I’ve been a questioner my whole life.
Even as a wee lad, barely out of swaddlers, if I overheard voices raised in mirth in another room, I would enter and demand (probably more of a squeak, at that age): “What is happ’nin??”
…generally resulting in an even greater explosion of mirth, and doing nothing to assuage my bewilderment.
But mirth de damned, I had to know.
When I read books (mostly about spacefaring… or dinosaurs) I consulted other books to confirm what I’d read, taking nothing simply on the author’s say-so. Often I found, to my irritation, that sure enough, they contradicted. Did Stegosaurus live 135M years ago or 150M?? Get your facts straight, dinosaur book authors!
In high school, if a teacher said something that struck me as nonsense, I spoke up. It landed me in hot water a couple of times, my cheekiness earning me a trip to talk to the guidance counsellor. But over time, I figured out how to be more diplomatic, and luckily, I even had one history teacher that engaged me when I challenged him. Even though he disagreed with me, sometimes vehemently so, he seemed delighted that one of his students would stand apart from his zombified classmates long enough to express an opinion about what he was teaching. He could easily have used his position of authority to shut me down with a: “Because I said so,” or: “Because the textbook says so,” and moved on with his lesson. But he didn’t. He encouraged an active mind. (Thank you, Mr. Brett.)
In college, I studied philosophy, I learned the value in logic, how to analyze an argument, unearth hidden premises, and identify errors in reasoning. Yeah, there were a few professors who wanted nothing more than to indoctrinate their students, and even more who didn’t care, but there were a couple that encouraged the questioner in me. Above all, they encouraged me not to simply accept the author or viewpoint we happened to be studying, but to see if I could dismantle their argument, think for myself, and come up with my own reasoning on the matter. In other words, to learn valuable critical thinking skills.
(Hmm, you’d almost think that was the whole point…)
In my twenties and thirties I read several authors who woke me to the dangers of authoritarian thinking. Chomsky alerted me to the dangers of media manipulation. Hayek alerted me to the dangers of Utopian power-seekers. In Thoreau, I read: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
Plus, I read an obscure, little-known work you’ve probably never heard of, called 1984. It’s about an absolute state that specifically uses mind control, espionage, surveillance, fearmongering, propaganda, doublespeak, scapegoating, and aversion therapy to get people to surrender their minds and what they know to be true.
I know, “science fiction”, right?
And then there were the most rebellious thinkers of all: the scientists.
Carl Sagan said: “Science has no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless.” (Cosmos)And: “Science is self-correcting. The most fundamental axioms and conclusions may be challenged. The prevailing hypotheses must survive confrontation with observation. Appeals to authority are impermissible.” (Broca’s Brain).
Heresy!
And Albert Einstein: “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” And: “He who joyfully marches to the rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice.”
Sedition!
And Richard Feynman: “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.“ And: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” And: “Don’t pay attention to authorities, think for yourself.”
Blasphemy!
These thinkers argued against an authoritarian basis for knowledge, and specifically warned against a time when authority might be used to decide matters of knowledge. As if might could somehow make right.
Over and over and over again, these icons, these giants, told me in so many words: Question Authority, Think for Yourself.
So, as far as I knew, critical thinking, reasoning, questioning, skepticism, challenging that which makes no sense, even if (and especially if) the nonsense were being peddled by the authorities, were good things. My whole life I was taught that these were virtues. And, accepting in the absence of evidence, blindly trusting, evasion, and arguments from authority were vices.
Until the Year of our Lord 2020.
Now, suddenly, we are encouraged to accept what media and public authorities tell us, even if it makes no sense, or if it contradicts what hundreds of doctors, scientists, immunologists, virologists, and epidemiologists are saying, or if it contradicts what the entire history of those fields have said up to this point, or even if it contradicts what the self-same public authorities said two, or six, or ten months ago.
Why? Apparently the answer that’s supposed to send us running back to our self-made prisons, warm and fuzzy with the knowledge that we’re being looked after by our well-meaning parent-authorities, is: “Because we’re the experts and we say so. And if you question us you are anti-science, anti-truth, and a conspiracy theorist.”
Well, here’s a little piece of advice: if you wanted that argument to stick you shouldn’t have been teaching me exactly the opposite for forty-six years.
You should have been teaching me that thinking for oneself is dangerous and stupid and will only lead to disaster. You should have been teaching me never to critically examine anything anyone says, and to blindly accept everything I hear. You should have been teaching me that the truth is whatever someone in a position of authority says it is.
But you didn’t.
So here we are.
“Because we said so” is not only not a convincing argument, it is a slap in the face of any sane, rational, thinking person. It’s an admonishment for thinking. It’s an anti-argument. An argument is when you present your case, reasons to believe, and adduce evidence in favor of your claim. “Because I said so” is the opposite. It is the dodging of an argument.
Are you wondering why every time you make an unquestionable pronouncement you create more skeptics? This is why. An argument from authority is a logical fallacy. When someone refuses to explain their reasoning to me, not only is it a slap in my face, it accomplishes precisely the opposite: it raises my suspicion and puts my critical thinking gears into overdrive.
Arguments from authority don’t silence criticism. They trigger it.
Plus, you know what I’m an “authority” on? How information gets sorted in my head, including what I put in the True column, what gets questioned on the basis of conflicting with what I know, what sets off my bullshit detectors, and what I know to be straight up horseshit. I might be wrong about something — Lord knows I’ve been wrong about plenty — but I’m the one who gets to decide that and correct it, not some Minister of Truth.
No one questions the right to see with their own eyes or hear with their own ears. We regard these as our birthright. These faculties are ours and no one can make us question their use. But, for some reason, when it comes to the brain, we happily surrender this birthright and let someone else do our thinking for us. This is the equivalent to willingly tying on blindfolds and stuffing cotton into our ears.
Why do you have a brain? If the sole purpose of your brain is to blindly accept whatever goes in, no matter whether it agrees or conflicts with the other contents you’ve rammed in there, what is accomplished by your having a brain versus your being a wooden automaton or a lump of clay or an android?
As Thoreau put it, if you surrender your own judgment you put yourself on level with wood and earth and stones and “command no more respect than men of straw, or a lump of dirt”. Yet these are the people we typically praise as good citizens.
Well, fuck what the herd thinks. If something makes no sense, you question it. That is your duty as a brain-possessor.
For example, when the initial modelers for the virus were spitting out numbers like a 4–7% fatality rate, driving humanity (rightly) into a panic, and we now know that those projections were far overblown, and that the actual data shows us that it’s closer to 0.14%, and those modelers somehow still have jobs, and we are still behaving as if this were the absolute deadliest disease ever to plague humanity, as if the fatality rate were 50%, 75% or 100%… my brain wants to know why.
When, in the entire history of humanity, even in pandemics far deadlier than this one, we have never quarantined the healthy populace, ever, and the WHO pandemic guidelines of October 2019 even say that the quarantining of exposed individuals is not recommended, then, a scant four months later, we decide that quarantining the healthy is a suddenly a spiffy idea, resulting in a staggering blow to worldwide prosperity, resulting in catastrophic loss of life many times worse than the virus, and UNICEF to move 1.2 million children into “wasting” status (meaning they’re expected to die within six months), and dozens of studies now show the inefficacy and destructiveness of lockdowns, and the WHO reiterates that it does not recommend lockdowns which will do nothing except increase poverty, and 12,000 (and growing) medical and public health scientists and medical professionals have signed a declaration saying that locking down the healthy populace is wrong and should be changed to focused protection for the vulnerable, yet worldwide, governments are praised for their lockdown policies, the stricter the better… my brain wants to know why.
When I find out that thousands of deaths are being counted as virus deaths despite 94% of the victims having 2.5 comorbidities, and that hospitals are being incentivized by thousands of dollars per patient to report them as virus deaths, even absurd cases like car accident and gunshot wound victims, and that heart attacks and cancer deaths are skyrocketing because people are suddenly unwilling or unable to get proper care owing to lockdowns, resulting in an even greater toll of deaths attributed to the virus, and yet despite all this the overall mortality is perfectly in line with seasonal values… my brain wants to know why.
When I find out that the PCR tests that are now driving the public to believe in an explosion of “cases” are not actually medical cases at all, nor are the tests capable of distinguishing between live, infectious virus particles and dead, non-infectious viral remnants, and for this reason the inventor of the PCR explicitly warned that they were not to be used for diagnosis, yet people are self-diagnosing “I have COVID,” if they test positive (not true), and how the tests are wildly inaccurate when run above 25–30 cycle thresholds (and even Fauci admitted so) yet the FDA is recommending labs to run these at 40–50 CTs resulting in thousands upon thousands of detections of completely benign, non-infectious viral matter, and how these detections are actually fantastic news that most of the positives are exposed yet non-infectious, yet the media continues to report this as an explosion of “deadly infection” … my brain wants to know why.
When hundreds upon hundreds of medical practitioners have said that the disease is easily managed with affordable and readily available treatments yet they are being censored, de-platformed, silenced, or losing their jobs, and we are told repeatedly, despite a 99.86% recovery rate, that the one and only salvation is a pharmaceutical vaccine, and no public official that I’m aware of has issued any recommendation on lifestyle changes which would reverse the biggest risk factors: smoking, obesity and vitamin D deficiency, and Harvard conducted studies months ago on what kind of emotionally-driven messages would achieve the maximum compliance for a vaccine that didn’t even exist yet (in other words, how do we best manipulate people) … my brain wants to know why.
So, tell me, who am I supposed to blindly trust?
“Trust the experts.” Which experts? They disagree. Yes, they do. It does us absolutely no good to pretend otherwise, or to silence only the experts who don’t agree with us.
“Trust the science.” I agree. But that means you don’t get to dismiss scientists who don’t support your conclusion as “not real science”. Science means you follow the evidence, even if it leads you somewhere you don’t particularly like.
Also, disagreement is not evidence of one or the other party being “unscientific”. Science proceeds on the basis of disagreements. That is why we praise science as a superior form of knowing than say, divine revelation, because when we make a scientific pronouncement others get to have a go at us. Science is done by us all. Anyone gets to participate. If I were a Swiss patent clerk, for example, I could have a go at the entire history of physics if I wanted, and the scientific community couldn’t, and shouldn’t, stop me. Disagreement, questioning, criticism: this is science working as it is supposed to. (Read those quotes by Sagan and Feynman again). Pronouncement by an authority that is beyond criticism has a name: it is called religion.
“Trust the government.” Almost beneath comment. We should be questioning what our government does, all the time. If the past four years haven’t taught you that then I don’t know what you’ve been paying attention to. (Some super-important stuff on your phone, probably.)
“Trust the media.” Sure, why would they lie? I mean, most of the media show a clear political bias, but they wouldn’t lie about the deadliness of a virus, right? Remember that these are huge entertainment conglomerates that sell whatever gets clicks and advertisement dollars. And boy howdy do we like to buy up fear. A story about most of us being cautious but fine and basically able to resume normal living? Boring. Also, going back decades, far before this mess, those advertisers have been… guess who? Yep, pharma companies. “Here is the doom-and-gloom, and now with a message from our sponsors, here is the cure. Ask your doctor.” It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just big business.
“Trust the FDA.” Okay. Am I supposed to forget that the FDA approved dozens of inaccurate and ineffective virus tests onto the market a scant six months ago, which bankrupted some local governments as they bought them up by the thousands and made those unscrupulous companies rich? Am I supposed to forget that the FDA routinely approves drugs by for-profit corporations that have a history of poisoning the public (witness the opioid epidemic) with little to no consequences? And that these corporations are accountable neither to the FDA nor anyone else as they are specifically liability-free when it comes to vaccines?
“Trust the fact checkers”. Isn’t it wonderful that we have these angels of Truth amongst us who can pronounce what is scientifically-certain and what isn’t? And we thought science was hard. Think how easily we could have skipped all that scientific uncertainty the past couple thousand years if they had simply graced us with their presence eons ago. When you think of it, their presence among us obliviates the whole need for any of us to think for ourselves, since the fact-checkers can simply reveal to us what is true and what isn’t. (Without influence, I’m sure, by the bias of the people writing their paychecks.)
Now, suppose you’re thinking: “Of course we shouldn’t blindly trust these entities. But in this case, your information is flawed,” and you proceed to give me contrary information.
You know what? Fine.
I respect that, and we can argue about the respective of merits of our understanding. You can point out things I might have overlooked, and I can do the same for you. This is called an adult conversation, and it’s what we should be doing, especially with something that stands to drag our civilization back into the Dark Ages if we’re wrong.
But don’t tell me to ignore or un-know what I know, or silence things you don’t want me to know, or to trust what you know without raising any questions of my own.
I cannot do that.I was taught otherwise.
The minute you tell me I have to believe what you believe, we’re no longer having a conversation.
Let me ask you this: what do you have to fear from questions? If the questioner is right, they’ve helped you identify an error in your reasoning. If they’re wrong, it’s an opportunity to teach and reinforce what you know. Either way, a question makes you stronger.
The fear of questions, of course, comes from this ridiculous cultural belief that if we publicly admit being wrong, we are somehow weak or worthy of shame. And so, better to save face, stick to our opinions, and run the herd off the cliff than admit weakness and change course.
Well, I disagree. Show me someone who admits being wrong, and I have immense respect for their courage. There is someone who values truth above all other considerations, including public reputation, and that is worthy of our praise.
The Dark Ages weren’t “dark” because people were idiots. They were dark because people were oppressed by a ruling authority that they did not, or could not, question. Proselytization, persecution, excommunication, and death… these were the order of the day for those who did not accept the official doctrine.
We need questioners. Without them, that’s exactly where we’re headed again.
I remember talking to a friend after we’d seen Inglourious Basterds. I pointed out that the dialogue, in true Tarantino fashion, was great, the acting wonderful, the tension-building in each scene masterful… but the scenario so utterly, ridiculously silly that it took me out of the film. I get that Tarantino is indulging in some revenge fantasy, but Hitler and Goebbels go to the cinema together? Honestly. My friend seemed to be almost be choking back his anger at my observation. “Oh my God! You didn’t try to analyze it, did you? Just turn off the logic for a couple hours and enjoy it, Jesus Christ!”
And you know what? He was right.
Maybe life would be more enjoyable with my brain switched off. I could enjoy silly premises in movies. I wouldn’t get in arguments with friends and family. Instead of reading and thinking and trying to dig deeper into issues I could just share some easy memes about how stupid people are that don’t agree with me, or with my favorite politician or celebrity guru. I could go along with the herd, cheering our wonderful government and media and tech giants and pharmaceutical companies for their heroic work in keeping us “safe” (including safe from opinions who don’t agree with ours) even as they plunge society into famine and ruin.
But I can’t. Call it a curse.
I notice things. I question.
And, God help us, so should we all.
Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. (Richard Feynman)
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind. (C. S. Lewis)
Wow, what an excellent essay! It’s always been obvious to me and considered basic common sense to ask questions, especially of authority. I have been so damn shocked that not only have most of the people around me failed to do so, but have actually shunned me for daring to. WTF!
Did a heavy sedative get put in the water in 2020? Maybe it’s social media turning peoples brains off and making them afraid of being ridiculed?
Mattias Desmet does a good job of explaining that what we could be seeing is a mass psychosis event but I wonder if that really is it? Whatever it is that has seemingly lobotomized a large number of people we have got to find ways to snap them out of it if possible. Thanks for your writing!