Some time ago, I read The Art of Thinking Clearly, a book that laid out a broad spectrum of cognitive biases, offering quick and accessible insights into human irrationality. It was like flipping through a catalog of common thinking errors. But when I picked up Thinking, Fast and Slow, it felt like stepping into the mechanics of the mind itself. Instead of just listing biases, Kahneman dissects the thought process behind them, showing how and why we fall into these traps.
The central idea of the book—that we rely on two modes of thinking—immediately resonated with me. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and automatic, while System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful. We like to think we make rational decisions, but in reality, we rely on System 1 far more than we should. I’ve seen this firsthand in financial decision-making, where traders (including myself at times) rely on instinct rather than deep analysis, often leading to misjudgments. Kahneman’s Prospect Theory, which won him a Nobel Prize, explains why we irrationally fear losses more than we value equivalent gains—a concept also touched on in The Art of Thinking Clearly but explored in much greater depth here.
Reading this book also made me think about how entire societies can be manipulated through these cognitive shortcuts. One of the most dangerous biases Kahneman discusses is cognitive ease—our tendency to accept ideas that are simple, familiar, or effortlessly processed, even if they are wrong. The easier something is to understand, the more likely people are to believe it. And nowhere is this more evident than in the way Iran’s clerical establishment has used oversimplification to manipulate public perception for over four decades.
Take, for example, Mohsen Qara’ati, a cleric who became famous for his absurdly simplistic interpretations of the Quran. He had a talent for distilling complex religious and social issues into ridiculous, childlike metaphors that, astonishingly, many people once took seriously. He would take a profound concept, strip it of all nuance, and repackage it into something so laughably basic that even a five-year-old could understand it. And that was precisely the problem—because when ideas are oversimplified to this degree, they stop being ideas and turn into slogans, designed not to educate, but to control.
For decades, figures like Qara’ati thrived because they understood one thing very well: if you make people think too much, they might start questioning you. Instead, they used catchy, oversimplified logic that bypassed System 2 thinking entirely, feeding the masses exactly what was easiest to digest. The clerical establishment mastered the art of availability bias—making sure that the most memorable, easiest-to-recall ideas were the ones that stuck. The result? Generations of people who were conditioned to accept simplistic, surface-level reasoning as truth.
But that strategy is failing. My generation—and even more so, the younger generations—are rejecting this way of thinking entirely. The Iranian people have changed. Four decades of religious and political manipulation have not strengthened the clerical establishment; they have eroded its credibility. People no longer accept oversimplified explanations; they demand real answers. This is perhaps the greatest cultural shift of our time—an entire society waking up from the spell of cognitive ease and learning to think critically again.
Reading Thinking, Fast and Slow reinforced my belief that recognizing these biases isn’t just an intellectual exercise; it’s a survival skill. When institutions rely on oversimplification to maintain power, the only way to break free is to resist the temptation of easy answers and engage in deeper, slower, more deliberate thinking. And that is exactly what is happening in Iran today.