What Exactly Is Skepticism?

And how can it make us less gullible?

Welcome to the premier post of Cheap Thoughts, grumpy sofa-based observations by a 19th Century Refugee duck-taped to a front-row seat for The Apocalypse.

I’m Ol’ Doc Skepsis, and my pronouns are we/were.¹

I decided to begin this substack with a post about an important cognitive strategy I’ve been using for awhile. A strategy I wish more people would use. One with a long tradition of intellectual rigor and transparency of process. Read on if you’d like to learn more about ‘filtering the infostream’ using skepsis.

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Skepticism is a philosophical tradition which comes down to us from Buddhism via ancient Greece. That’s a pretty long tradition…500 years before Christ.

If we’re still using the methods of skepticism after all these years, it clearly still has value as a tool. It’s a major part of the development of my personal mantra:

Witness everything, believe nothing, and eventually PATTERNS EMERGE

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Let’s begin with some definitions. From ancient Greek:

σκέπτομαι  - sképtomai [SKEP-tow-my]: to consider, to meditate, to deliberate (the root *sḱep- comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *speḱ- to see, to look, to observe)

σκέψῐς - sképsis [SKEP-sis]: perception, observation; examination, speculation, consideration; doubt, hesitation

See why this concept is so important to our culture? Note particularly the last two words above.

Most people nowadays are victims of the socially-engineered narratives pushed by the ‘pop culture’ of the legacy media corporations. I call those victims ‘indiscriminate consumers of corporate infotainment product.’

Skepsis helps ‘immunize’ us to the disinformation viruses currently infecting the world’s population. It’s like a mask for your brain only it works.

Those who use skepsis to filter information are called skeptics:

skeptic — someone who habitually doubts beliefs or claims accepted by others, requiring strong evidence before accepting any belief or claim; someone undecided as to what is true

…and those who identify as skeptics practice skepticism:

skepticism

In ordinary usage — an attitude of doubt, or a disposition toward incredulity, either in general, or regarding a particular phenomenon; a position that true knowledge, or some particular knowledge, is uncertain; a method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism:

In philosophy — a mode of inquiry that emphasizes critical scrutiny, caution, and intellectual rigor; a method of obtaining knowledge through systematic doubt and continual testing; a set of claims about the limitations of human knowledge, and the proper responses to such limitations

As you can see, skepticism is a healthy strategy for filtering the deluge of information we are flooded with daily. Skepsis helps us not to be ‘triggered’ by the nonsense of the malicious, and / or the thoughtless, who believe whatever spews forth from their ‘trusted news outlets,’ ‘official channels’ and ‘fact-checkers.’ Skepsis is the opposite of ‘believe everything’ — it’s ‘believe nothing’ for which there is insufficient proof. At the very least, skepticism precludes ‘jumping to conclusions.’ A good thing.

Mark Twain once commented, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie; and hard it is, to undo that work again!” (Edward Bernays was apparently familiar with that quote.) Skeptics cannot be fooled, at least in theory.

Now for some history:

Pyrrhonism is the earliest Western form of philosophical skepticism. The Greek philosopher Pyrrho developed his skeptical philosophy in India, when he was there during its conquest by Alexander the Great [c. 325 BC]…many similarities exist between Pyrrhonist philosophy and the Indian philosophies current at the time. In particular, he lists the following:

1. there are no beliefs or opinions which are true or false, and therefore

2. we should give no positive answer to any of the logical alternatives. It would also be seen that

3. the four logical alternatives mentioned in Timon's account (i.e. is, is not, both is and is not, neither is nor is not) are identical with that of Sanjaya; the Buddhists; and perhaps also of the three schools of Sceptics

4. the value of the skeptical attitude is said by Pyrrho to be the fact that it promotes speechlessness (aphasia) and mental imperturbability (ataraxia).

ἀταραξία - ataraxia [a-ta-rak-SI-a]: impassiveness, coolness, calmness; "unperturbedness,” generally translated as imperturbability, equanimity, or tranquility; first used in Ancient Greek philosophy by Pyrrho to describe a lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry.

Sounds like a fine place to be, doesn’t it?

One sad thing I witnessed during ‘The Pandemic’ was how powerful a motivator fear is. Even after masks were proven not to work, the frightened still insisted that they (and everyone around them) continue to wear one. Witnessing that level of cognitive dissonance showed me that those poor souls were not reacting to a fear OF something (in this case, a virus) — they were just unconsciously telegraphing their baseline free-floating anxiety for all around them to see, in a cult-like orgy of in-group virtue signaling. 

This unwitting public confession of group mental illness at first confused me. Subsequently my attitude progressed from horror to disgust to compassion. US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have been a Marxie bastard, but he nailed it when he said, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Those who still (in the spring of 2022) insist that covid is a mortal threat are delusional at best, and possibly irremediable. Recall the Mark Twain quote above.

But of course I’m ever hopeful. If these people hear the TRUTH from their ‘trusted news outlets,’ ‘official channels’ and ‘fact-checkers,’ that may be enough to penetrate the conditioning. And whatever we can do to help the wanderers back onto the path, we must do.

It seems to me that any lifehack which might lead more people to Pyrrho’s “lucid state of robust equanimity characterized by ongoing freedom from distress and worry” is probably a good thing.

If you agree that skepticism can be a fine coping strategy for information overload, and that it can help the confused to deal with these trying times, please share this article widely. Thank you very much for reading.

1. 1  View my bio HERE for why I’m ‘out of time.’