In a recent episode of Joe Rogan, the actor Terrence Howard was the invited guest. The three-hour-long interview soon made its rounds on the internet in a flurry of reposts, memes, reaction videos, and satires. It became so viral that many people were revisiting old clips of Terrence Howard from years ago, and going down a Terrence Howard rabbit hole. I watched as much of it as I could.
Throughout the interview, Terrence focuses not so much on his acting career but overwhelmingly dazzles the audience with some interesting word plays with scientific jargon. He seems to dart effortlessly from one scientific theorem or concept to the next, with little contextualization, no throat clearing, no connective tissue to reality.
The actor is lucid, sober, and fairly articulate. However, the substance of what he says is diarrhea of the mouth, word salad, etc. Joe on the other hand speaks very little, other than to nudge the conversation along, asking Terrence to confirm a point or two.
I cannot speak to what Joe Rogan was thinking during the interview. He seemed to do the best he could. He was either being hospitable to his guest or was genuinely engaged in a topic he knew little about. Whatever the case, it is clear that Terrence Howard’s rants were unintelligible, and the man perhaps needs help.
But Joe Rogan sat by—finding, or feigning some amount of interest. Terrence posits himself as an intellectual rebel—that the likes of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Oxford College had shut him out and down. That he was a maverick type. He could see, in a sense, what others could not. Terrence, after all, believes that 1 x 1 should really, actually, equal two.
And one might see where Joe Rogan would find this idea, this attitude, appealing. Joe Rogan himself is a bit of an intellectual rebel, willing to go into uncharted waters in conversation and even entertain, at least temporarily, some very out-there ideas. Is it possible that Joe Rogan empathizes so much with any out-of-the-mainstream idea that even the most inane, ludicrous ideas are given credence, simply because they come from the fringe? Is this skepticism for thee and not for me? Can we become so entranced by fringe ideas that nothing can ever be as it seems?
Skeptics are everywhere—and they should be. We need dissenting voices, to hear and articulate unpopular questions. We need to question the institutions that govern our way of life. We should not afford ourselves the luxury of assuming we are always being told the truth—we are not always being told the truth.
But are we always being lied to? To what extent do we take our conspiracy? To what degree is everything a Psyop? Where do we draw the line between skepticism and paranoia?
Believing every common narrative certainly has its pitfalls—we have seen this over and over. In a big way, covid skeptics were right about much. The efficacy of masks, the efficacy of the vaccines, etc. The lab leak theory that has now become a more dominant narrative. These check marks end up in the victory category for the COVID skeptic. The folks who took the word of our betters could certainly be accused of being lazy. That is—lazy thinkers. NPC’s. Sheeple, etc.
However, we ought to be careful as well. We should also be skeptical of our skepticism. Skepticism can be good for its own sake, but not every conclusion is accurate simply because the mainstream disagrees.
In this realm, the realm of the intellectual rebel, no mainstream, common-sense approach to any conclusion is likely to suffice. Conspiracies abound, psyops are commonplace, nobody is to be trusted. This, too, has its own roots in a kind of appeal, a kind of laziness, if I may.
There exists, in some ways, an excitement to knowing the deeper truths that are out there. To know, for damn sure, that the government was in on it, or that buildings just don’t fall that way.
This makes many conspiracy theories exciting and attractive. It is to say, “You won’t pull the wool over my eyes!”. And this attitude makes sense, in some cases.
With the prevalence of A.I., an influx of constant streaming information from the web, a litany of opinions, and authoritarian impulses on a global scale, we are heading into murky waters. The Information Age, indeed. Not the Informed Age, suggesting we are a more educated public, but the Information Age, suggesting that information is our new currency, our new toy, and even our new weapon.
There was a time when photography and video could be easily discerned as fake. Early CGI and special effects simply could not hold up to a simple naked-eye test. Nowadays, however, the technology has increased; making a distinction between what is real and what is not is evermore challenging.
In the world of conspiracy theories, the conspiracy has an interesting advantage—it takes only just one theory to be proven correct every few decades to keep afloat many, many more. There is a “broken clock is right at least twice a day” type dynamic that plays out. And as we have seen, there are conspiratorial claims that unearthed their truth—like the tobacco companies hiding the addictiveness of their products, for instance. Many false conspiracy theories stand on the backs of one or two true ones.
Like Alex Jones’s famed debacle involving The Sandy Hook school shooting. Or the Pizzagate man who showed up at a restaurant armed with a weapon, looking to free children from the confines of their bottom basement—there were no children and there was no basement.
In an increasingly artificial and politicized world, we can naturally observe the tendency to believe what you want to believe. Based not on its likelihood, but on how it makes you feel. Because we are all trying to make sense of the world. We are all building our own world, too, bit by bit, piece by piece of information. With little truly reliable information, we can become suckers for a good story, attractive not by its likelihood, but by the (un)popularity of its plot.
However, nothing is always true and not everything is a lie. To not be skeptical of those who hold immense power over you with an investment in your interpretation is dangerous. To think you are always being told the truth is dangerous. But what is equally dangerous to believing everything, is believing in nothing. Many things are simply as they appear to be. Ockham’s Razor is still a sharp tool and is still worthy, and useful. We should remember to use it occasionally.
Judson Stacy Vereen is the author of American Pleasure, 62 Poems from Judson Vereen, and Like A Bird Knows To Sing. He is also a staff contributor to Wrong Speak, where he publishes a bi-monthly opinion column. His substack page Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
I grapple with this all the time. Certainly correct and right to be skeptical of skepticism. Someone recently wrote on X that it's critical to remember that everything you understand about the world is a mental construct of a presumed objective reality out there. Everything that we perceive or think passes through our perceptual filters, from basic sense organs with their inherent limitations, to the far greater complexity of our cognition. So, skepticism of skepticism is (sort of?) a subset of that larger acknowledgment of how the human animal works.
Trickier still is how we cooperate and compete with each other, both at the individual level and at larger group levels. We run cognition games (psyops); we attempt to trick each other; we attempt to be earnest and "real." There *is* such a thing as Power in the world. There *are* humans who leverage incredible amounts of status and access to further agendas. It's that phenomenon that births "conspiracy theory." I'm not sure I can blame people when their attempt to perceive what's "really going on" begins to come unmoored. It's a deeply challenging game.
The best answers I've been able to come up with (for now, at least) include test, test, test (skeptical of skepticism). Apply Popper's falsification theory by default (this is difficult to remember to do, especially consistently). Be on guard for the stories that make you feel good; look especially hard at those. Even as, confusingly, our gut-instinct can often be our best guide. As much as possible, locate yourself in the "local"--stick with what is present in your immediately accessible, concrete, and material world. The further out we get from that, the wobblier the whole edifice becomes.
And we talk to each other, and test, through forums like this one! Thanks for the great post.
"We can naturally observe the tendency to believe what you want to believe. Based not on its likelihood, but on how it makes you feel." The covid conspiracists are the ones who put their claws into the ridiculous bat-in-a-wet-market theory. It seemed to make them feel better to tell themselves the government wouldn't lie about this stuff and research labs are perfectly secure. But the bigger problem is this belief led to people being willing to jail those who didn't go along, not far off from the man who showed up to the pizza parlor with a gun.