Do your own research

It sounds like the most sensible advice there is. Think for yourself. Never take authority at its word. Do your own research. And yet, in the mouth of the modern doubter, it has become precisely the opposite of what the philosopher meant who raised doubt to an art.

Descartes' crowbar

In 1641 René Descartes resolved to doubt everything that could be doubted in even the slightest degree. His senses deceive him at times, away with them. Perhaps he is dreaming. Perhaps, he reasoned further, there is an evil demon deceiving him about everything. He tore reality down entirely, in search of one thing that even that demon could not take from him, and he found it: even if I am deceived about everything, I cannot be deceived about the fact that I think. I think, therefore I am. On that single boulder he meant to build again. The direction is everything: Descartes doubted in order to be able to know. Doubt was the wrecking ball, not the house.

The inversion

And there lies the distortion. "Do your own research" sounds Cartesian, but it turns Descartes upside down. Descartes doubted his own convictions most fiercely, and rebuilt only on what survived the doubt. The modern researcher-on-his-own-initiative does the opposite: he doubts other people's sources, the experts, the institutions, the figures, mercilessly, while his own preferred sources are exempted from every test. Descartes sought a foundation that everyone could share: reason. The conspiracy thinker seeks a foundation possessed only by the "awake." And notice the asymmetry, because that is the heart of the matter: infinite doubt toward the virologist with thirty years of research, zero doubt toward the man with a ring light and a strong opinion. The one must prove everything one hundred percent or be rejected; the other need only confirm what you already felt.

And look at what that "research" actually amounts to in practice. You type in a question that already carries its answer within it, the algorithm serves up the videos that flatter your suspicion, and three hours later it feels as though you have looked something up, when all you have done is sink deeper into what you already wanted to believe. Descartes read precisely what contradicted him; that was the whole exercise. The modern seeker mostly arranges to be proven right, and rebrands the confirmation as "research."

Questions you have to weigh for yourself

So before you go on, in pieces, honestly. What is the last conviction you "researched" that you actually hoped to see proven true. And did you then search just as hard for the counterarguments as for the confirmation? Do you test your own side as strictly as the other? And the most uncomfortable one: when you did your own research, did you go looking for the strongest case against your suspicion, or the strongest case for it? Because there, and nowhere else, lies the difference between thinking and proving yourself right.

The lesson that remained when the dream failed

Finally, be honest about Descartes himself, because his project ran aground. That single boulder turned out to be thin, and the attempt to nail the whole of knowledge back together from the ground up has largely failed; an unshakeable foundation of that kind probably does not exist. So the lesson is not "seek absolute certainty." The lesson is the method, the merciless self-testing, the crowbar you set first against your own walls. Whoever demolishes only the neighbour's house and leaves his own walls untouched has learned exactly the wrong thing from Descartes, and then calls it independent thinking.

A thought to carry with you: when did you last tear down something you hoped would stand, a conviction of your own, not someone else's?