. Imagine someone explaining inflation, crime rates, mental health, addiction, social inequality. Well, they can define the terms, describe the concept, maybe even give a few examples, but they've never stepped back to ask the next question. What does any of that truly mean? And how do I know this is true? And what else might explain this? The illusion of comprehension is one of the most dangerous cognitive traps, and it's why most pseudo-intellectuals end up at the second level. People who know they are uninformed are capable of learning, while people who believe they understand when they don't, well, they can get stuck forever.
Bloom's hierarchy wasn't meant to describe society. Yet, it has become the perfect metaphor for the modern world. We are drowning in information but starving for insight. We're plugged into infinite content and yet disconnected from actual thought. The lowest levels, which should be only the starting point for deeper thinking, have become the entire destination. Civilization has flattened into a single plane where the easiest form of cognition dominates every conversation: repeating what somebody else has already said. If you want to understand why society feels fractured, shallow, polarized, exhausted, anxious, and overwhelmed, you have to understand how we got stuck at the bottom of the pyramid. And to understand that, we need to go deeper into the psychology of the modern mind.
There is no conspiracy, no villain pulling the strings from some hidden shadow. The real enemy is a combination of evolution, emotion, technology, and culture. All working together like gravity, pulling the mind towards the path of least resistance. And the brain, it loves efficiency. Not the truth. The human brain, frankly, wasn't built for philosophy. It wasn't built for abstraction, long-term planning, or even careful reflection. It was built for survival in a dangerous world. Spotting threats, reacting quickly, conserving energy, and avoiding uncertainty. Thinking deeply is metabolically expensive. It burns real calories. The brain is only 2% of your body weight, yet it consumes around 20% of your energy. And every time you engage in higher-level cognition, whether that's analyzing, evaluating, or creating, your brain is doing something evolution never optimized it for.
In psychology, this has a formal name: cognitive miserliness. The brain uses as little mental energy as possible. It prefers shortcuts, heuristics, patterns, and familiar answers. And odds are, you've experienced this in small ways. Skimming instead of actually studying, watching summaries instead of reading the book, nodding at an idea that you don't actually fully grasp. The mind is wired to avoid effort unless effort is necessary for survival.
This is why the bottom of the pyramid feels good. The first levels, remembering, understanding, and maybe even applying, are relatively mentally cheap. They rely on pre-existing neural pathways and they reward repetition. They don't require any restructuring of your beliefs, no discomfort, and no conflict with the tribe. The higher levels, however, analyze, evaluate, create, those demand reconstruction. They require friction. They force the brain to wrestle with conflicting data, suppressing emotional impulses, and challenging its own identity. Evolution doesn't like that. So, it punishes you for trying. Thinking deeply literally feels bad at first. There's this cognitive soreness, the mental equivalent of lifting a heavy weight at the gym for the first time.
Now, unfortunately, most people mistake that discomfort as a sign that they should stop, or even worse, they take it as evidence of failure, which I'll assure you now, it is not. This phenomenon, called the misinterpreted effort hypothesis, explains why the climb up Bloom's pyramid feels impossible for the average person. The moment thinking stops becoming smooth and effortless, people assume, "Well, I'm confused. I must not be smart enough. Something's wrong with this argument. This topic is just too complicated for me." Or, "I'll just trust someone else's explanation." Well, what they don't realize is that difficulty is the doorway to intelligence. Discomfort is the signal that you are rising into higher cognition. Most people turn around at the first sign of struggle, mistaking an uphill climb for a dead end. And that's not because they're incapable or or stupid. They're not. But it's because nobody taught them that deeper thinking requires discomfort. Nobody told them that thinking has a weight to it. Nobody told them that burning means you're growing.
There's also the fact that deep thought does require time, a lot of which you don't get in our society today. As humans, we used to lay down and stare at the stars each night, surrounded by loved ones around a fire. We had time to pause, think, reflect, and tell stories. Today, people wake up exhausted. They work jobs that drain them, scroll feeds that overstimulate them, and live in a world where attention is always fragmented. Thinking in such a world has become a luxury, one that most of the population can simply not afford. And so, society stays on level one simply because it is the only level that fits their schedule.
If evolution made thinking hard while technology made it unnecessary, today's digital world is engineered to reward the lowest levels of cognition. Social media feeds are structured around instant reaction, instant outrage, instant validation, instant identity reinforcement, instant emotional stimulation, instant, instant, instant. And nothing, not a thing about this environment rewards slow, reflective thought. Platforms make more money when you operate at the bottom of the pyramid. They want you to remember, share, react, repeat. And by the way, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Analysis slows you down. Evaluation breaks the emotional loop. Creation takes time. In essence, deep thought is bad for business.
So, the internet spoon-feeds society pre-packaged opinions, bite-sized takes, and tribal narratives the way a parent feeds a toddler mashed peas. And like toddlers, most people swallow whatever's given to them. Not because they're stupid, but because chewing is just difficult. Technology has become a cognitive prosthetic. We outsource our memories to cloud storage. Social understanding to influencers. Curiosity goes to the algorithms. Creativity, leave that to the AI. Opinions, let the tribe speak. Every year, more mental labor moves from the biological mind to the digital one. And outsourcing always comes with a cost. Unused ability withers. When calculators became common, arithmetic skills dropped. When GPS became common, navigational intuition disappeared. When search engines became common, factual memory worsened. So what happens when we start to outsource thinking itself? Well, we are beginning to find out.
According to a global survey, nearly half of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15 do not meet the minimum level of reading comprehension set by education standards around the world. In other words, almost half of the younger generation struggle to read with understanding, not just decoding words, but grasping meaning and context. In the United States, the latest national assessment testing reveals a worrying downward trend. In 2024, reading scores for fourth and eighth graders dropped again. This marks the third straight decline. In 2025, a high school senior cohort recorded their lowest reading and math performance in decades, with over 30% lacking basic reading skills. At the same time, surveys show a decline in voluntary reading and engagement with text. A recent 2025 literacy survey of young people ages 8 to 18 found only about 1 in three said they enjoy reading in their free time, the lowest reported reading enjoyment rate in two decades. These aren't isolated trends. They are revealing a worrying pattern. As educational and cognitive demands shift outward to your screen, the algorithm, or search engines, foundational capacities like reading comprehension, sustained attention, and independent thinking are getting worse.
So, what does this mean for politics, culture, and public discourse? Well, politics becomes about who can deliver the most emotionally charged, bite-sized message. Public discourse devolves into repetition of surface-level opinions rather than genuine debate. And all of this has led to one of the worst things that we are experiencing today. Perhaps the most powerful force keeping society at the bottom is identity. Most people don't realize this, but by adulthood, their beliefs are no longer cognitive. They're tribal. Once an idea becomes part of someone's identity, they stop thinking about it altogether. But they defend it, they protect it, they justify it, and they repeat it. All without pausing to question it. Everything becomes a loyalty test. "My group believes this." "Well, people like me say this." "My side supports this." "Well, I can't question this. It's who I am." Identity collapses the pyramid into a single step. There's no need to climb if the goal is not truth, but belonging. And the tragedy is this: the smarter a person is, the better they are at justifying their tribal beliefs. Intelligence doesn't automatically lift people up on the pyramid. Sometimes it actually traps them even deeper at the bottom because they can create more elaborate excuses for why they shouldn't climb.
When access to information becomes infinite, people assume understanding becomes infinite, too. "I saw a video on it." "I read a headline." "Well, I know what this means." "I already understand this issue." Information creates the illusion of expertise. Knowledge creates the illusion of wisdom. And society confuses both with thought. Why climb if you believe you're already at the top?
Identity-based thinking also favors emotion over cognition. People don't ask, "Well, is this true?" They ask, "How does this make me feel?" And feelings are the enemy of higher-order thinking. Because analysis requires emotional distance, evaluation requires neutrality, creation requires clarity. But today's cultural climate treats emotions as sacred. If something offends, challenges, or discomforts, it's rejected outright long before the mind has the chance to properly engage with it. The pyramid collapses whenever the heart overpowers the head.
If the lower levels of Bloom's pyramid represent the gravitational pull of modern life, then the upper levels represent something radically different: intentional cognition. The kind of thinking that doesn't happen by accident. The kind of thinking that you have to choose. It's cultivated, built like a muscle. And most people never experience it. And that again, not because they're incapable, but because true thinking feels nothing like what we've been taught. It's slower, stranger. It's more uncomfortable, more humbling, and yet far more transformative.
To understand the path upward, we must first shatter a myth. Climbing into a higher level of thinking isn't about consuming more information or having more opinions or collecting facts like they're souvenirs. It's about changing the relationship between you and your thoughts. So, let's break down how this actually works and what separates real thinking from its cheap imitations.
At level four, thinking becomes structural. You're no longer simply absorbing ideas. You're taking them apart like an engineer studying the blueprint instead of admiring the building. Analysis is the art of comparison. How do A and B differ? What assumptions underlie each? What patterns keep repeating? What contradictions hide beneath the surface? But genuine analysis requires something that our culture has almost forgotten: intellectual patience. You cannot analyze anything if you're rushing. You can't analyze anything if you're emotionally triggered. You can't analyze anything if you're only seeking confirmation. Analysis begins with slowing down enough to ask a simple but revolutionary question: What's actually going on here? Not what you want to be happening, not what you've been told is happening, but what is actually happening? This moment, the pause, the distance, the disidentification is the first real step towards higher cognition. You're no longer the puppet of your thoughts. You're the puppeteer pulling the strings.
Once you can compare ideas, the mind must take the next uncomfortable step: judgment. Evaluation is level five, and it's often misunderstood. People assume judgment means criticism. In reality, it means prioritization. Given multiple truths, which matters most? Given multiple perspectives, which one is the strongest? Given multiple values, which takes precedence? Evaluation requires bravery because it forces you to commit, to take a stance, to say, "This matters more than that." This is not the arrogance of certainty. It's the humility of responsibility. Most people avoid level 5 because evaluation requires emotional regulation, delayed gratification, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to admit ignorance, and the ability to revise beliefs. Evaluation is the first level in which thinking becomes an ethical act. Here, you're no longer just collecting information. You are shaping it into a worldview.
At the top of the pyramid lies level six, synthesis, originality, and creation. Most people misunderstand the word creativity. They think it's artistic, aesthetic, or expressive. But the deepest definition of creation in Bloom's own terms is this: the ability to produce something that did not exist before, using the knowledge you understand, the patterns you've analyzed, and the judgments that you've formed. This could be a new solution, a new model, a new explanation, a new metaphor, a new idea that reframes the entire problem. Creation is the highest level because it represents a total transformation of how your mind interacts with reality. You are no longer a consumer of ideas. You are a generator of them. And here's the secret that very few people understand: the top of the pyramid is not about intelligence. It's about freedom. Because when you can create ideas, you are no longer controlled by the ones that you inherit.
This is the highest level of Bloom's taxonomy. However, we're going to have some fun here. There is one more level that I felt I had to address in this video. So, Bloom's taxonomy explains how we think. Metacognition explains who is doing the thinking. This is the shadow level above the pyramid, the dimension that turns thought into reflection. Metacognition is the ability to watch your own mind the way you watch a movie. You're observing the observer, and you begin to notice, "Well, I tend to react emotionally to this topic." Or, "I'm defending this idea because it protects my identity." "I'm drawn to this conclusion because it feels comfortable." "My desire to be right is preventing me from seeing what's true." It's like you're unlocking the ability to debug your own mind, to identify cognitive biases, emotional triggers, and blind spots in real time. Metacognition is the spiritual evolution of the intellect. It turns the mind into both subject and object. And once you can think about your own thinking, well, the lower levels lose their power over you.
Everything above, analysis, evaluation, creation, metacognition, none of it is innate. It's not genetic. It's not a gift granted to a chosen few. No, it's a skill, and like any skill, it strengthens with use and decays with neglect. So, I've said that society is stuck at the bottom. And that's not because people lack the ability to rise through the ranks. I want to reiterate, these people are not stupid. It's just because they don't practice enough to get better. Real thinking feels different. It's slower. It's heavier, deeper, more uncertain, more revealing. And it's sometimes quite painful, but it is also more meaningful than anything happening at the lower levels. Because when you climb the pyramid, you reclaim something humanity has been losing for decades: agency over your own mind. And you stop being like the echo of myths. You stop being simply a reaction. You stop being a vessel carried by cultural currents. And you begin to navigate the world with conscious intention. You become someone who creates instead of someone who simply consumes. And this is how true thinking works. It is not easy, but it is liberating.
Now we turn to the final and most important question. How do we rise? Not just in theory, but in practice. The truth is, most people never rise. Not because they can't, but because they were never shown how. Thinking, real thinking, feels like walking uphill through deep sand. But there is a path, and there are steps. There is a way upward. And it all starts with step one: slow down the mind. In a world obsessed with velocity, the single most radical thing you can do is slow down. Thinking requires time. Uninterrupted, quiet, uncomfortable time. The mind cannot analyze when it is simply reacting. It can't evaluate when it is constantly stimulated. It cannot create when it is constantly distracted. To begin climbing the pyramid, you must reclaim attention as a discipline. Start with the small things. Read something long enough for your mind to wander and then force it back. Sit with an idea for more than 10 seconds. Resist the urge to jump between apps and tabs. Delay reactions by even a single breath. Because thinking begins where impulsivity ends. When you slow your mind, you create the space necessary for thought to grow.
Higher-order thinking is not a flash of genius. It's a habit. It requires endurance, not brilliance. Just as physical stamina builds through repeated exertion, mental stamina builds through repeated struggle. To grow it, you must intentionally engage with thoughts that stretch you. Choose books that challenge your worldview. Study ideas that you don't immediately understand. Sit with complex problems instead of rushing for the answer. Resist the temptation of simpler narratives. Each time you try to understand something different, you strengthen the very muscles necessary to climb. Most people stop thinking when they feel that friction. The climber rises because of the friction.
Step three, learn to hold multiple possibilities at once. Low-level thinkers crave certainty. One explanation, one narrative, one tribe. But higher cognition begins the moment you realize that multiple truths can coexist and you can hold them in tandem. To analyze effectively, you must learn to hold contradictions without collapsing. Compare ideas without choosing sides prematurely. Tolerate ambiguity without panic. See the complexity inside simplicity. If level one thinking is a straight line, levels four through six are like a constellation. Your mind becomes capable of holding patterns that intertwine, overlap, and sometimes even conflict. And this is how depth emerges.
Step four, build intellectual humility. The greatest enemy of thinking is the illusion that you already know enough. True thinkers have a unique trait that imitators lack: a quiet awareness of how little they truly understand. Like the great Socrates once said, "The only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing." Humility is the gatekeeper to the highest levels of thinking. Without it, the mind becomes a fortress, impenetrable, unchanging, defensive. To develop intellectual humility, assume your first reaction is incomplete. Question where your beliefs came from. Recognize that certainty is often a feeling, not a fact. Learn to say, "I don't know, but I want to know."
Step five, begin judging what matters. At level five, thinking becomes intentional. You're no longer comparing ideas just to compare them. You are drawing conclusions. You're shaping a worldview based on values, logic, evidence, context, trade-offs. And this is where most people tend to turn back. Why? Because evaluation requires commitment. It requires taking responsibility for your conclusions. It requires choosing what to prioritize, what to reject, what to protect, and what to release. But the moment you begin evaluating, truly evaluating, you step into the adulthood of the mind, and the climber reaches the final ascent.
Step six, create something new. Creation is not just artistic. It's cognitive. It is the moment when all the thinking you've done transforms into something original. A new interpretation, a new solution, a new model, a new synthesis, a new question, a new way of seeing the world. Creation is the ultimate expression of independence. It proves that you are no longer repeating the minds that came before you. You've built your own. This is the summit of the pyramid, not because it is the easiest, but because it is the furthest from imitation.
People imagine the cognitive pyramid like a staircase with some people stuck at the bottom and others lounging comfortably at the top. But this metaphor misses something important. The top is not a place. It's a practice. Nobody reaches it and stays there permanently. Nobody is done climbing. You rise, you fall, you rise again. Some days you live at level six. Some days you regress to level one. Every moment you choose depth over speed, curiosity over certainty, reflection over reaction, you ascend. Every moment you choose to ask one more question, consider one more angle, or sit with one more discomfort, you ascend. Every moment you choose to think for yourself, you ascend. And the miracle is this: when one mind climbs, it changes more than just that mind. It changes everyone connected to it. Your clarity becomes a light guiding others to the top. In a world trapped at the bottom, climbing is a revolutionary act.
The highest level of thinking is not about being the smartest person in the room. It's not about knowing the most facts or having the most opinions. It's not about winning arguments or dominating debates. The highest level of thinking is this: to be able to hold your mind in your hands, examine it with honesty, reshape it with intention, and create from it a life that is truly your own.