Let's take open-mindedness, or openness to experience. It is considered one of the big five personality traits according the five-factor model. Let's see what Mr. Wiki has to say:
Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has. It is also described as the extent to which a person is imaginative or independent and depicts a personal preference for a variety of activities over a strict routine. High openness can be perceived as unpredictability or lack of focus, and more likely to engage in risky behaviour or drug taking. Also, individuals that have high openness tend to lean, in occupation and hobby, towards the arts, being, typically, creative and appreciative of the significance of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Moreover, individuals with high openness are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven—sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor.I don't necessarily agree with this entire definition, but I do like the aspect in it of being curious. I think curiosity incorporates a humility of experience and understanding. But that's not how most self-defined “open-minded” people believe themselves to be. First, they are coming from metaphysical assumptions as we all are. Generally, they see tradition as a bad-thing or just plain old and tired ideas that need to be deconstructed.
As the counter-culture grew, it saw the “closed-minded” as the old guard and obstacles to progress who needed to step aside or die-off. As Bruce Charlton notes, “Closed minded became synonymous with irrational and wrong; then was interpreted as evidence of ignorance at best, but more often of cruel wickedness. To be closed minded (implying sealed-off from evidence, from experience, 'dogmatic') was the characteristic attributed to the bogeymen of fanatical 'fundamentalist' right-wing/ fascistic/ authoritarian - Christians; in essence, those who tyrannically restricted sexual behaviour.”
But what this notion did was to get the “open-minded” ones to trade off some vertical traditional precepts for some horizontal self-determined “freedoms”. So while some may have opened the aperture to new experiences in counter-culture, they closed themselves off to classic antiquity. As this “open-minded” postmodernism crept in further, minds became more closed off to coherent ideas around religion, morality, and logic.
Today, as David Bentley Hart remarks, “we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations.” By refusing to accept objective standards (more closed-mindedness), we fall into an incoherent “openness” of something that is undemanding and therapeutically comforting. As Gödel believed, we would always trade off coherency for completeness.On the matter of original thinking, we are also left with short-sightedness on this concept. Original is not necessarily new, because most ideas are not that new; nor are we strictly autonomous when it comes to the source of our ideas.
Moreover, originality is not necessarily thinking differently from everyone else, but it consists of thinking for oneself. Or as Franklin Merrell-Wolff put it, “by ‘original’ I do not mean an idea that has never been thought before, but one which, for the individual, has been produced with a creative effort from himself.” In other words, you've made that the idea your own through reflection verses being indoctrinated into it.
(I do find it amusing Apple ran one of the biggest campaigns on the mantra “think different” when today most of Silicon Valley has been indoctrinated into a leftist “think alike” view.)
Genuine pursuits of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual curiosity can create real openings and originality. The answer is not to limit ourselves to a dogmatic rigidity, as we are only fully human when these deeper Truths are revealed and made our own. But this does require us to sort ourselves out beyond the shallow and undisciplined “openness” we have fallen under.
All in all, this explains why open-minded and original thinkers are the most prone to closed-mindedness and unoriginality. They are unaware of their metaphysical assumptions or where and how their ideas have been assimilated. If we are ignorant of our own assumptions and where they come from, we can't delve deeper into our curiosity in a truly open manner. Instead, we are contained by our own arrogance and pride while indignantly believing we are so much better than we are.
“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked.... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.” — G.K. Chesterton