You cannot doubt everything

It is a proud sentence, and you hear it everywhere: "I trust nothing and no one, I think for myself." But it is untrue, and in a way that changes everything. Whoever says it is in fact trusting an enormous amount. He simply does not notice.

The hinges on which the doubt turns

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, near the end of his life, in notes that did not appear until 1969, something that undercuts the whole modern culture of doubt. In order to be able to doubt something, he observed, you must hold countless other things fixed. You doubt whether the medicine works. But meanwhile you trust your senses, your memory, the meaning of your words, the fact that the world existed yesterday too. Those things held fixed he called hinges: they are not proved, they are that around which the doubt turns. Without hinges the door of doubt cannot move. A doubt that tries to doubt everything therefore destroys itself. "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything," he wrote. "The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."

Trust moves, it does not disappear

And here is the sobering consequence for the present. The conspiracy thinker who says he trusts nothing trusts the algorithm that served him the video. He trusts the charismatic stranger with the self-assured voice. He trusts the meme, the gut feeling, the voice that says all the other voices are lying. He has not abolished trust. He has relocated it, from institutions you can call to account to sources that answer to no one. "I don't trust the mainstream media," said via the platform of a billionaire, citing a source with no editor, no correction, no accountability whatsoever. The hinges have not disappeared. They have moved to a darker place.

And that "darker" is not a mood but a structure. A newspaper you can sue, an editorial desk you can correct, a broadcaster you can hold to account; they have a name, an address, something to lose. The anonymous account, the algorithm, the forwarded meme answer to no one. So you did not simply swap one source for another, you swapped a source that must admit its mistakes for one that never has to. Is that more distrust, or less? Total doubt does not exist; everyone trusts something, the only question is what, and whether it lets itself be checked.

Questions you must weigh yourself

So weigh it, piece by piece, and apply it to yourself and not only to "that other person." What do you hold fixed without proof, so that you can doubt the rest? When you last rejected a source as "unreliable", which source did you trust in its place, and was it more answerable for errors, or in fact less? And the sharpest of all: if you really trust nothing, how did you come to trust the very thing that told you to trust nothing?

Where the insight ends

Here too, be honest about the limit. Wittgenstein's hinges are not beyond dispute: are they truly immune to doubt, or are they merely seldom doubted? And can they shift, can what stood firm yesterday begin to wobble today? Moreover, "you inevitably lean on a few certainties" does not tell you which ones to hold fixed. The insight exposes total doubt as impossible, but it hands you no ready-made list of what to trust. That work remains yours. The only thing it takes from you is the comfortable misunderstanding that you stand above trust. You do not. You stand in the middle of it, the only question is whether you dare to look at what.

A moment to take with you: name the one hinge you never doubt. And is it one that lets itself be checked, or one you simply find agreeable?