Question Everything
“Ana Montes wasn’t a master spy. She didn’t need to be. In a world in which our lie detector is set to the off position, a spy is always going to have an easy time of it.”—Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know (2019)
A few years ago I was asked to buy a t-shirt. It was part of a fundraiser for a local philosophy department’s student association. The slogan blazoned across the chest read: QUESTION EVERYTHING. It made me smile, the way that cheesy Hallmark cards often make me smile.
We simply don’t have the time or energy to question everything. We all rely upon people and things we don’t understand. We trust the people on the highway not to veer into oncoming traffic. We trust that the food we’re eating isn’t poisoned. We trust that the people we leave our children with aren’t going to hurt them. We trust that the money we use has real value. We trust that the people who say they love us actually love us, despite the fact that we can never really be sure. We can never really know another person’s heart, not with certainty. And so on and so forth. We are swimming in a sea of trust each and every day.
People who’ve had their faith in the world profoundly shaken by a psychotic break, a horrible accident, or a devastating betrayal—people who actually question everything—are broken, profoundly dysfunctional shells of their former selves. At Projet PAL in Verdun, I worked with people who were recovering from severe mental health problems. What’s hardest for many of these people is that they feel like they can no longer trust their own senses. They’re tormented by questions such as: Am I really talking to you? Are you really real? Is this really how I feel? Can I trust my feelings?
The same is true of those who’ve lived through a devastating betrayal. We’ve all known people who’ve been cheated on and habitually lied to. But imagine what it must be like to be Paula Rader, the woman who discovered that the man she was married to for 34 years, Dennis Rader, the father of her children, was the notorious serial killer known as the BTK killer. She thought her husband was a good man. They went to Christ Lutheran every Sunday morning. He was even elected president of the church council.
How hard it must be for Paula Rader to trust people now. How hard it must be for her to trust her own judgment. She must be tormented by questions such as: How could I have been so stupid? So blind? Hard as it must be, the Paula Raders of this world won’t be able to resume anything like a normal life until they begin to trust again, until they learn how to have faith again. Because faith isn’t a choice. It’s a necessity.
