I’m a cranky old lady. I think we’ve covered that before but let’s just get it out in the open. As a cranky old lady, I come with a large dose of cynicism and a cat. The cat doesn’t care about politics but she also doesn’t care about her litterbox so maybe she’s not a great role model, especially not for other cats. I’m not a role model; I’m way too cranky for that.

Crankiness tends to breed both cynicism and hyper-skepticism. I’m evidently not cranky enough yet because I’m not cynic enough to believe that the world is hopeless and I refuse to be stupid enough to be a hyper-skeptic. I already did a tour as an atheist so I’ve done my time as ‘young and moronic’.

So as a recovering idiot, let me give y’all a few pointers on this ‘thinking for yourselves’ thing. First and foremost, it’s work. Get over the idea that the first stupid thing that runs through your head is profound. I’d have saved 10 years wasted in atheism if I’d had the sense to know that basing your worldview on a literal logical fallacy is moronic. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it is good. There’s always another way to look at the idea – find it before you assume you must be right.

Second, you aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are and you aren’t nearly as dumb as you think you are, either. Twelve years of schooling sets you up to a lifelong addiction to comparison with others. Stop it. Truth doesn’t care who its proponents are or its opponents. If a thing is true, then it is true regardless of whether the guy telling you about it has a Ph.D. or is as dumb as a sack of hammers. It’s not true or false based on whether or not it ran through your little noggin either. The idea lives or dies on its very own merits.

And finally for now, experts aren’t always right and the guy on YouTube isn’t always wrong. If you caught on that this is a repeat of the second point, you’re pretty sharp. But it bears its own point because the false appeal to authority is currently a national past time. People switch off their brains the instant an expert says anything. The guy isn’t wrong because he’s an expert but he’s also not right because he’s an expert. If the point is something you’re arguing about, the argument is NOT settled by an expert offering his/her opinion.

Your government is not perfect. The people working in it certainly are not. Neither are they evil incarnate. Sometimes government gets it right. Sometimes it gets it VERY wrong.

So how do you know which is which?

This is where healthy skepticism comes in. Officials almost always have some interest in the decisions they are making. In fact, the cases where they have no interest in the decision are extremely rare. Most decisions affect representatives and officials politically. This is something we’re stuck with because getting rid of it would be harder than making swimmers not wet. Kinda hard while you’re still in the water; not having a political interest while serving in a political role is just as hard to separate.

People with an interest can still handle the problem honorably. They can also be pond scum about it. Humans are like that.

Knowing that Representative Bob probably has an interest in getting voters to support the legislation he’s talking about is just one reason to think harder about what exactly is being proposed and whether or not its a good idea. Another is that Bob may be a fine, upstanding representative and a total idiot who has been taken in by a slick talking lobbyist. Heck, Bob and the nice lobbyist may both be well intentioned and just wrong.

Every argument on its own merits. That’s healthy skepticism. It doesn’t just accept the truth of a statement when that statement needs to be considered. Neither does it assume the statement false because Bob is in Congress. Healthy skepticism is just not being either a sucker or a cynic.

On the bright side, it gets easier. You outgrow school and youthful stupidity. You get sucker punched a few times and you stop being quite so willing to accept whatever the expert says at face value. You also figure out pretty fast that being convinced that the world is a bad place insures that you are going to be living in a bad place and it wasn’t true anyway.

Good does triumph over evil but not by itself. That second act is never fun for the hero, is it? Getting from the problem to the solution requires work and a lot of clear headed thinking.

And a large dose of healthy skepticism.