Free Thinkers vs Paid Thinkers: What a Freethinker Is, and Who Can Afford to Be One

Last updated: November 3, 2026

In the usual definition, a freethinker is someone who forms beliefs by reason and evidence rather than by accepting authority, tradition or dogma, historically above all the authority of religion. The word turns up in England in the 1690s, when William Molyneux, in a 1697 letter to John Locke, called John Toland “a candid freethinker”, according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on freethinkers, and it became a banner in 1713, when Anthony Collins published A Discourse of Free-Thinking and defined free-thinking as “The Use of the Understanding, in endeavoring to find out the Meaning” of a proposition and then judging it by the strength of the evidence, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports. Three centuries later, plenty of people online describe themselves as free thinkers, which makes the older question more interesting: can you think freely when someone is paying you to think?

The meme answers with a reaction shot: “free thinkers when paid thinkers show up”, over the face of a man who has just seen something deeply alarming. It has a cousin in the “so-called free thinkers” meme, which, as Know Your Meme documents, shows a row of identical robots from the film I, Robot marching in step.

What the Free Thinkers Meme Means

Both memes play with the same irony. A free thinker is supposed to reach conclusions independently, yet the people most eager to call themselves free thinkers often seem to arrive at exactly the same conclusions, in exactly the same words, at exactly the same time. The “so-called free thinkers” version makes the point visually with the rows of identical humanoid robots from the 2004 film I, Robot, marching in perfect formation: a crowd of individuals who all think alike.

The choice of film is apt. I, Robot borrowed its title and its famous Three Laws of Robotics from Isaac Asimov’s stories, collected in 1950, in which machines behave predictably because their thinking is governed by rules they did not choose. The meme suggests that a certain kind of online free thinker works the same way: the rules are just written by a different authority, and the obedience looks like rebellion only because the uniform is new.

The “free thinkers when paid thinkers show up” version adds a second twist. The free thinker, who prides himself on independence from institutions, meets the professional, the academic or expert who is paid to think about the question full time, and the look on his face says that independence may have been a polite word for not having done the reading. The joke cuts both ways, though. It mocks the amateur who confuses contrarianism with thought, and it raises an old suspicion about the professional: if someone pays you to think, are you still thinking freely?

In everyday use, “so-called free thinkers” has become a sneer of its own. It is aimed at people who present suspicion of mainstream sources as proof of intellectual independence, and it says that what looks like independence is often just membership of a different crowd, with its own slogans, its own heroes and its own rules about what may not be questioned.

That double question is what makes the meme philosophically interesting. Freedom of thought can be lost in two directions, to the crowd and to the paymaster. The rest of this article looks at how philosophers from Socrates to Kant tried to protect it from both.

A Friend of Locke Starts a Fight

The term “free-thinker” became a fighting word in 1713, waved as a banner by Anthony Collins and thrown back at him as an accusation.

Collins (1676 to 1729) was a friend of John Locke in Locke’s old age, and the SEP names Locke as one of the main influences on his philosophy. His Discourse argued that people have a right, and even a duty, to examine any question for themselves, including questions of religion, and judge it by evidence. The book provoked fierce replies. The classical scholar Richard Bentley answered with Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-Thinking, which, according to the SEP, charged that Collins’s definition was too broad, in effect a definition of thinking as such. Whether Collins himself was a deist (someone who holds that God can be known by reason without revelation) or an atheist writing with caution is still debated: the SEP reports that some scholars place him among the deists, while David Berman has argued that he was in fact an atheist.

Nietzsche Did Not Want to Be a Freethinker

Nietzsche wrote about “free spirits”, and he went out of his way to say that they were not freethinkers. For him, most so-called freethinkers were just conformists of a newer kind.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), section 44, he writes that he and his kind are “something else than ‘libres-penseurs,’ ‘liben pensatori’ ‘free-thinkers’”, in Helen Zimmern’s translation, and whatever else these honest advocates of “modern ideas” like to call themselves. In the same section he calls such people “wrongly named ‘free spirits’”, “levellers” who serve “the democratic taste”. Reason as such was not his complaint. As he saw it, freethinkers had swapped one herd for another: they rejected the church but accepted, without examination, “Equality of Rights” and “Sympathy with All Sufferers”, democratic values that he elsewhere in the book (section 202) calls the inheritance of the Christian movement. You can dislike his politics and still feel the sting. A thousand people rejecting the same authority in the same words is still a crowd, which is roughly where the robot meme comes in. Our post on Max Stirner’s “spooks” follows the same suspicion even further.

From Collins to Clifford: What Freethought Became

After Collins, freethought grew from a scandal into a movement. In the nineteenth century the word was attached above all to organised religious scepticism. Charles Bradlaugh founded the National Secular Society in Britain in 1866, and in the United States the orator Robert Ingersoll, nicknamed the Great Agnostic, filled lecture halls with attacks on religious authority. Freethinkers in this sense were not necessarily atheists, but they insisted that no belief, however sacred, was exempt from examination.

The most rigorous statement of the freethinking ideal came from the English mathematician W. K. Clifford in his essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1877). Clifford told the story of a shipowner who sends an old emigrant ship to sea, quieting his doubts about its seaworthiness by trusting providence. The ship sinks. Even if it had arrived safely, Clifford argued, the owner would have been guilty, because he had no right to believe on the evidence he had. His conclusion became famous: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Clifford’s rule was soon challenged, most famously by William James, who argued in “The Will to Believe” (1896) that some decisions cannot wait for conclusive evidence. He described options that are live, forced and momentous, such as whether to trust another person or to commit to a way of life, and argued that refusing to believe until the evidence is complete is itself a choice with consequences. In such cases, he thought, our passional nature may legitimately decide. But Clifford captured what freethinking had come to mean: not a particular conclusion, but a method, the refusal to let authority, comfort or habit do the work that evidence should do. By that standard many self-described free thinkers fail, because they reject one authority only to accept another without checking.

Bertrand Russell gave the movement its twentieth-century manifesto in his Conway Memorial Lecture of 1922, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”. He argued that the old threat to free thought, religious persecution, had been joined by a newer one: governments, schools and newspapers shaping opinion through propaganda and economic pressure. A person who cannot lose their job for an opinion, he suggested, is freer to hold it. Russell’s point anticipates the paid thinkers of the meme. Freedom of thought depends not only on courage, but on the conditions that make independence affordable.

Socrates Worked for Free, and Said So

The worry about paid thinking goes back at least to Athens. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates presents his refusal to charge fees as evidence of his honesty (more on his method in our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge).

He tells the jury, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, that the report “that I am a teacher, and take money” has no more truth in it than the other charges. He names the travelling teachers who did charge, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis, who persuade young men to pay them for instruction they could have had for nothing at home. Later in the speech he offers his poverty as proof that he never asked anyone for pay. But Socrates does not say that taking money corrupts thinking. He says that if a man were really able to teach, receiving money for it “would be an honour to him”. In this passage he does not accuse the sophists of fraud; he disclaims their kind of wisdom for himself and leaves, with visible irony, the question of whether they really have it. The harsher equation of fees with corruption comes from elsewhere: in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (1.6.13), Socrates compares those who sell wisdom for money to prostitutes.

Kant’s Answer: The Paid Officer and the Free Scholar

The most useful answer to the meme’s second question comes from Kant’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784). Kant distinguished two uses of reason. The private use is the reason you exercise in a post or office entrusted to you: an officer on duty, a tax official, a clergyman preaching to his congregation. There, Kant argued, you may be bound to follow instructions. The public use is the reason you exercise as a scholar addressing the whole reading public, and that use, he insisted, must always be free.

Kant opened the essay with the motto he took from Horace, sapere aude, dare to be wise, or have the courage to use your own understanding. Most people, he argued, remain intellectually immature not because they lack intelligence but out of laziness and cowardice. It is so comfortable to have a book that understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me and a doctor who judges my diet for me. The modern free thinker who outsources his opinions to a favourite influencer would have struck Kant as a perfect example, not an exception.

His examples are striking. An officer who receives an order must obey it, but nothing forbids him, as a scholar, from publishing his criticism of military policy. A citizen must pay his taxes, but may write against their injustice. A clergyman must teach the doctrine of his church to his congregation, but as a scholar he may share with the public his carefully considered doubts about that doctrine. The arrangement looks odd today, since it reverses our usual use of the words public and private. Its point is clear, though: being paid for a role does not have to cost you your freedom of thought, provided there remains a space where you can argue as yourself, before everyone.

On Kant’s model, the paid thinker and the free thinker can be the same person at different times. The danger begins when the space for public reasoning disappears, when the officer can no longer publish, the scholar can no longer criticise, or the employee cannot say outside the office what he thinks about what happens inside it. That, rather than the salary itself, is what turns a paid thinker into a hired voice.

The Philosopher Who Turned Down a Professorship

Some philosophers have refused paid positions to protect their independence, and Spinoza’s refusal is the best documented.

In February 1673 Johann Ludwig Fabritius, writing in the name of the Elector Palatine, offered Spinoza a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, with “the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching”, on the understanding that he would not use it “to disturb the religion publicly established”. Spinoza replied on 30 March 1673 and politely declined, while asking leave to consider the matter further. He wrote that he did not know “the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined”, added that teaching would take him away from his own research, and said he was moved by his love of quietness, not by hope of a better post. Three years earlier he had published the Theological-Political Treatise (1670) anonymously, and its subtitle, as the SEP quotes it, argues that the freedom to philosophise can be granted without harm to piety and the peace of the state. His refusal is a classic example of the free thinker’s bargain: independence bought at the price of a salary.

Schopenhauer Against the Professors

Not everyone shared Kant’s optimism about salaried philosophers. Arthur Schopenhauer, who failed in his own attempt at an academic career in Berlin, wrote a furious essay “On University Philosophy” in his Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). Philosophy professors paid by the state, he argued, are under constant pressure to teach whatever the state and the churches find convenient, and their real task is less to seek the truth than to keep their positions.

Schopenhauer drew a distinction that still bites: there are those who live from philosophy and those who live for it. The first group treats philosophy as a career, the second as a calling, and in his view the two rarely coincide. He was hardly impartial, since he spent years accusing Hegel, the most successful academic philosopher of his day, of being a charlatan. But he was pointing to a real risk that later sociologists of science would study in detail: when careers, funding and reputations depend on certain answers, those answers become suspiciously attractive.

Max Weber put the professional side of the problem more soberly in his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1917). An academic career, he told his students, is a wild gamble, and the scholar’s duty in the lecture hall is to present inconvenient facts, including facts inconvenient to his own political views, rather than to act as a prophet or a demagogue. For Weber, the paid thinker earns his independence through a discipline that the free amateur rarely imposes on himself: the willingness to say what the evidence shows even when it disappoints his audience.

The fair conclusion is not that paid thinkers cannot think freely. Many of the most independent minds in history held academic posts, and Kant himself was a professor. It is that independence is never guaranteed by a job title, in either direction. The amateur can be captured by a crowd, the professional by a career. Both escape the same way: by caring more about being right than about belonging, and by being willing to pay the price of saying so.

The Free Thinker Test: Thinking or Just Signalling?

If calling yourself a free thinker proves nothing, how could anyone tell the difference? Philosophy offers a few practical tests. The first comes from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859): he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. A free thinker should be able to state the strongest version of the opposing view well enough that its defenders would recognise it.

The second test is whether you can change your mind. Clifford’s ethics of belief implies that beliefs should move with the evidence, in both directions. Someone who has held exactly the same opinions on every contested question for ten years, regardless of what new evidence appeared, may be consistent, but is probably not thinking freely. The third test is whether your independence is selective. Distrusting every official source while trusting every unofficial one is not freedom from authority; it is a change of authorities.

Descartes, not usually counted among the freethinkers, supplied a fourth test in his Discourse on Method (1637). His first rule was never to accept anything as true that he did not clearly know to be true, and to include nothing in his judgements beyond what presented itself so clearly and distinctly that he had no occasion to doubt it. Few people can live by that rule all the time, and Descartes himself kept a provisional morality to get through daily life. But as a check on our most confident opinions it remains hard to beat.

By these standards, free thinking is less a personality than a practice, and a demanding one. It requires reading people you disagree with, admitting what you do not know and occasionally siding with the experts, which is the least exciting conclusion a free thinker can reach and often the correct one. The robots in the meme fail all three tests. So, uncomfortably, do many of the people who share it, which is exactly why the joke keeps working and why it is worth sharing with a little self-suspicion.

So, Can Paid Thinkers Think Freely?

They can, though the question deserves better than a shrug. Salaries create dependencies, and so does the attention economy that pays free thinkers on the internet.

Journalists, academics, podcasters and streamers usually depend on someone, whether an employer, a funding body, advertisers or an audience. A self-described free thinker who earns money from a following is not outside that system. They are paid in a different currency, and the pressure to keep the audience happy can be at least as strong as the pressure from an editor. Socrates’ remark about honourable fees suggests that money alone does not ruin a mind; it does create incentives a careful thinker should be able to name. A practical test follows from the history: free thinking is less about who pays you than about whether you would say what you now believe if it cost you the payment. Spinoza could answer that question. Most of us would need a moment.

For a philosopher who thought most of our “free” ideas were ghosts we obey, read Max Stirner’s Spooks Explained: Truth, Morality and the Madhouse of Fixed Ideas.