Scepticism

A short essay on what scepticism is, and what it is not.

Question everything! - Too much. Believe everything you read on the internet! Is far too little. Believe what your friend said, your parents, an online news outlet? Those are harder. Believe what your eyes see - hmmm.

A good dose of scepticism is very healthy. It probably always has been but it’s especially healthy now. Scepticism encourages the scientific method, it's about questioning that which others believe to be true or correct. 

In a world where anyone can publish anything just about anywhere, and where motivation is found so readily in wealth and celebrity, it’s difficult to determine a source’s bias. And then when you’re educated to believe and do certain things certain ways without the means to check or to prove them, accepting things on blind faith becomes easy, and we stop thinking of it as faith, just ‘common knowledge’. 

This thing called society that we find ourselves living in is built on trust, when that trust breaks down the fighting breaks out. If someone you trust tells you something, you’re likely to believe it. And you should, questioning everything is too much. 

But these days you don’t have to look that far to find modern examples where untrusting people are taring at the media or condemning that what they think to be false. Raging against what they don’t trust. 

This is not scepticism though, this is denial. Whether it’s born out of privilege or arrogance or something else I don’t know but it’s important to spot the difference.

If you hear something that seems strange or wrong to your ear and your reaction is to immediately deny or to discredit the speaker, take a breath. Scepticism means to question, to take a scientific approach and question the assumptions, the reliability, and the accuracy of the thing, not to take down and replace with your truth. 

You can’t do it for everything, that’s too much work, but a nice dose of scepticism and some critical thinking can go a long way.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash