How much does a person need to know before he can think critically? Ignorance, prejudice and wishful thinking can certainly imitate forms of critical thinking in a superficial way. But real critical thinking, which also entails an awareness of one’s own precarious conditions, is very rare. According to the national curriculum, Swedish pupils are supposed to learn critical thinking in school, as part of their personal development, and not least to grow up into full-fledged citizens in society. Critical thinking is considered fundamental to the development of well-functioning individuals in a democratic society.

But critical thinking is not an easy thing. It is a kind of opposition, an opposition that people must learn to exert or apply by using their knowledge constructively – or for that matter destructively, because it may actually involve confronting or demolishing others’ concepts and claims, or their own. It is easy to say what critical thinking is not, and thus what does not teach a person to reason in a way that is germane: eliminating boring classics is not critical thinking. On the other hand, reading “boring” classics and then explaining why one thinks they are boring and why they should not be included in instruction may well be critical thinking. Critical thinking is not based on taste and opinion but on knowledge. It requires work, frequently boring work, and analysis based on understanding, albeit critical understanding, of what a person is analysing.

We live in an age of niches and target groups, where civic-mindedness has been replaced to a terrifying extent by a kind of customer-mindedness, where the most important thing for anyone, from teachers, politicians and journalists to fishmongers and perfume sellers, is thought to be satisfying their customers’ needs. It is a small step, far too small, going from respecting one minority or another to giving them what they want, not bothering them with critical thinking, not arguing that there is something greater, something right or wrong, something they also have to subordinate themselves to – whether it is logic, respect for the freedom of others or the Swedish national curriculum for compulsory school.

Critical thinking is connected to the most basic problems of democracy. Citizens should obviously get what they want; they are the ones who make decisions in the country, they are the employers of politicians. So politicians who want to achieve a certain position should analyse the desires of citizens and satisfy as many of these as possible. But if someone satisfies too many, that person is a populist; if she satisfies too few, she is an elitist. Granted, views and values are important in a democratic society. The world is not clear-cut and unambiguous; rather, it is a picture puzzle, which we must constantly interpret and reinterpret in order to understand.

Since we live in this gigantic picture puzzle together, with so many others who have different perspectives and experiences, living standards and contexts of meaning, it is clear that there must be conflicts that cannot be resolved. As long as they do not have any deleterious effect on the common welfare, each and every person is allowed to believe what they will. That means there are more opportunities than ever before, primarily via the Internet, where basically any taste, disposition, view or dream can become the breeding ground for a “community”, one that can easily spread globally and have an actual impact on culture or on commerce and politics.

Naturally, everyone should have the freedom of expression. But should everyone have the same right in every context? It is clear that an astrologist should not have the same freedom of expression as an astrophysicist when it comes to academic research on the expansion of the universe. The astrologist’s objections are not based on critical thinking. But surely no one can or wants to do something about the hodgepodge of astrological advice and predictions available on-line.

Similarly, it is quite apparent that real Holocaust deniers, be they Nazis or Islamists, are engaged in a type of ideologically controlled criticism, which only superficially takes on the form of science, but their real objective is to falsify history for ideological purposes. They are so far removed from what is reasonable that they simply do not operate in an academic setting. On the other hand, there are also uncomfortable ideological values that can serve as the basis for completely reasonable historical readings. For instance, the fight over how Soviet communism should be assessed has yet to be settled. And the same is true for understanding how Nazism came about and could gain such a strong standing so quickly. Is there something particular about German culture? Their legacy of Romanticism? A crisis brought on by modernity and the First World War? Was it something historically unique or something that can be repeated?

History provides examples of everything; it is to a large extent, like our world, a picture puzzle, as Benedetto Croce said, always contemporary. So it is not that easy to ban the lies, fantasies, visions and the conscious or subconscious manipulation in either political or academic life. Disinformants and fantasists obviously create serious problems, but problems that must most likely be resolved with methodical constructive criticism, debate and openness. I find it easier, personally, to engage opponents who live in the same world I do, who recognise a reality similar to the one I believe I live in, than people who may well share some of my values but who do so on what I believe are false grounds.

In autumn 2009, the Swedish station TV4 broadcast a few shows about “the Truth Movement” and examined some of the views thriving in these more or less loosely coalesced groups, who argue that the American government itself was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. There are people who simply demand a new inquiry, referring to details that remain unclear. Some think the government knew about the attacks ahead of time and allowed them to take place in order to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others go so far as saying that the attacks were in fact carried out by the government, with Bush in the lead, and that everything reported in the media is a lie. Airplanes were not what caused the towers to collapse; it was some kind of explosive. And the Pentagon was hit not at all by a plane but by a missile.

Just by conducting a brief search for sites frequented by adherents of “the Truth Movement”, one quickly realises that many of the most active supporters have even stranger theories, like the world is controlled by some kind of race of space lizards, that can change their appearance to resemble humans and have an evil plan for world domination. The man behind this “theory” (a fantasy that does not deserve to be called a real theory) is David Icke, a former British footballer and Green party member, among other things, who lectures full-time about how these space lizards have manipulated history for thousands of years.

It would be comical and should probably be muffled into silence if there were not in fact so many people, in relative terms, who now say that they either believe this kind of claim or are not certain that such claims are completely falsifiable. Even crazier than the belief in these lizards is the belief that Israel/Zionists/Jews/Mossad are behind the attacks, so as to discredit Muslims and give the Israeli state freedom to act, or that it will lead to the coming of the New World Order (NWO), one in which a world government rules the entire planet and all the inequalities of people are evened out, with ostensible freedom that is in actuality the most extreme and subtle form of slavery.

According to a survey conducted by TV4 in conjunction with the programme, as many as 18 per cent of Swedish citizens under the age of 30 believe that the US government was somehow involved in the attack. This figure obviously does not say much about their degree of belief, and there is most likely not as high a percentage who believe in the craziest theories, but this figure nonetheless suggests that nearly one fifth of the country’s youth have such little faith in the news and reporting on an event of this scope that they are prepared to question the very foundations of them.

It is one thing to deny the existence of al-Qaida, and another to claim that it is a loosely organised group and not a league of terrorists governed from the top. It is one thing to argue that the Bush administration misappropriated the terrorist attacks for its own political purposes, but it is quite another to maintain that the administration was itself behind the attacks. It is quite possible, on ideological grounds, to explain and understand the attacks and put them in a context that makes them comprehensible. Different premises lead to different conclusions, just as people’s values inform their views. In Sweden, our pundits pointed with great confidence to US policies, the country’s thirst for oil and oppression of the third world as an explanation of these terrorists, who in their eyes came across instead as a kind of revolutionary avant-garde, choosing to attack the clearest symbol of capitalism and Western supremacy, the tallest tower in the most important city.

That was an extremely simplistic picture, which completely overlooked the perpetrators’ own social background, their own ideological convictions and driving forces, which may not have been as close as they had originally thought or hoped to those of the Swedish left conveyed in the cultural review sections of the nation’s newspapers. This picture has gradually become more nuanced. No one can parade poster-slogan views with any credibility that the terrorists were motivated by some kind of fervour for justice or that there is some kind of innate evil in Islam that would suffice as motive for this “hatred of freedom”.

But this complex view of the world does not fit on a news bill. It does not make headlines. The long, probing conversation and cultural processes that develop over long periods of time cannot be summarised in a chapter in a textbook. The belief that there are secret powers conspiring behind closed doors can provide some kind of comfort in this situation. There is someone in control, a clan, an elite, a clique, a camorra, behind the curtain pulling the strings. A belief in conspiracy gives meaning to existence. That is probably why so many of the words they use for themselves have something to do with “opening your eyes”, “seeing” and being “awake”. These are terms that originate in religious revivalism, and the source of this modern variant lies in diverse groups in the US, often times religious, anti-federalist, millennialist and so cocksure of their cause as only superstitious people can be. In times of crisis and uncertainty, the number of believers grows.

What is particularly noteworthy in the early 21st century is how much of this traditional right-wing extremist ideological baggage has been taken up by parts of the left. Hatred of Bush and opposition to the war in Iraq obviously contributed to this. But, I would be so bold as to argue, the general fumbling for a coherent, meaningful world view on a left that has lost faith in its own utopia is also part of it. Even a portal figure like Naomi Klein comes remarkably close to conspiracy thinking when she maintains in her book The Shock Doctrine that “new liberalism” took advantage of disasters to introduce reforms that were ultimately aimed at world plunder. The ideological one-sidedness of her theses, and the banal observation that major disasters and upheavals can also be taken advantage of for different sorts of coups, reforms and the like, regardless of whether for good or for evil, becomes a kind of explanation of world history that, by leaving out any contradictions, is surprisingly close to the false critical theory constructions of conspiracy thinking.

The idea that secret conspiracies were behind major events in history is not as old as one might believe. The modern variant of this superstition stems largely from the period following the French Revolution, and it was given a real boost with the collapse of Europe in the First World War. The old dynastic Europe, ironically, offered a kind of transparency: everyone knew which royal families had ties to which; the politically motivated marriages of various princes and princesses were made completely in the open and for consistently clear reasons. When the French monarchy was swept away and large parts of a familiar Europe were blotted out in subsequent wars, existence lost its comforting, engrained contours for the continent’s inhabitants. This was further emphasised as revolutionaries challenged the church’s power; the first ideas of citizenship were spread and with them a secular notion of society and – as a result of all this – full citizens’ rights, for instance, for Jews.

In 1797, the French priest Abbé Barruel published a history of Jacobism in which he explained the secret forces of history. It was the Order of the Knights Templar, officially disbanded in 1314, but continuing to operate in secret, in later times largely as the Illuminati, but clearly also as Freemasons. A few years later, an otherwise unknown Italian officer, Simonini, maintained in a letter to the same Barruel that the real powers behind the Freemasons and the Illuminati were none other than the Jews.

One does not have to Google long before it becomes apparent that this same ancient conspiracy theory – that the world is controlled by a secret society, for which the Jews are responsible – is still amazingly widespread (although today people speak more often about “Zionists” than about “Jews”). For instance, vaken.se, which is “the Truth Movement’s” most important Swedish website, has a number of threads dealing with the Illuminati’s world conspiracy and their links to “Zionists”. If anyone doubts that the term “Zionism” is essentially being distorted into a cover for the Jewish plot to take over the world, they just have to take a peak.

To be sure, they speciously maintain repeatedly that “not all Jews are Zionists” and argue that it is not at all anti-Semitic to accuse Massad of something. And that need not be the case, but if one examines the deep structure of their ideas and the broader contexts they depict, it is fairly obvious that the world view according to which the “Zionists” control and have controlled the world for some 200 years is exactly the same professed by anti-Semitic reactionaries in the 19th century, and which was most clearly manifested in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That book, incidentally, is held in high esteem by David Icke, and one that Mohamed Omar, for example, thinks should be included in school instruction, just as it was in Nazi Germany, a book that is marketed today as documentary material in a number of countries in the Middle East, from where it has spread to Muslim countries as far away as Southeast Asia.

It is not unexpected that popular culture also capitalises on some of these fantasy-inducing theories. In his latest book, Dan Brown has had a go at the mythology of Freemasonry and links it, whether consciously or not, to Barruel’s old connections. Can we expect the next novel by this blockbuster author to take up The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in as thrilling and playful a fashion? Most likely not, but it is just one step from this, and it would not be strange if someone, at least in these global subcultures, were to pick up the thread.

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It is often said that “the masses” today are being lulled to sleep by entertainment and consumption. Perhaps there is actually something to this. We live in a reality that is often considered too tough and chaotic. Economic and political aims involve matters frequently far over the head of the average citizen. Many of the more optimistic “new liberals” are thought to be rather insensitive to the personal suffering that results when industries are shut down and towns die.

The observation that many people interpret and speak based on their own interests has aroused scepticism about authorities, which is at heart healthy. Clearly, this should put to use and developed in school. Clearly, an active citizenry requires the ability to think critically. It is as much a question of an instinct of self-preservation as of social structure. But how will it be possible to create this when the authority of teachers is already questioned? What is authority really? There is so much we take for granted, so many authorities we rely on without even thinking of them as authorities. I don’t check to see if the underground conductor is sober and doing his job properly before I get on the train. I don’t question the fundamentals of mathematics when I check whether my sales receipt adds up.

We need a common ground where we can meet; this means a moderately accurate or at least functional image of the world and ourselves. Respect for some basic rules and assumptions – without this, dogmatism is elevated and restricted by a prohibition on ideas. The ability to listen, to decide which arguments are relevant, not to get caught up in the details, to advance our own argument without being won over by wishful thinking. I worked as a teacher for a short time and know that a person can function as an authority without being authoritarian, that one can listen to everybody in the classroom, generate discussion, disagree and encounter opposition and support in a way that promotes development. But the basis for this must lie in actually reading the same texts, and broadly believing in the same reality.

The Internet is a wonderful opportunity for new voices to make themselves heard. And in countries like China, Cuba and Iran, courageous individuals are writing about their everyday lives in a way that explains the toughness of the regime and the everyday routines of, indeed, everyday lives. They help to promote understanding, development and friendship among people who might never otherwise have had anything to do with each other’s world. But at the same time, a sense of Internet community cannot replace criticism, research, analysis and the actual dissemination of news. Far too much of what is being written on-line is for those who are already saved. No matter what tiny group you belong to, you can always find like-minded people on-line, whether you believe in space lizards, the benefits of drinking urine, or want to deny the Holocaust. However, what is missing today, to a growing extent, are venues where people who hold opposing views can meet in earnest and be forced to debate one another.

It is a misfortune that so many young people choose not to believe in “the authorities” and instead turn to conspiracy theorists, who many times have a more rigid world view than the traditional authorities they scoff at. This demonstrates that the anti-authoritarian tradition of rebellion – which has long been nurtured by youth and popular culture and led to teachers not being able to justify to their pupils why they actually have to read The Iliad or the Swedish classic Hemsöborna and also learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – has had devastating effects. Commercial freedom is not actually real freedom. Yet nor, by the same account, is knee-jerk opposition. A liberal education provides greater opportunities for freedom of thought and productive associations.

It is the school’s duty to furnish it, perhaps especially to those who do not value it, because they are most likely the ones in greatest need of it. It also provides a few basic rules of life, which can function in the public space as well: someone who gives criticism must be able to take it, someone who makes a claim must be able to support it, someone who says something must also respond. But it takes a lifetime to determine what that means.