The Judiciously Skeptical Mind

Advice on how to avoid falling down the conspiratorial rabbit holes opening up all around us

Merchandise with the face of Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump is sold in the expo hall the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 22, 2024 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, I was loading groceries onto the belt in one of the checkout lines at my local ACME in the Philadelphia suburbs when I began to overhear the cashier’s conversation with the elderly customer ahead of me. The cashier, a man in his late 20s, was patiently explaining that the much-discussed romance between pop megastar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was a transparent marketing ploy intended to boost ratings for the National Football League.

Swift and Kelce, he confidently asserted, were both getting paid hefty sums to put on a sparkling show for the cameras. But it was all fake, scripted. Just look at that, he said, waving a hand toward the half dozen magazine covers adorned with gleaming images of the happy couple. No doubt the Chiefs are gonna win. That’s all part of the script, too. And the fans are just lapping it up.

But not this cashier. He’d seen through the script and was doing his best to spread his hard-won knowledge about the truth of things residing just below the surface of our lives, which, he was certain, are meticulously organized and controlled by powerful people and institutions. As I eavesdropped on this conversation, doing my best to convey to the cashier through my body language that I didn’t want to pick up where he’d left off with the customer ahead of me, now beginning to roll her cart toward the exit, a thought popped into my head: There are probably a lot more people in this country who think like this guy than people who think like me.

But how exactly do I think? And how does it differ from the ACME cashier? That seems like a worthwhile topic for a post.

Degrees of Knowledge

Maybe the most troubling thing about our cultural moment is that trust in once-authoritative public institutions has so fully collapsed among so many that it’s possible for people to believe in just about anything, with evidence cobbled together from whatever sources happen to pop up in an algorithmically curated social-media feed or a self-directed series of Google searches.

This points to an extremely important fact about the way most human beings think.