Doubt

Syed Mesum Ali

“I doubt everything I read, everything people say and everything I think. That is how I learn.” – Syed Mesum Ali

Carl Jung mentioned in his writing that doubt is living; truth is sometimes death and stagnation. It is strange that doubt is linked to living when we all are completely aware that doubts keep us in a continuous cycle of inner-debate. We all know our proclivity towards categorical thinking. As soon as we encounter something anomalous, we tend to box it right way because to doubt requires rigorous thinking. Your first thought might be, we live in a collectivist culture that’s aided by our religious values. Moreover, our lives are entangled in our extended family system that nourishes our health and provides us with psychological security. The most obvious and convenient response is to regard such pre-existing axioms as truth. Moreover, doubt can also be regarded as a waste of time and energy when everything is already provided. The question is, why is doubt regarded as a spark that can ignite something of value in you? Why do we have this urge to sneak into the unknown? Answers to such questions are not simple.

When I wrote this particular aphorism, I was completely aware of the insufficiency of our culture. Our culture feeds on the individual to keep itself intact. Culture demands order and it is obtained on the expense of the individual. The culture of our country fears newness while we know that the most fundamental law of nature is change. I don’t want you to look at culture in the light of sociology rather, how it meddles with the individual. The nature of our culture has become the nature of our individual now. Sigmund Freud coined a term of “Psychological Death” and wrote further that the repetition-compulsion to follow early patterns of interpersonal evaluation and relatedness and the inability to learn to replace them by new patterns, deprives a person of the freedom to live and move about in the world of psychological reality. We need to understand that our culture is facing a psychological death and that the individual is embedded in the culture. The young generation in particular, needs this self-realization to bring forth their potentials. Self-realization is not to abort what is being provided to us in the form of culture because we all know that humans are not capable of inventing a whole conduct for society. By self-realization, I mean, every individual must confront himself with the reality of nature- that is mysterious. How can one expose himself to the mystery life? The simple answer to this question is “Doubt”.

Doubt is not as simple as questioning. Uncertainty is the hallmark of individuality. Imagine yourself sitting in a dark room after a long hectic day and suddenly a question pops up in your head, “Why do I exist?” and after a short silence you tell yourself, “ I don’t know”. Such disagreements with one’s own being give birth to what I call ‘individuality’. Similarly, when someone disagrees with a thought or an idea presented in a book, that particular person is inviting ‘anxiety’ into his being. Let me ask you- who could possibly want to feel anxious when acceptance is an easy way out? A person who voluntarily exposes himself to the complexity of existence has understood the concept of centrality. Humans do not realize their potential unless they have a certain amount of moral courage. The acceptance of unsureness that is intrinsic to human life is being truthful to oneself. Now, if someone asks me about the alternative to doubt, my answer will be self-deception and stagnation. Self-deception can take many forms. It is equivalent to believing in one’s own lies, like holding the pre-existing axioms of culture as the ultimate truth. Moreover, such self-deception can take the form of projections onto others in a way that if someone doesn’t agree with any of the values they hold as the truth, they simply regard them as enemies. A person who lives such a self-indulgent life is no different from the child who resists giving up his childhood for adolescence. It is a manifestation of what Carl Jung called as our unconscious wish to remain a child. Human psychological sacrifice as mentioned in the case of doubt is anxiety that comes along with it. The next simple question I personally encountered was, What is the result of such unsureness? It took me a while to figure this out, but eventually, I got there. The answer was ‘learning’.  The state of unsureness triggered my psychological instinct -curiosity. I followed every idea I countered, I chased them down the streets of my mind, I juggled them around while sitting in my bed. The most beautiful thing about learning is it keeps you ahead of time. You have been solving the psychological hurdles you have not encountered yet. You encounter a problem you think about and form a conceptual framework of the idea. What is the most important thing when you build a new house? It’s the base on which the house will stand. The process of learning aided by thinking and sparked by the doubt in the first place makes you form grounds for complex problems. It is a chain reaction that cannot stop because the goal is not certainty but learning. Learning is forever. The triumph of thinking is not certainty about few things in life. It is about moving forward. Moreover, psychologically. the combination of doubt, thinking and learning is very helpful. For example, we have this idea of mass level conspiracies in our country. You will meet people who will tell you that each and every country is conspiring against our country. It is the most narcissistic proposition I have ever heard. Let us put in the framework of doubt, thinking and learning. You doubt the particular idea because there is no clear evidence to such a fearful statement. Such doubts will make you think on the matter for a long time. You will think upon questions such as, why would every country conspire against us? What is so valuable about my country? After listening to your thoughts, you actually learn something new. What you learn invariably depends upon the time and energy you spent on a particular idea, but at the end of the day, at least you had the courage to confront the problem rather than adopting an irrational fear.