Thinking Politically: How Metacognition Shapes Our Political Views

Thinking Politically: How Metacognition Shapes Our Political Views: Florin, Serban Gabriel: 9798316080311: Amazon.com: Books

Our political beliefs are not just a product of what we think, but how we think about our thinking.

Metacognition is the hidden architect of our ideological structures.

This book advances a revolutionary thesis: metacognition—the cognitive ability to check, evaluate, and regulate one’s own thinking—serves as the foundational driver of political consciousness, fundamentally reorienting our understanding of human political existence.

Political consciousness, encompassing an individual’s awareness of power dynamics, mechanisms of social coordination, and the formation of ideological frameworks, has long been interpreted through external lenses, such as economic determinism, divine authority, or institutional coercion.

Traditional scholarship—from Sumerian divine kingship (3000 BCE) to Marxist class struggle (1848 CE)—casts humans as products of their circumstances.

In stark contrast, this book asserts that political consciousness appears from within, through the dynamic, reflective processes of metacognition.

It positions individuals not as passive subjects shaped by external forces but as active, self-aware agents who interpret, challenge, and construct their political realities.

This paradigm challenges millennia of intellectual orthodoxy, offering a bold new perspective that prioritizes internal agency over external compulsion and promises to reshape how we conceptualize political life.

The book’s chronological scope is ambitiously expansive, tracing metacognition’s pivotal role in political consciousness across the full arc of human history and beyond—from the rudimentary sociality of primate groups 30 million years ago to speculative political systems of the mid-21st century influenced by artificial intelligence.