Let’s start to introduce a modern typology of human beings. We’ll begin with the type I’ll hereafter call the freedthinker.
The freedthinker is distinguished by several simple features: first, above average intelligence being utterly wasted and going without proper training (hence, frequently, the freedthinker is found among the mass of Masters and Doctoral students in the humanities); second, the freedthinker invariably has strange, novel beliefs that contradict what everyone — from the lowliest couch potato to the most sophisticated physicist — believes: these beliefs always have a quality of naive believability, but are seldom supported by research or careful argument. Third, the freedthinker has considerable scorn both for established facts and established modes of reasoning — he generally prefers his own forms of reasoning: modus sycophans, modus demagogus and modus out and out fucking lying.
He is distinguished by his use of common sense reasoning in all of those spheres of knowledge where common sense has proven inadequate: physics, biology, chemisty and so on. This, of course, is to be expected as using methods beyond common sense would require him to join into a community of scientists that might make his thinking less free: he might put himself at risk of becoming an enslaved thinker.
The freedthinker also has a preference for uncommon facts — that is to say, “facts” of which somehow only he is aware.
Now, the freedthinker is a unique type in that the solution to the freedthinker’s vices is already well-known: formal and unambiguous rules of reasoning along with accepted sources of “fact”. Yet, it is from this solution — this restriction, that is — that the freedthinker has been freed.