Truth is hard to come by these days because no one has any doubts. No matter the side people are on, if there are sides, they all believe absolutely that they’re right.
What happened to doubts, to thinking that “Yes, ‘A’ seems right but maybe ‘B’ has points, too”? The trouble with people not having any doubts, who believe unquestionably in the rightness of their stance, is that they never seem to take into consideration things like trade-offs. A measles vaccine saves lives, but it also destroys some lives. There is a whole lot of doubt in the discussion, but you never see it, just utter “knowing” on both sides.
It’s not just online — that absence of doubt — but also conversations in person. It’s hard to converse with people who have no doubts, who know what they know and have no interest in knowing anything else.
I don’t think there’s anything that’s so true — so doubtless — that it’s set in stone. Not even the pyramids, talking of stone. The research I did years ago makes me think the pyramids are not tombs. The later ones, perhaps, were created as tombs, after people lost the reason for the pyramids, but originally they seem to have been a means of pulling energy directly from the earth, a lost art that Nicola Tesla tried to recreate with his various experiments, including the Colorado Springs wireless electricity tests and his Wardenclyffe Tower. There’s a lot of talk in certain segments of the internet about such lost technologies, as well as the theory of Tartaria, an advanced civilization that supposedly was erased from human memory when the world was “reset”. Although it’s fun reading about such theories and seeing the “proof,” I don’t really believe in a reset theory, and yet other research I did years ago, on the origins of the Black Death, makes it seem as if that could have been a reset, a way of stopping an explosion of human progress.
People who believe in such things have no doubt that they are true. Those who don’t believe have no doubts that they are false.
What happened to doubting? Maybe doubt is another lost art.
A few weeks ago, some fellow left a few comments here on my blog telling me that if I’m writing for myself, I have no business publishing my articles, that writing is a service writers do for others. He is convinced of his rightness, but I have doubts. For one thing, I am not narcissistic enough to believe that everyone wants to read what I write; in which case, any writing I do has to be for me. It also seems to me that so much that is written is garbage, which is certainly no service to anyone. And it’s garbage because people are writing for others. They write the books they think people want to read, they post the memes they think people want to see, write articles they think people want to believe, and in all of that, the truth gets lost.
Oddly as it sounds, I’m beginning to think that truth can be found in the doubts. And maybe that’s where wisdom lies, too — in the doubts.
As Robert Jordan wrote: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyways.”
This could be why wisdom is so hard to come by nowadays — no one has any doubts. No one even seems to know there is anything to doubt about their position.
It’s possible I believe so much in the importance of doubting because I have doubts about everything. But who knows? Not me, that’s for sure!
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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