I posted this five months ago,
Albert Schweitzer maintained that skepticism in one's own ability to reach conclusions is the bane of our age. From "Out of My Life and Thought" he says, "The organized political social, and religious associations of our time are at work convincing the individual not to develop his own convictions through his own thinking but to assimilate the ideas they present to him. Any man who thinks for himself is to them inconvenient and even ominous.
...Corporate bodies....try to achieve the greatest possible uniformity....
Man today is exposed throughout his life to influences that try to rob him of all confidence in his own thinking....
The spirit of the age never lets him find himself...
...man of today is forced in to skepticism about his own thinking, so that he may become receptive to what he receives from authority. He cannot resist this influence because he is overwored, distracted, and incapable of concentrating....moern man no longer has any confidence in himself. Behind a self-assured exterior he conceals an inner lack of confidence. In spite of his great technogical achievements and material possessions, he is an altogether stunted being because he makes no use of his capacity for thinking....To renounce thinking is to declare mental bankruptcy....
To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon redards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit. Our very attempt to manipulate truth itself brings us to the brink of disaster."
Schweitzer goes on to say that once institutions let the skepticism genie out of the bottle, first convincing society that it cannot govern itself, that skepticism runs rampant, and people have no faith in the institutions who purport to serve them.
I would say that Schweitzer was prophetic on this point.
