We Americans have never lacked for confidence in the face of complexity. We prefer our truths quick, our opinions ready-made, our explanations boxed and bowed by someone who “sounds like they know what they’re talking about.” The trouble is, more often than not, they don’t.
This is a lesson we seem congenitally unwilling to learn. We take things on trust—because the man on the screen wore a suit and spoke with conviction, or because a teacher long ago told us that consensus was the same thing as certainty. We accept what’s familiar, what’s traditional, and what doesn’t rock the boat too hard. And sometimes, we’re simply wrong.
Over seven decades, I’ve watched fashions in belief come and go like wind through a wheat field. But two truths have proven stubbornly consistent. First: Every message you receive has a point of view. And second: We, as a people, are all too willing to be misled by those who are confidently mistaken.
The current panic in the public square is named Artificial Intelligence. We are told it will write our books, grade our papers, compose our music. Some literary platforms now require us to swear that no robot whispered in our ear when we typed our latest submission. And yet I’ve had AI detectors, machines designed to unmask other machines, cast suspicion on creations that were mine, even as the same machines scrape my books and blogs to feed the digital consciousness.
AI, like every media platform before it, from television to Twitter, is just another megaphone. It amplifies what others have already said, already believed, already sold. It is, like us, shaped by incentives. And those incentives likely point toward profit or power—not truth.
So, how do we find the gems in the dirt?
This is about judgment; about how we respond to a world where every idea is packaged like a product and every fact comes wrapped in ideology. Titles and degrees do not guarantee competence. One denies science, another hides cerebral decline, a third stirs fear as a strategy and uses a magician’s misdirection to hide true intention. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again.
What distinguishes human beings from the animals, we are told, is depth perception, not just with our eyes, but with our minds. The animal decides by instinct: do this and live, do that and die. But we, in theory, have the capacity for verification.
So, when someone tells you that a group of people is uniformly wicked, shares a single tweet to represent a universal truth, or claims that a vaccine is either miracle or menace, ask to see the data. Question the source. Dig down. And even then, hold some doubt in reserve.
And here is the danger: when we let emotion do the work of reason, when we base our beliefs on what is easy or familiar or pleasing, we do not become freer. We become manipulable.
The last time Americans were asked to decide the future of their country, more than one-third stayed home. That silence, too, is a vote. The shouting on our screens may be loud, but the real crisis is quieter, an erosion of critical thinking, a retreat from curiosity, a surrender to fear.
If you’re not verifying, you’re being managed. If you’re not thinking, someone else is thinking for you. And if the people we elect discourage education, mock expertise, and celebrate ignorance, it is not because they want us strong. It is because they know we are easier to rule when we are weak.
Verify. Doubt what sounds too good. Read the footnotes. Ask the questions. We must all become amateurs in the noblest sense of that word;lovers of truth, seekers after clarity.
For in the end, our future does not depend on knowing the answers. It depends on being willing to ask the questions.
