Our Innate Ability to Dispel Doubt

We don’t cross the street when someone tells us to. We look for ourselves before crossing. Some may see this as egotistical, but it has ensured the survival of humankind during its early and most arduous millennia. Some would have us believe such selfish acquisition of personal knowledge is no longer necessary. 

Quite the contrary, personal doubt can be satisfied only by personal inquiry, and only the person making the inquiry can know when the doubt has been dispelled. That occurs in the moment the doubter comes to understand something he/she/they didn’t know before. What that something is will be different for different people. That is inevitable. Our bodies of knowledge and experience differ. Moments of understanding occur at different times and by different means for different people. 

Brains are as unique as fingerprints. Not identical physically to begin with, each brain is inundated from birth with an irreproducible flood of impressions it soaks up with total impartiality. This stream of impressions is further rendered irreconcilably unique due to the simple fact that the creature of corporality receiving the impressions occupies of necessity a location in the universe no other corporal creature can occupy at the same time. Hence, the exact confluence of impressions impinging on one creature cannot be experienced by any other. One creature imbibes impressions from a physical perspective impossible to replicate for any other creature. 

The uniqueness of this constant stream of sensations is compounded by the uniqueness of the creature’s physical substrate, its body, which gives rise to its disposition. The unending exposure to impressions may cause the creature anxiety, contentment, pleasure, or pain depending on the configuration of the flesh, blood, bone, and nerves that compose the creature subjected to those impressions.

As a creature advances in life, its voluntary contribution to making sense of the world increases.

In addition to being a limitless receptacle for a mix of sounds, sights, smells, temperature, pressure, and light, the brain is not passive, but itself cradled by a generative engine we call the mind. From the incessant, disparate impressions it receives, this engine weaves an internal representation of the world. Were the mind unable to do so, the creature would not survive. But the creature does survive, proof that the mind accurately maps within the brain the components of that outside world necessary to its survival. It also tells us that the world each mind maps for itself is to a certain degree similar. For the reasons mentioned above, however, those worlds also differ. There is also no accounting for the attributes this generative engine injects into the facsimile of the world it creates: continuity, logic, plot, sense, motive, language. 

As a creature advances in life, its voluntary contribution to making sense of the world increases. As a result of our vast diversities, each of us pursues making that contribution by a different path, and we arrive at making sense of it all at different times. The doubts that constantly bubble up reflect the unique gaps in our personal world views and pose formidable challenges. Each of us is obliged to satisfy doubts others may not have. Individuals resolve private doubts when they acquire an unlooked-for or long-sought fragment of knowledge that enables them to understand that particular something. When that piece of the world falls into place, it broadens our understanding, permeates our body of knowledge, sharpens our perspective of the world, and strengthens our relationship to contemporary lives. Understanding comforts and satiates. It relieves the tension created by our sense that we are rough-edged chunks of ballast heaved about in an ever-churning world. Sussing one little piece of knowledge brings us into harmony with it all until the next doubt bubbles up, usually seconds later, and we snap back into what-was-that? mode. 

This is how thinking creatures work their way through life. It is similar to how they would toil along the coal face of an endless mine burrowed deep underneath sunny hills, mired in dark as they move cumbersomely toward the light. A kind of knowledge is the reward, a personal truth, but not isolated. Often, others recognize our hard-won truth as a plausible perspective they can readily adjoin to their own. 

Alas, we have limits. Intellectual barriers will frustrate us fearfully, focusing the doubt on ourselves and our ability to understand. In redoubling our efforts, we are left to challenge those stubborn doubts with our single tool, whose adequacy we have come to question — our mind. To defy the limits opposing us and address those intimate doubts, we require focus, resolve and, above all, patience. With persistence, we do master the concept, perceive the convolutions, batter down the contradictions until the Gordian knot dissolves of itself because we have recognized the knot for what it is: artifice, digression, distraction, feint, ploy, sleight of hand. The core of the baffling issue lies revealed before us as pristine, simple, and well-formed as a hen’s egg stripped from the foiler’s nest of obfuscation. In prevailing, our facility to learn increases. As we toil on, our confidence grows.

We learn of strange judgments handed down by august courts that stir our suspicion that something unseen is weighing in the balance. No one tells us what, but the scales seem to be off. 

Those battles of ours are intellectual ones. Our single weapon, the intellect, is an organ that underperforms when deprived of time to reflect. Few of us cannot be outwitted. It happens quickly and stings frightfully when we realize we’ve been duped. Optimally, embarrassment is our only injury. But those of us who withdraw and take the time required to ponder and reflect seldom emerge wronged or fooled. 

But time, even as the political confusion overwhelms us, is what we are not granted, whether by design or accident. From every media channel, and they are everywhere, politicians bawl out to us, taunting, berating, cajoling, bullying, blandishing, begging, wanting us to elect, select, or re-elect them. The rewards for them if they succeed are greater than we can imagine, but there is no talk about that. We then hear announcements of strange judgments handed down by august courts that stir our suspicion that something unseen is weighing in the balance. No one tells us what, but the scales seem to be off. Doubts abound.

Hundreds of sources offer themselves as a means for us to inform ourselves. They crowd each other out, abbreviate our attention span, disturb our focus, make us uneasy, anxious that we may be missing something somewhere else. It is to our disadvantage that we Americans consider ourselves to be exceedingly well informed, highly educated, and unusually intelligent — and therefore impossible to fool. Meanwhile, we are being formed into a line along a long path. The path is slightly curved. We cannot see where it leads. If we stepped out of line, we could take a peek, but we are discouraged from doing so. We hear whispers about what lies ahead, but we do not believe the rumors. 

With our loyalty no less than our welfare at stake, we must be ready to deploy our mental faculties at all times to extract sense from the stupefying chatter.

Heroism, although universally admired, is a pedestrian event encountered daily. It consists in nothing more than a confrontation during which a person applies their full moral and ethical powers to make a decision about what to do, what to believe, what to think. That is all. It is not the degree of difficulty that makes the act heroic, but the totality of the engagement. We know when we’ve succeeded because our success purges and exhilarates. Our response dispelling the doubt and confusion is as the spider’s thread. Spiders dangle their threads as if into empty air, yet they do form webs with strands that, for their diameter and weight, possess the tensile strength to moor a battleship in heavy seas. As securely do our honest responses in our battle for clarity buoy us up and bind our world. 

With the chaos of information we are awash in today, each of us faces weighty and not innocent assaults on our understanding every waking hour. With our loyalty no less than our welfare at stake, we must be ready to deploy our mental faculties at all times to extract sense – and motive – from the stupefying chatter. This means an all-out contest between ourselves and the myriad of hucksters, barkers, carpetbaggers, politicians, preachers, and pundits — strangers to us all, laser-focused nonetheless on us — for whom the stakes are mysteriously high. They need to get us back into that line on that curved path leading up to a slaughterhouse we cannot see.