Trust nothing so you can trust yourself.
On Rene Descartes and The Glass Castle
We live in a world of opt-out. You get automatically subscribed to a newsfeed you didn’t ask for. Telemarketers spam you with calls and voicemails. When you sign up for an account, one of the boxes you check allows your data to be collected. Our default setting is “on”, which pretty much removes any individualistic tendencies we have.
(It can also verge on creepy. We’ve all experienced talking about X product then seeing an advertisement for it scrolling through Instagram the next day.)
Most people don’t take the extra step to opt out, subjecting themselves to an endless stream of news and ads they didn’t ask for, all while their data is collected. What ends up happening with your hyper-curated and personalized feeds is your conformity to the content you’re consuming. After all, you are what you eat.
The world of opt-out makes it difficult to think for yourself. Your thoughts are no longer your own. And this is the ultimate trap. You’re stuck in the matrix. Get out.
So yes, opt out where you can. Unfollow. Unsubscribe. Seek your own truth. But how?
Descartes’ Method of Rigorous Doubt
We can get a little inspiration from French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596–1650). At his time, two schools of thought dominated how we discover truth: empiricism, finding truth through sensory experiences, and rationalism, finding truth through reason. Descartes, a rationalist, needed to face a growing number of skeptics who were suspicious that either could yield the truth. So, he one-upped them. Descartes out-skepticked the skeptics.
He started to doubt everything. He figured the only way to be certain was to begin with the assumption that nothing was certain. He figured by questioning everything, fundamental, universal truths would emerge from a sea of doubt. For the most part, he was overwhelmingly wrong.
First, he doubted our senses. Makes sense. I hear my mom calling me downstairs when really she hasn’t said anything at all. I see a friend at the grocery store, begin to approach, and realize they’re actually a stranger. I ask where my phone is when it’s in my hand. So our senses fail us. That’s the basis for the empiricist-rationalist split. Which is why Descartes took it step further.
He doubted every sensory experience until he questioned reality itself. He doubted that his waking life was real at all, and that there was no reason it couldn’t just be a dream.
And he didn’t stop there. Maybe we’re not just passively dreaming up our lives. Instead, a demon is constantly at work to deceive you with thoughts that aren’t your own. Descartes meant this quite literally, but indoctrination has been present for all of history and continues today via religion, standardized education, and the Internet.
Descartes came to doubt everything, even on the most radical level, and found most everything fail his scrutiny.
So it’s surprising he found something he couldn’t doubt, something that could actually be considered truth.
Queue notorious quote whose meaning you didn’t really know until now:
I think, therefore I am.
Descartes was finding every premise he contemplated was false. His head was filled with thoughts concerning the nature of reality and its fallacy. To him, the fact that he was thinking, even if those thoughts were based on deceit, was proof enough for his existence.
Not sold? I wasn’t either.
Do you exist? Yes, but also, no.
How can you tell anyway?
For starters, you have a mind and you have a body. Descartes noted that these two things were distinct. But only your mind determines your existence. Your body and its actions, even if observed, could just be something conjured up.
Buuut, we put a lot of faith into the existence of our body. Our thinking minds will our body to feed itself, our legs to take us to the table, our hands to coordinate the fork into our mouth. We wouldn’t do that if we didn’t believe our body exists. If our bodies were an illusion, we still largely accept it as truth—our version of the truth.
Under this assumption, truth is highly subjective. Reading The Glass Castle shed some light on what happens when you reject “objective” truth. The memoir details Jeannette Wall’s journey from homelessness and family delusion to independence and financial stability. Since Walls retells her life from when she was as young as the age of 3, her story likely took some literary agency despite being based on true events. Memory—which we can consider as a collection of imperfect recordings of our imperfect senses—is a testament to the fact that we can be truthful without being accurate.
As Walls grew up, her parents believed themselves superior from conventional medical practices, the advice of their children’s teachers, and government aid. They doubted modern medicine, the education system, and public support and concluded that this allowed their family to build biological resistance and psychological immunity. Ultimately, they viewed their homelessness not as the absence of safety but as independence from societal malady. Their version of the reality of homelessness was the benefit of living an adventure, as Walls recalls several times her father “busted her out” of the hospital or her mother uprooted them from school for her own teaching.
The unconventional upbringing that Walls experienced was based on her parents’ subscription to a truth different from the truth more widely accepted by society. To many of us, ignoring medical advice, public education, and government assistance is wrong, but for Jeanette Walls, it was the reality of her childhood, something she saw persist until her father’s death and through her mother’s continued choice to stay homeless. The Glass Castle reveals that beyond our physical body, societal standards largely dictate our beliefs.
Rex Walls, Jeannette’s father, was steadfast in his rejection of society, on an almost transcendentalist level. If you’re unfamiliar with the philosophies of Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalism was a movement characterized by self-reliance, intuition, and the belief that society corrupts the purity of individualism. While transcendentalism (popularized by Descartes’ adversary Immanuel Kant) sharply diverges from Descartes’ rationalism, a common ground between the two can be found in the focus on the individual. At the end of the day, both philosophies point toward coming to conclusions independently.
The conclusion Rex Walls came to was to make his life mission to find gold and build his family a glass castle to finally settle down in. He never accomplished this, and his expressed desire to do this seemed largely an excuse for his unemployment and inability to provide his family with a permanent home.
This made me question the extent to which we control our own beliefs. You can’t will yourself to believe you have a larger income than you do, spending freely and avoiding bills—at least not without consequences. Money itself is a human construct whose influence you can remove yourself from if you reject society altogether. This seemed to be Rex Walls’ general belief. In this case, it’s difficult to tell whether his idea of the glass castle was a delusion or simply his own version of reality.
I think the glass castle represented hope more than it did a home for the Walls family. Under society’s reality, Rex knew his dream of the glass castle was ultimately unattainable, so instead he constantly referred back to it to keep the hopes of his children intact, and, when they eventually outgrew his delusions, his own hopes.
Through doubt of the existence of a glass castle, Walls learned to reject the reality of her parents and instead conform to society. In this case, conformity isn’t negative since it allowed Walls to live a better life than her parents set her up for. Most importantly, she came to this conclusion based on her own critical thinking and evaluation of her living situation. Where she chose higher education as a path to financial stability, her parents continued to choose homelessness. Through both, we find that belief is a choice.
In short, it doesn’t matter if you exist or not. Reality as you know it is the only thing that matters. An illusive reality is still your reality if you continually choose to play by its rules.
Now perhaps a look into The Glass Castle wasn’t exactly the clearest way to draw conclusions of reality and existence. We can circle back to Descartes for some answers.
Clarity: Objective vs formal reality
The subjectivity of belief can blur the distinction between reality and illusion. If you believe something exists, the truth of its existence should be valid, right? To answer this, Descartes had to classify different levels of reality.
First, there was formal reality, or existence indisputable by anyone. The glass castle, contrary to what Rex Walls thought, doesn’t exist in formal reality. A higher power, an all-knowing and all-powerful God, has infinite formal reality according to Descartes. Things whose existence is derived from our senses, like the clothes we wear or the house we live in, have a finite amount of formal reality. The modern medicine and public education system, which Rex Walls didn’t believe in, also hold a finite amount of formal reality. Surely, they exist, but in an amount limited by our senses and our ability to interpret them. Lastly, there’s modal reality, things that exist under certain conditions. An alternate universe, for example, would have modal reality. Similarly, Rex Wall’s desired world independent of society and its constructs would have modal reality. It could exist, but doesn’t.
Secondly, there’s objective reality, which describes how well something is able to represent truth. Essentially, these are realities that exist only in our heads: ideas. An idea is not any less real than the object it represents, especially since it comes from our mind, the only thing that confirms our own existence.
The varying levels of reality we are exposed to on a daily basis could very well paralyze us into immobility if we sought to evaluate every one. This isn’t practical, so what we can do when faced with contrasting viewpoints and belief systems is to first, doubt.
Doubt it Like Descartes
I began this post encouraging you to opt out of any feeds you don’t actually want to follow. This might apply exclusively to social media feeds or email lists, but it can also apply more generally to believing what your parents believe or agreeing with your school’s method of teaching if you’re a kid like me. You’re doing yourself a disservice by not opting out of any of these perpetuators of group think, echo chambers, and filter bubbles.
Descartes doubted everything, so should you unfollow everyone on Twitter? Maybe. The key in all this is not to disbelieve everything. If you believe in nothing, there’s also no point. Getting to zero belief is just a stepping stone—edit: a springboard—you can stop at before figuring out where you actually want to go. If you do unfollow everyone, refollow those people who do bring you value. Find feeds that intrigue you, and vet them to see if you agree with them. The goal (another bad soccer pun haha) is to customize your experience, not just on an app, but in life. And you can only do it through continued, mindful evaluation, through thinking.
You can only be if you think.
“I think, therefore I am.”
At first, trust nothing. Then, seek out that which you do trust. Slowly incorporate and accumulate values and virtues that reflect your inner thinking. Only then can you trust yourself, can you be comfortable with your being. Think for yourself. Your existence awaits.
“What is it, then — faith versus truth? And realizing that part of her zeal to believe was her fear to know, she set out to learn the truth, with a cleaner, calmer sense of rightness than the effort as dutiful self-fraud had ever given her.”
Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged
Thanks for reading :) If you enjoyed this article or any of my other work, leave me some claps and feedback. Follow me here on Medium for more posts on philosophy, as well as writings about emerging tech and innovations like artificial intelligence and the future of space.
If you’re interested in accompanying me on my journey with emerging tech, connect with me via LinkedIn or email and subscribe to my monthly newsletter!
