The red pill or the blue pill?
Those are your options. One puts everything back the way it was before you followed the rabbit into the wilderness. You “wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” The other takes you deeper into the hole but you don’t get to preview what’s down there before you choose.
Up until this moment you’ve felt fairly assured you knew how your world worked. You’re starting to think perhaps there’s more to know. Curiosity whispers an incantation to pursue the rabbit. Ask any cat and they’ll tell you Curiosity isn’t to be trusted. They’ve never actually seen it for themselves but they all “know a guy who did…” Curiosity isn’t even the one to worry about. Her amigo Doubt is the real threat and where Curiosity goes Doubt is within her shadow.
But, there’s two pills, remember? The other sends you back to Kansas where you’ll be with those who love you best. They’ve left a bowl of soup on the table in your bedroom for when you wake up. And when you do it will still be hot. It’s your favorite du jour, too, Certainty. Every time you slurp it down you become 4 years old again for that brief moment. That’s when things were perfect, remember?
One pill opens your eyes but you might not like what you see and once you do it can’t be unseen. The other reminds you that everything’s just fine even if everything is very much not fine but you won’t know the difference so I guess that makes everything fine for you.
So which do you choose?
The possibilities of Curiosity?
Or the comfort of Certainty?
You can’t have both. Doubt comes with Curiosity. You’re curious because you doubt. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be curious to explore what lies beyond your belief. But Doubt takes more energy, more stamina and is uncomfortable. Comfort comes with Certainty. Whether or not your correct isn’t the point. How certain you are that you are correct is. The more certain you are the more comfort you find in that Certainty. But Certainty also bears a price tag, the potential for deception. You often think you’re pursuing the truth but in fact you are not interested in the truth. You are interested in being certain that what you define as the truth is the truth. If the truth is your aim then Doubt is your pill. A hypothesis is not tested by only looking at supporting evidence to build certainty. It’s proven, or given room to roam, by a failure to disprove it. In the words of Voltaire, “Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers.” This requires an honest doubt, no? A genuine curiosity. And sometimes the “doubt” actually shines the winding way to sharper vision. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so. Likewise, doubting doesn’t necessarily cast the truth into jeopardy.
A comforting certainty may be what we prefer today. But it shall not liberate us tomorrow.
So what’s it going to be?
The red pill or the blue pill?
Photo credit : Flickr
