This is a follow-up to How to Think for Yourself, which I published last August. That post covers the five hidden ways a group gets you to believe things without you noticing, and the six habits that protect you from it. If you haven't read it, it's worth going back to, because today's post starts from the one question it left unanswered.
How do you know what day you were born?
You were there, but you don’t remember it. You know the date because your parents told you, and because it is printed on a document that someone else filled in. You have repeated it your whole life, on every form, without once asking for proof.
Now try a few more. How do you know the earth is billions of years old? How do you know the medicine in your bathroom does what the box says? How do you know that a country you have never visited exists? If you went through everything you believe and kept only what you have personally seen and tested, very little would be left. Almost everything you know, you know because someone told you and you decided to believe them.
On a normal day this works fine. The trouble starts when the people you rely on disagree with each other.
Say you see two doctors about the same problem. One tells you to have the operation. The other tells you to wait. Both studied for years, both have treated hundreds of patients, and both are sure. You have to choose between them, and you did not go to medical school.
The usual advice is to think for yourself. So you go home and start reading, and you read for the whole weekend. By Sunday night you have learned some new words, and you are no closer to knowing which doctor is right. A few hours of reading cannot replace twenty years of training, and deep down you know that.
So you choose another way, usually without realizing it. You go with the doctor who sounded more confident. Or the one who explained things more clearly, or who seemed kinder, or who gave you the answer you were hoping for. It feels like you weighed the evidence. What you did was pick the person you liked more.
I have to admit that my post from last August did not help with this. I wrote that thinking for yourself does not mean ignoring experts, and that the real skill is telling true expertise from false authority. Then I moved on. I never said how to do that, and that is the hard part.
So how do you decide who to trust when you are not able to check their work?
The question is bigger than doctors and scientists. There is the friend you call before every big decision. There is the parent whose ideas about money you picked up as a child, long before you could question them. There are the two or three people whose opinions you hear in your head when you are trying to make up your mind. Do they deserve that place? Would you be happy to end up thinking the way they think? Because if you listen to someone for long enough, that is what happens.
This is the whole reason I write this newsletter. The goal I have for every reader is sovereignty. Over your attention, over your thinking, and over how you respond to whatever the world puts in front of you. A mind that can be talked into anything is not sovereign. But a mind that trusts nobody is not sovereign either, because it ends up believing whatever it happened to stumble on and calling that independence. A sovereign mind still takes other people’s word for most things. What makes it sovereign is that it chooses whose word to take. That choice is one we rarely make for ourselves. It gets made for us, by whoever is loudest, or closest, or most sure of themselves.
There is a way to make it yourself, and you don’t have to become an expert in anything to use it. It starts with a fact that sounds like bad news at first. Nobody thinks for themselves in the way we like to imagine. Not you, not me, and not the experts either.
Continue reading with a paid subscription to learn why even the world's best scientists have to take each other's word, what Seneca told Lucilius about choosing whom to follow, the signs of character that show whether someone deserves your trust, and what the Stoics did when two trustworthy people still disagreed.
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