Too skeptical to disbelieve

A couple years ago, I was sharing how transformative the Conversations With GodI mean, you know, with a name like that, you just gotta read the damn book. Either you're about to get your ass enlightened or you'll be treated to the top-notch entertainment of witnessing the magnitude of the author's balls and how well and long he'll manage to upkeep the scam. That's a win-win if there ever was one. trilogy by Neale Donald WalschWell ...and God, presumably, or at least allegedly. had been in my life with a fellow overthinker. During the course of discussing them, the latter informed me that, as it happens, he had read it too (at least the first book if memory serves me right). Having said that, "he didn't believe it because [he] was too skeptical." Something about that sentence didn't sit quite right with me. My schizoid crackpot sense was tingling.

So I did what any other well-adjusted individual would have done and kept quiet on the moment, but proceeded to mull it over petulantly, and came up with a peeved alternate perspective as a comeback which I scribbled in my PKM system. I'd mostly forgotten the whole thing until now, about two dozen moons later, when I decided to publish this pontificated version, 'cuz it seemed à propos if you'll pardon my French.

See the thing is I've got a fearful avoidant attachment style, bundled with a long-in-the-tooth hypersensitivity about being misunderstood or mischaracterized, and to top it off I'm an INTPAnd yes, the other guy was an INTJ. The best way I've found to spot them in the wild so far is when despite a 90% agreement with someone, we still end up spending 90% of our time bickering on every other sentence uttered. (well it's probably all correlated to start with). If you have no idea what all these fancy gibberish words mean, basically I'm more on edge than an antsy battle-scarred drug detection dog when it comes to sniffing out the potential underlying ramifications and implications of any simple surface statement. At the first whiff of mental trojan I spit back the whole thing outright at epistemic daggers drawn. I may have no patience for bureaucratic red tape, but I'll enthusiastically get lost in endless framing fuss-pottery. Ask me any basic yet non-trivial yes/no question and I might be able to churn you out a halfway decent answer if you give me about three hours to square out definitions💡Got a bad habit of getting sidetracked in loosely related rabbit holes too. and elaborate on all the background concepts we're gonna be needing.

So let's unravel today's hair-splitting galore.

Had he said "I was too skeptical about the whole thing to believe in any of it" that'd've been different. That'd've been fine.

There's a difference between being skeptical about something and being skeptical full stop. Some of the former depends on personal proclivities as well as the times' zeitgeist. Like most people nowadays, I'm not all that sold that Zeus is dicking around in the flesh on Mount Olympus, preparing his next convoluted scheme to get laid that'll ruin the life of some poor woman and her close ones, for the sole crime of being too alluring for her own good. Regardless, literally every single human being is skeptical about at least a couple of things. Even the most gullible chump out there's got a few bog-standard limits.

Would you play ball in your heart of hearts if a coworker tells you they outrun Usain Bolt in a casual 100-meter race last weekend? Or that they can personally lay golden eggs and all they require to prove it would be for you to grant them this one opportunity to showcase this secret talent of theirs by following them in the janitor's closet? Do you think most people would? And yet, you've got the same people—who'd slowly start backing off and stealthily dial the HR department—believing all kinds of other crazy whacky shit.

They believe:

that they'll find personal purpose and fulfillment if they just follow the education-job-family-retirement pipeline without asking any questions like a good little trooper;
that if they keep trailing their crush with the energy of a sad subservient pup, their natural sex appeal will suddenly undergo a complete 180;
that if they keep having the exact same conflict with the exact same person, they'll finally reach a breakthrough on the 396th go-around for some reason;
that if they guilt-trip and shame themselves and their peers just hard enough, they'll finally manage to do this thing they never could muster up to now;
that "good" things happen to "good" people;
that this clusterfuck of a universe was somehow created by a sensible and benevolent GodOops, that's me (ᵕ—ᴗ—). Guilty as charged...;
that most parents have got the faintest clue on how to responsibly raise their kids;
that Guilty Crown is a good anime;
that the one specific location they were raised in and from which they inherited a substantial share of their biases is self-evidently the pinnacle of human civilization;
that the only thing keeping us from reaching utopia is the existence of governmental regulations on the free market;
that the only thing keeping us from reaching utopia is withholding the means of production from under the all-encompassing supervision of the state;
that they know what's true and right with enough certainty to impose it on everyone else—by force if necessary;
...

The list goes on and on.

Now being skeptical full stop on the other hand, that's a completely different pair of shoes. It's a personality trait. A recurrent pattern of behavior. A way of life. For some, a philosophical stance. For others, a committed methodical practice. Sometimes both.

Thus, if one is so skeptical full stop that it prevents them from believing specific claims independently of their own volition, it seems to indicate that humans can be spread out on a single scale ranging from mellow naivety to hardcore skepticism. Whether you'll fall prey to bullshit depends on your skepticism level and the treachery level of the claim, like some kind of epistemic JRPG. If you're a level 42 skeptic, you'll easily slay a level 34 "new age minerals" fishy belief with the Mithril Hitchen's razor you looted from the last map's televangelist boss, but get helplessly indoctrinated by its level 69 "unhinged political ideology" drinking buddy.

Under this framing, we can easily understand the divergence in my aforementioned interlocutor and yours truly's reactions to said book. My skepticism score was just too damn low. Tough luck being a rational scrub. I wasn't tall enough to ride on the big boys' epistemic roller coaster. Had it been over 9000, like an actual OG™, I'd have reached the Pearly Gates of wisdom and seen the truth of the matter in this instance, namely disbelief or at the very least stern circumspect agnosticism.

But does it really work like that? I'm not sure it's so simple, that it can truly be reduced to a one dimension scale. Like many other things in life, it's probably more of a battlefield of different preferences, fears, temperamental biases, defining moments, and social allegiancesJust to be clear, I think my conversational partner of the time would most likely assent with this second framing over the first (and probably add a fresh and thick layer of nuancing squabbles of their own). I'd be loath to besmirch their views, irrespective of anonymity. Still, I've sensed the general assumption carried by the first framing lurking under the surface of otherwise fairly thoughtful individuals' discourse, and thought I'd use this opportunity to bring attention to this item of my well-endowed pet peeve collection..

On my end, I have a very hard time having strong convictions and I incessantly second-guess and question them, yet I do harbor a couple "unskeptical" beliefs clandestinely in my philosophical attic. Perhaps the fact that I have a hard time believing, in general, is what motivates me to trust easily, because the constant uncertainty pushes me to desire having beliefs, in a quixotic quest for some modicum of comforting foothold.

Therefore, in a way, you could say that I believe because I'm too skeptical.