Thinking for ourselves has run amok

By Tom Krattenmaker
November 20, 2021

Back in my student newspaper days, one of my colleagues wore a t-shirt that bore a message I’ve never forgotten. “Question authority,” it said. 

Decades later, it’s amazing to behold the degree to which the concept has caught on. And how far astray it has gone from the type of journalistic and political skepticism my Minnesota Daily coworker had in mind. 

Question authority, think for yourself, “do your own research”—the apotheosis of these practices has laid waste to the culture’s information ecosystem. No wonder the Chronicle of Higher Education felt compelled to publish its recent series on the cloudy future of expertise.

Thinking for ourselves has merit. Until we do it poorly, that is, and apply it to realms where our fanciful theories and “alternative” facts have no bearing. Such are the straits in which we now find ourselves.

News of an acquaintance’s COVID-19 death has brought these issues into focus for me. I intersected with this man (whose name I’m omitting out of respect for his grieving family) when he invited me on his radio show to discuss my then-new book Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower. We were kindred spirits, it seemed. He was a maverick minister who doubted the literal existence of God and divinity of Jesus. I, a self-avowed secular progressive who had the temerity to call himself a follower of the teachings of Jesus.

We were thinking for ourselves, on some of the biggest questions of human existence.

As I learned while reading about my host’s death, he followed his independent thinking in some, er, interesting directions after our conversation. He promoted 9/11 and climate-change conspiracy theories and—you guessed it—all manner of far-fetched notions about the pandemic and vaccines being part of a sinister plot.

In one post, he postulated that globalists and “elites like Bill Gates” were setting the stage for a “mass infertility event” as part of a population-reduction scheme; this, through their efforts to push a COVID vaccine that he was convinced caused infertility. Note that there is no scientific evidence that COVID vaccines cause infertility.

In the end, it didn’t matter what my acquaintance thought and said about COVID-19 and the vaccines. He contracted the virus and died.

Self-righteousness and “he got what he deserved” are neither a mature nor compassionate response to tragic tales like his. At a certain level, you can understand why paranoia has become so prevalent and so many Americans question authority today. There’s a strong and valid sense that conventional politics and institutions and leaders, and the predominant ways of relating to them, have failed. People have been betrayed. Trust has been violated. The rich have gotten richer, meanwhile, and the powerful have grabbed more power.

But once you’ve decided the culture’s traditional understanding of one or two important truths is wrong, what’s to stop you from rejecting, well, everything?

Far be it from me to suggest we were better off in a bygone age before Pandora’s box was opened. In other times and places, religion skeptics like me were not free to reach and communicate their own conclusions about God’s existence and the meaning of life. You could get tortured for it. Same for the practice of challenging governments and other human authorities. Would you want that?

Let’s admit this, too: Scientists and experts are not always right. To blindly trust them is foolish.

But nor should the data they produce be automatically rejected because they’re on the “wrong” side of a cultural divide or you don’t like the implications.

Our country is growing ungovernable—the culture is devolving into epistemological chaos—because too many people are thinking for themselves too much and too poorly. There are powerful interests who want it that way, knowing that in an informational fog, those who hold the most power get to dictate what’s “true.”

How to navigate this impossible information landscape?

There’s wisdom in what I used to hear from the climb leaders in the mountaineering club I belonged to when I lived in the Pacific Northwest. These leaders were highly trained and experienced and, in most cases, had led teams up that same peak before. But knowing their own fallibility, they encouraged the team to take our share of responsibility—to speak up if we noticed the leader setting up an unsafe anchor, for example, or leading us off trail onto dangerous terrain.

In a few instances we spoke up. All to the good. But imagine how far we’d have gotten if we’d questioned everything the leader said and did.

Yes, citizens need to keep our eyes open and our heads on swivels—but while giving due deference to authorities and information sources that have credentials and credibility.

It’s distressing that the information ecosystem has become a toxic waste site. But not to despair. Whatever chaos people like Steve Bannon foment with their propaganda and misinformation, facts are still facts. You can have your opinions about their meaning. But not their existence.

Despite strenuous efforts against it, objective truth is still out there, pushing against those who suppress it and roiling the waters wherever it’s denied. It eventually has the final say.

Tom Krattenmaker writes on religion and values in public life. He is the author of “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.”  Follow him on Twitter: @krattenmaker