Disclaimer: I am not a religious authority or anything close to one. I’m choosing to write about this topic to challenge my own understanding of decision-making.
Thesis: As Muslims, we should operate with Islam as the moral bedrock we use to make decisions.
I’ve been nursing this idea for a while after a conversation with a relative sparked an observation I made about the rational inconsistencies Muslims exhibit in America and around the world. A large debate in the Muslim/Arab community right now is over whether or not we as a community should support Biden (or Kamala) because of their administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East. And while I wouldn’t consider myself a necessarily political person, my relative made an interesting point that we, as Muslims, should understand that our vote is a signal of approval, and that we should make decisions based on Islamic principles, not democratic, republican, western, capitalist, socialist, or any other frameworks’ principles that we may or may not subscribe to. All of those identities, he argues, should be second to our Islamic perspectives and only accepted under the circumstance that those secondary ideas agree with what Islam teaches. He rejects the idea that we should submit ourselves to any generalized belief system before understanding what our fundamentally guiding beliefs should be as Muslims. I found his argument very compelling and was reminded of this article that describes first-principles thinking, Socratic questioning, and how we can use these frameworks in our daily lives.
According to the article, “A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption.” Aristotle self describes first principles thinking as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” To reach first principles, we use Socratic questioning to rigorously question our assumptions and draw out the fundamental maxims we believe to be true. The article sums up the socratic questioning model as a series of questions:
Socratic questioning generally follows this process:
- Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)
- Challenging assumptions (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?)
- Looking for evidence (How can I back this up? What are the sources?)
- Considering alternative perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)
- Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?)
- Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)
As aspiring first-principles thinkers, there is a fundamental difference between self-proclaimed followers of Aristotle like Elon Musk or Charlie Munger, and us, Muslims. At their root, first-principles derive meaning from whatever the decision maker deems is true. Elon Musk might strip a business problem into hundreds of subproblems that eventually land on science as the ultimate source of truth in his decision-making process. And while his decision-making process might work well for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors, first-principles thinking fails unless we accept an external source of information as the ultimate source of moral truth instead of relying on our own imperfect understanding of logic and reasoning. The core belief we must have as Muslims looking to be rationally consistent is that the Quran supersedes our personal beliefs whether we believe them to be “logical” or not.
The Farnam Street article also wrote this:
The thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves.
Just like Elon Musk is not constrained by NASA’s analysis of the space industry, we as Muslims should not limit our understanding of politics, finance, technology, etc. to what our current society agrees is good or bad. We should become principled in using Islamic thinking as our fundamental decision-making framework and work diligently to improve our understanding of Islam such that it becomes natural and effortless in our daily lives.
My personal takeaways from this are twofold: