"I just know that I don't know anything", Socrates said. And with those words not only showed a huge intellectual humility, but it also put doubt on a pedestal. Doubt has been and continues to be the companion of great thinkers. Free and transformative thinking arises from doubt. Only by challenging the deepest convictions and beliefs can we go beyond what we take for granted and build something different and ours.
Unfortunately, these days doubt is often vilified while paying homage to a single thought that feeds on immovable truths. However, facing complex problems armed with absolute certainties and truths only leads to big mistakes.
Doubt forbidden: the machine for making certainties
Doubting has a bad reputation. Our society does not reward those who doubt and take it easy. It does not reward those who want to concentrate, take the time to reflect and disagree with what is established in order to build their truths and their life on the basis of them.
Instead, reward the fastest. Who applauds and amplifies the official speech. Those who make automated decisions without thinking too much because they have convinced us that the most important thing is to move forward. At any cost. Advance, advance and advance. No room for doubts and dissensions.
In this way, motivated by slogans and clichés - which often sound good but lack meaning - we rush to judge without knowing the circumstances, much less the reasons. There empathic resonance becomes one rara avis when we are in a hurry to move forward and doubt is seen as a waste of time.
Therefore, fewer and fewer people are giving the benefit of the doubt. When we live in a society that has become a truth-making machine through politically correct, but biased and distanced from reality, judgments, we become relentless judges who believe they possess a Great Truth. The definitive one!
Virtually without realizing it, we avoid everything that is different. We ignore what generates doubts. We point the accusing finger on others with no time or desire to investigate their causes and discover mitigating circumstances. The guilty verdict is a mere formality, because we don't need much evidence in a world that rewards speed over reflexive pause and gets carried away by appearances rather than delving into the essence.
But judging without doubting and deciding without thinking is the most direct way to mental rigidity and intellectual stagnation. A meaningful life involves doubting, retracing our steps, rethinking our possibilities, reconsidering our beliefs, and changing our opinion once, twice, or as often as necessary.
I doubt, so I exist
"Doubt is the beginning of wisdom", Aristotle said. From a philosophical point of view, doubting allows us to restrain the momentum of judgment. It helps us respond rather than simply reacting to circumstances. It encourages us to put ourselves in the other's shoes, but it also allows us to take a step back to get away from ourselves and not give in to the spontaneity of the first impulse.
"Whoever doubts considers and reconsiders, weighs and weighs, discerns and distinguishes", according to the philosopher Óscar de la Borbolla. Doubt is there conditio sine qua non of a more thoughtful and prudent attitude. Those who doubt abandon the inertia of everyday life and the flow of dominant thought to transform their life into a personal choice. Doubt, in fact, is a lethal weapon against conformity, a balm against irrationality and the best antidote against mental automatisms.
Doubting is a fundamental exercise in finding other ways of seeing and understanding the world. Doubt makes us question things, even those we have always taken for granted. Activate the critical thinking. It forces us to question everything. It encourages us not to settle for the first answer or what they tell us.
Doubting also implies the absence of prejudice. It is an opportunity to see things from another point of view, not necessarily more true or more false, but just different and more personal. Doubt is what drives us to question and question everything to give meaning to what we live, a deeply personal meaning.
To reap the benefit of the doubt, we just need to make sure we don't get stuck in the shaky balance of yes and no. We have to analyze things, but then we have to make decisions and act. Doubt is not paralyzing, nor does it imply a waste of time if the brooding process is followed by an evolutionary transformation.
Stopping to consult, weigh, reflect and doubt, before making a decision, in the end it does not hurt, indeed. We must let ourselves go and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt instead of immersing ourselves with closed eyes in a sea of absolute certainties that transform us into partial judges of others and of ourselves. Perhaps we should attend the Magna Graecia agora more, but not in search of answers and truth, but of doubts and questions, as the journalist Guillermo Altares said.
Admission The benefit of the doubt to build a meaningful life was published first in Corner of Psychology.
