Skepticism

I was brought up to believe that there is no nobler pur­suit than the truth.  I was told that the truth should be obvi­ous, and my heart will know what it is.  Alas, in sim­pler times, in smaller worlds this was eas­ier to per­ceive, and no doubt if I were born in the mid­dle ages I would have become an arro­gant spir­i­tu­al­ist who had all the answers.  We no longer live in that age.  We live in a very large world full of dis­so­nance and har­mony, where even our own cul­ture tends to shock us every decade or so.  We can no longer cling to tra­di­tion for the answers to our ques­tions, as the tra­di­tions of the past were of a world far smaller and slower than the one we live in and know about today.

Alchemy, pre­cur­sor to Chem­istry, was rid­dled in superstition.

Yet, myths of old per­sist.  New myths abound.  We humans are sen­ti­men­tal to a fault.  Time isn’t money, time is value, and the longer we hold a belief the stronger we value it.  It is hard, and some­times embar­rass­ing, to let go of some­thing we’ve held dear for so long (espe­cially if we prop­a­gated our opin­ions about it for many years.)  Our rep­u­ta­tions tend to be more impor­tant than the truth for most of us, and our ego pro­tects us with self-delusions and ignorance.

Who doesn’t love to be right?  Imag­ine if you could just be right all the time, no mat­ter what, wouldn’t that just feel great?  Well, it’ll feel great until the facts hit you, and your arro­gance led you down a dan­ger­ous path that may have hurt you or those you love.  Per­son­ally, I love being wrong.  There is noth­ing more valu­able to me than to be proven wrong about some­thing, espe­cially some­thing I’m quite proud about.  Why live a lie?  Igno­rance is not bliss! Igno­rance is dan­ger­ous for you and for soci­ety.  If you care at all for the truth, you will want to be as wrong as pos­si­ble.  Only then, can you ever hope to be as right as possible.

The way of the skep­tic is not an easy path.  To be skep­tic does not just mean being crit­i­cal of oth­ers, but most impor­tantly it means being crit­i­cal of your­self.  It is too easy to point the fin­ger and nit­pick a the­ory to death, it is far harder to do that to yourself.