And it shows…

A thought nugget I'm chipping away at… especially coming out of this week's Stronger Together Library Conference… is the difference between “scepticism” and “cynicism” and “naïveté” and “ignorance.”

In particular I’ve been noodling over how much it seems that it's people's insecurities, especially when unacknowledged and unresolved… feeling insecure in their own knowledge, in their own ability to understand, in their own sense of belonging… insecurity in one's sense of their place and worth in the world… that can lead to grasping at misinformation as identity and doubling down on beliefs and attitudes not because they are defensible but because they “fit.” And to question — to actually “do the research” — would bring down that house of cards.

So instead of applying scepticism as a tool for testing beliefs and ideas, including and especially one's own, one can fall into using cynicism as a weapon against the beliefs and ideas of others, to let an understandable naïveté become willful ignorance. And while scepticism and cynicism might at first glance seem superficially similar, the difference, especially in intention, is profound. One asks “is this right?” while the other asserts “I am right!”

The thing is, the “certainty” that spawns as a reaction to insecurity looks and feels very different from a confidence borne of curiosity and exploration. And it shows. (And if you can’t tell the difference, you might want to get curious about that…)

Curiosity beats certainty every time.

So I agree, do your research, my friends, but not to prove ourselves right but rather to see where we might be wrong.

And always #CheckYourCitations