Book

When Thought Turns Against Its Owner

Dr. Ahmed Hassan al-Khudair

Date of publication: July 11, 2026 22:39 KSA

What drives a person to turn against his own ideas, after spending years defending them? And how do some thinkers transform from the most fervent believers in their convictions to their harshest critics, to the point that they seem to be tearing down with their own hands what they built over decades of research and writing?

Not every intellectual transformation is evidence of contradiction, nor is it always a sign of maturity. Human history is full of revisions that led to major discoveries and contributed to correcting established intellectual paths. But it has also known transformations that are difficult to understand if we limit ourselves to reading ideas alone; because a person does not live by his mind alone, but carries his ideas wherever his experiences take him, accompanied by his hopes and disappointments, victories and defeats. Therefore, some major intellectual transformations appear more complex than can be explained by logic of proof alone, and they are difficult to attribute to a single psychological cause. For an idea is not born in a vacuum, and the psyche does not live in isolation from thought, and what a person writes is often an extension of what he lives as much as an expression of what he believes.

And those who examine the biographies of some thinkers who moved from one extreme position to its opposite, as in the experience of Abdullah al-Qasimi and others, realize that the transformation was not merely a change in convictions, but was often a reflection of a deeper transformation in their view of themselves and the world around them. For when a person's self-image changes, the image of the world often changes with it. This conflict reaches its peak when a person reaches a stage where he reviews the sum total of his life, only to discover that reality has not achieved much of what he dreamed, and that the ideal he defended for so long did not find its complete image in life. At that point, a calm revision may turn into a harsh one, and frustration becomes the lens through which he views society, culture, and history, so judgments become severe, and the gap between him and his past widens. In such moments, a state may arise that we might call intellectual narcissism, not as a psychological diagnosis, but as a tendency to believe that the flaw always lies outside the self. Society becomes responsible for failure, culture the cause of regression, and heritage a barrier to progress. Here, it is not limited to revising an idea or criticizing an opinion, but extends to a break with an entire system that was once a matter of certainty and belonging. Nevertheless, fairness requires differentiating between intellectual revision and intellectual apostasy. Revision may be the fruit of a mind that has the courage to acknowledge new truths revealed to it, whereas apostasy may - in some forms - be a reflection of an internal conflict seeking an outlet as much as it seeks truth. Therefore, it is not permissible to interpret every intellectual transformation as a psychological crisis, nor is it correct to always consider it a pure triumph of reason. For a person does not always change his ideas because he found truth; he may change them because he is no longer able to live with his old self. When the need for truth mixes with the need for reassurance, it becomes difficult to distinguish between what proof dictates and what wounds dictate. Perhaps this is what makes judging intellectual transformations one of the most difficult judgments; they are read not through ideas alone, nor through the psyche alone, but through the continuous interaction between them. The mind seeks to convince itself of what it sees as truth, while the psyche seeks protection from what hurts it, and between the two paths many convictions that we think are products of thought alone are formed. Perhaps the greatest mistake people make is that they judge ideas in isolation from their owners, even though thought, in many cases, is nothing but the inner biography of its owner, written in the language of reason.

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