They utilize cognitive images/‘ideas’ (simplified visual-linguistic mental constructs) only, according to the most superficial of possible associations, to either reinforce something they already believe or to ignore something they do not want to believe or consider.
They operate instead on pre-programmed emotional impulses, in effect they are literal brainwashing victims. Through very advanced social engineering and psychological warfare they have been re-wired mentally and emotionally. Now they resemble more of a walking talking puppet, a somnambulist, and not the fully functioning human being with sentience and a fuller range of its cognitive and emotional possibilities oriented toward reality that was their birthright as a member of the human species.
Their birthright has been stolen, they do not even realize it and they fight so hard to keep themselves in chains. It has been said that everyone has some kind of mental illness even if they don’t show it, but it is more accurate to say that everyone (almost everyone) is the victim of a very subtle and very deliberate program of brainwashing and propagandization.
What is thinking? Properly, thinking is the sequential connecting of inner mental images/contents in ways that are accurate to the realities and meanings which those images and contents represent. This implies and requires logic and a correct orientation to reality, a value of honesty and truthfulness. It requires a degree of objectivity and suspension of judgment. And it requires a high level of perceptibility and attention to meaning.
Most people today are overly emotional and ideologically programmed. Politics has suffused almost every aspect of modern life. Globalized neoliberal communism-lite and NWO-Agenda 2030 ideology has taken over most of society at the individual and institutional levels. Critical thinking is frowned upon or openly prevented. Threats, gatekeeping, censorship and cancel culture, all of these stand in the way of the few remaining independent thinkers from making any real progress in the world except by pretending to agree with all of the bullshit.
It is sad how people cannot see what is happening to them. Philosophy is the biggest failure, and bears the most responsibility for this profound human loss and suffering. Ontology has collapsed into a thousand disparate pieces, and philosophy is to blame. Philosophers themselves are the ones who could have and should have fought to prevent this; instead, most of them went along with it for their own power and prestige and ego-stroking, and most of the others ended up going down their own narcissistic rabbit holes or simply gave up and vanished.
There is an entire hidden history of the world, one that chronicles the failure of philosophy and the corresponding failure of the human ontological world, as well as chronicling all of the deceits, attacks, lies, psyops, brainwashing programs, deep ‘conspiracies’ of groups and individuals who have together in their own ways orchestrated this entire thing. The super mega rich and powerful, the world-controllers as I call them since they are not “elites” other than in their own warped insect-like minds. The hidden history of the world would be a very interesting one to read, unfortunately no one has bothered to look closely enough to be able to write it.
Oh there are bits and pieces here and there if you know where to look, and you should do that in order to build up a truer picture of things in your own mind. But a complete or at least comprehensive-intending true historical account of modern mankind? It doesn’t exist.
How to recover the ability to think, how to help someone else learn how to think properly and escape the matrix of their own emotional-mental enslavement? I have no idea. I have tried so many times to help people break free, as far as I can tell it has never produced positive results. Anyone for whom it was helpful was already somewhere along the path to freedom. At least I could help some of them further along their journeys. But more so I would like to help those still locked inside the prison. And yet, they are the ones who refuse any and all assistance and will fight desperately to remain jailed.
A few key principles that are needed for proper thinking, at least you could try and cultivate these in people here and there:
Logic.
Reality/truth.
Common sense.
Objectivity.
Emotional distance.
Seeing both sides of the issue.
Empathy and understanding.
Self-observation.
Intellectual honesty.
Curiosity.
Being capable of admitting when one is wrong.
since you seem cool 
