Skeptical of Skepticism

Can I trust my skepticism?

It's a question I've been asking myself lately because of UFOs.

They aren't called UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) these days. They're called UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). Perhaps the name was changed to distance the subject from the "flying saucer" imagery that dominated popular culture since the late 1940s.

One thing is certain: the phenomenon is being taken more seriously than it once was. There have been televised Congressional hearings in the United States, along with the ongoing release of government materials and testimony from military personnel.

For most of my life, I've regarded UFOs as a subcategory of Cold War kitsch. Even if the phenomenon is entirely fictional, it remains worthy of interest. Like any enduring cultural artifact, it tells us something about who we are and what preoccupies us. It is, in its own way, another form of storytelling.

That's why I'm a sucker for eyewitness accounts, which forms the vast majority of 'evidence'. I've tried to avoid the more sensational material, but I've read a number of books by reporters who strike me as credible. I've watched fighter pilots testify before Congress about encounters they cannot explain, and followed the release of government videos with genuine interest.

Even more tantalizing is the archival material, much of which is now easily accessible online. Yes, there is an enormous amount of garbage out there. But if you know where to look, some of what you find is remarkably compelling, particularly the older eyewitness reports, interview recordings and photographs, before the existence of iPhone filters.

What becomes difficult to dismiss is the sheer volume of accounts. Thousands upon thousands of documented reports spanning decades, continents, cultures, and social classes. The witnesses include fighter pilots and police officers, scientists and teachers, farmers and businesspeople, children and grandparents. They come from every conceivable background. 

Even if one were to presume that the vast majority of the reports are hoaxes, the remaining percentage would constitute a very large number of encounters. 

Some cases, in particular, resist easy explanation. The most persuasive to me involve multiple sources of corroboration, large groups of people observing the same phenomenon. And of those (there are many dozens) some are especially compelling because they involve children who report having the same experience. One such event happened at Westall School in Melbourne, Australia, in 1966 in which there were reportedly as many as 300 first-hand eye witnesses. Another more recent event took place at Ariel School near Harare, Zimbabwe in 1994, where 62 children aged 6-12 described a remarkably similar encounter with a craft and unusual beings.

At what point does the cumulative weight of evidence begin to outweigh lingering doubt? When the tables turn, and it's the skeptics who start looking like the ones pulling at loose threads to preserve a conclusion. That's when skepticism begins to resemble a belief system rather than a method of inquiry.

We live in a strangely incongruous time. We are surrounded by technologies that would have seemed like magic only a generation ago. Smartphones, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles—each would once have belonged to the realm of science fiction. Reality seems to be melding with the imagination.

At the same time, this is an era of manipulation and deception, where images can be fabricated and videos altered convincingly with your personal device, making trust ever more difficult. Even believing your own eyes comes into question.

The obvious recent example is how the assault on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, became questioned, despite millions (perhaps billions) of witnesses on TV, countless hours of video footage, and extensive testimony and documentation.

It seems that today, more than at any other time, if an alien spacecraft landed in the middle of Central Park, was witnessed by thousands of people and filmed from every angle, most people would refuse to believe it. More likely they would find reason to call it a hoax and dismiss it as some kind of conspiracy. 

Check out the dark satire Don't Look Up. It's a film about a comet on a collision course with Earth and how easily we are manipulated and lulled into a state of collective denial.  

But human beings are fundamentally believing creatures. The battle is always over what we believe and, as Orwell documented, who controls that belief. 

Belief makes ordinary life livable. Every morning you head out to the driveway because you believe your car will start. Or you wait for the metro or the bus because you believe it will arrive. You believe you'll arrive at work safely. You make plans for next week, next month, and next year based on belief.

None of these things is certain, it's solely based on past experience. Plus, verifiable facts take us only so far. Beyond them lies a vast territory of assumptions, expectations, probabilities, and trust.

Even deeper, the aspects of life that give existence meaning—creativity, invention, ambition, hope—are all rooted, to some degree, in belief. We make decisions based on assumptions we believe to be true and commit ourselves to futures that do not yet exist.

Which is why I've started becoming skeptical of my skepticism. After all, skepticism relies on a set of beliefs too.

Not in UFOs, ghosts, or miracles, but belief in the reliability of certain methods for knowing anything at all. Belief that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Belief that human perception is flawed. Belief that simpler explanations are usually preferable to more complicated ones.

These are reasonable assumptions. They are probably indispensable assumptions. But they are assumptions nonetheless.

At some point, every worldview rests upon foundations that cannot themselves be proven, even skepticism.

I'm not ready to entirely abandon my skepticism. Just a little more prepared to be open to possibility.   

George

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George is the man who mops my floor,

He comes every day at half past four,

Greek with a thick mustache, speaks broken French,

Arrived here after serving as a driver in the war.

Every day I ask George if he’s doing well,

Most days he mutters "The world’s going to hell,"

Then adds, "What choice is there, we have to soldier on,

If you only knew half the stories I could tell."

George was part of this building’s construction crew,

Poured concrete and swept the floors in ‘62,

The owner liked him, said "Start a cleaning company, 

And I’ll give all of my business to you."

George’s company employed 300 at its peak,

Today he's rich as an Arabian sheik,

Turned eighty last Thursday, never said a word,

Came to mop my floor as he does every week.

"The Blacks have no respect, the Asians and Indians too,

I clean up after them like I’m paid to do."

Georges says he's not racist, just telling the truth,

Then smiles and says he owes everything he has to that one old Jew. 

Self-Worth

When I was growing up there was a lot of talk about self-worth, or self-esteem. It was the pop-psychological buzzword of the 1970s. Books were written on how to raise children with a healthy sense of self-worth because low self-worth was thought to be the root of almost every problem. Violent criminals had low self-worth. Moral degenerates had low self-worth. Losers had low self-worth. Self-worth seemed to explain everything.

It was defined as the feeling that you had value. Parents were told they had to make their children feel wanted and cherished so they would grow up believing they were valuable. Conversely, emotional neglect was said to lead inevitably to a lifetime of pain and unhappiness.

My parents were very preoccupied by this. At least my mother was. An avid reader of pop psychology, she seemed convinced that her own struggles stemmed from a lack of self-worth. Her parents had come of age during the Depression. Their priorities were making money and climbing the social ladder. They succeeded. My mother grew up with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, so material deprivation could hardly explain her unhappiness.

The discovery that her problems were rooted in low self-worth was a revelation. The emotional neglect, ignorance, and occasional cruelty of her parents suddenly became the obvious culprit.

I sometimes wonder if previous generations of the past blamed their parents for their personal shortcomings. I suspect that before the earned affluence of the postwar era, most families were too busy trying to put food on the table to spend much time analyzing their emotional wounds.

They didn't turn out so badly.

Which raises the question: is self-worth really a thing, or is it just another piece of pop-psychological mythology?

I think self-worth is largely a fiction. A convenient explanation that transformed unhappiness into grievance and gave people somewhere to hang the blame for lives that had not turned out as they hoped.

That is not to say that a structured and supportive family life is unimportant. Of course it matters. It is to a child what water, sunlight, and fertile soil are to a plant. But it is not destiny.

History is filled with people who emerged from deprivation, neglect, and dysfunction to accomplish remarkable things and live extremely fulfilling lives.

Worth works psychologically much as it does economically. You may believe something has value, but unless someone else is willing to pay for it, that value remains purely theoretical. There is no such thing as self-worth. Worth is actually determined by others.

And that's a good thing, because it means worth is not intrinsic—it is earned.

To have value, you must be useful. Productive. Capable of contributing something that others need, want or at least respect.

This is where family life matters. A supportive upbringing does not instill worth; it cultivates empowerment, independence, and resilience. A child who learns to navigate the world, solve problems, and recover from setbacks develops the capacity to become useful and productive. And from that, a sense of one's self-worth naturally follows.

One of the great lies modern parents have told their children is that they are perfect just as they are. And related to that is the idea that love means smothering their children with attention and affirmation.

The result is often not confidence but learned helplessness.

Children do not become strong because they are told they are valued. They become valued because they are taught how to become strong.

Beaufort

News today that Israeli forces have crossed the Litani River in southern Lebanon and recaptured the medieval Crusader castle called Beaufort. 

I say recaptured and not captured because it’s not the first time. The story of the last time Israel held Beaufort is fictionalized in the acclaimed 2005 novel of the same name (originally entitled in Hebrew ‘If There Is A Heaven') by Ron Leshem which later became a harrowing Academy Award nominated film.

I reviewed the novel for The Gazette, and also had the privilege of introducing Ron at a reading at the JPL.

If you haven’t read the novel, now may be a good time. Suffice to say, the story - which is essentially about the futility of war and the sacrifice of a generation - does not end well.

Spent

I have spent my life

       trying to make some money;

Not too much of it.

Your Biggest Fan

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I'm no mind reader,

But I might get something right.

Give me a hint,

Then let's go for a bite.

I barely know myself,

No matter what I do.

You can't really expect me, 

To have a clue about you.

Here's a little something,

I think you might like.

Try not to be insulted,

If it don't fit right.

Cause nothing's perfect honey,

Let's enjoy what we can.

Keep doing what you do, 

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

Yeah I'm your biggest fan.

It's getting hot in here,

And the music's getting loud.

The opener did a good job,

Of winding up the crowd.

Left just enough for us,

To use our imaginations.

I'm counting on you baby, 

To help me finish what I'm making.

There'll be a bit of you, 

And a bit of my creation.

There'll bit of truth,

And a bit of fascination.

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

It's getting hot in here,

I'm your biggest fan.

Gonna cool you down baby,

Cause I'm your biggest fan.

Gonna cool you down baby...

Remote Work

I'm like some kind of contemporary superhero. Death-defying. Call me SuperJew. Impervious to termination.

Not in the crime fighting sense, which always made me wonder - why do all the classic superheroes, freaks of nature who possess inhuman powers, use them to fight crime? Why not just enjoy the everyday benefits? 

Here's what I mean.

Maybe you've heard this story. I read it in a novel, so don't give me credit. 

The setting is a concentration camp during WW2. Imagine Auschwitz. Gas chambers. Public gallows. Ovens with massive smokestacks.

A train arrives. A selektion on the ramp is made, and a man is sent left - straight to the 'showers'. He is stripped naked and along with women, children, and other men, herded into the gas chambers for immediate extermination. The Zyklon B pill is dropped in. 

Fifteen minutes later the doors are open and a Sonderkommando team gets to work dragging lifeless bodies out, loading them onto wagons and rolling them over to the ovens for incineration.

Lo and behold the aforementioned man, an utterly ordinary-looking man - he could be a regular bookkeeper, or a banker, or a journalist - walks out of the gas chamber as if he had been casually taking a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park.

This has never happened before. The growing pile of corpses proves the gas worked perfectly. The SS guards stand there in shock. 

Except for one who immediately grasps the gravity of the situation, and in fear of accusations of incompetence extracts his pistol from its black leather holster and fires a bullet from behind the prisoner directly into his skull at close range.

Nothing happens.

The man does not drop to the ground. He flinches, and then rubs the back of his head as if he had bumped it on the door frame.  

Panic sets in.

The man is grabbed by the arm and rushed off to the camp Commandant's office. 

The Commandant is told what happened. 

The Commandant does not hesitate. Being a skeptic, he slides the pistol out of his holster and fires a bullet into the chest of the Jew seated in front of him. The chair jumps, but otherwise the Jew seems to feel nothing. He yawns because it has been a long, exhausting day.    

After some interrogation, the Commandant learns that the newly-arrived prisoner was a well-known journalist before the war. He wrote for one of the popular daily newspapers. In fact, before the Commandant was a Nazi, he worked as structural engineer for a company that built bridges and was an avid reader of this Jewish journalist's stories. 

Now both men arrive at simultaneous realizations.

First, the journalist-Jew realized what was in store for him at this terrible place: An eternity of torture and suffering.

Second, the Commandant realized that this one Jew, who appeared to be impervious to death, will spoil the Führer's ultimate plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. He decides that the only thing to do is to keep this man a secret.   

The Commandant says to the journalist-Jew that he must stay and work in his home as a servant for the duration of the war. 

The journalist accepts but makes one request. He asks if every evening he may tell the Commandant a story. If the story pleases him, the Commandant will attempt to kill the storyteller. This is a no-brainer for the Commandant. He gets a delightful story and a chance to kill this SuperJew.  

I am the storyteller. The SuperJew. Okay, I'm exaggerating.  

It's not The Final Solution, and my eternal life of drudgery isn't exactly working in the home of a Nazi.  

But like the imprisoned journalist-Jew who wants to die but can't, I have a superpower that is both my salvation and my purgatory. 

I can't be terminated in an HR sense. As in become unemployed. Terminated from my current employment position; Vice-President Actuarial at the Insurance brokerage firm of Caine Fitzpatrick (hereinafter CF). At least until AI inevitably comes for my job. And trust me, I've tried. Over and over again.

It all started when I sold my family's insurance brokerage company. 

Rothstein & Sons Insurance was founded by my grandfather eighty years ago. My father eventually took over the firm, and after him, twenty years ago I took over.

I got my Actuary Degree, and worked hard to build-up the firm. I expanded our clientele fourfold over ten years, which naturally made us acquisition bait. Eventually the big fish swallow the small fish.

I was happy about it. Always thinking of my exit strategy. Cash in and enjoy the proceeds while I still had my health and could enjoy myself.

I'm 62. It's been two years now and I still can't get out.

We agreed on a price, they gave me a position with a fancy important-sounding title, an office and an expense account to ensure a smooth transition. 

After about a year I slowed down the pace of work. These days I do almost nothing. Barely even go to the office anymore. Make a few calls. Spend most of it looking after personal investments. Day trade stocks. 

I started dropping hints to my 'boss' - a nice enough guy named Cleeve Sidwell 15 years my junior - that it was time to give me the boot. To drive the point home I started answering his message with monosyllables without being rude. Yes and no slowly became maybe.

Also started ignoring most of the emails that came my way from the six agents who report directly to me. Cut them loose.

Told my 'assistant' Linda that she didn't have to work so hard, and to take afternoons off whenever she wanted. She's got young kids. All this did was endear me to the employees I oversee. 

CF has 4,000 employees in 23 countries. My little division doesn't really exist for them. I won't quit because I want a severance offer. There's still three years left on my contract. 

The only question is how long it will take for them to notice. I work hard at trying to get noticed in the worst possible way.   

Months passed. I ignored messages, skipped afternoons, and barely showed up at work. People just assumed I was working remotely. Remote work, what a joke.

Making myself scarce wasn't working so I tried the opposite tactic.   

One time I told Cleeve that we needed to talk. I barged into his office like a madman. Took the phone out of his hand - he was midsentence. Slammed a bunch of papers on his desk like he was being served a lawsuit. 

I said, "Cleeve, do you have any idea how much money I'm costing this company?! Do you?! I cost this company over 100 grand a year! It's here in these spreadsheets. I'm keeping track. Column one is the revenue my clients bring in. Column two is my salary, my expense account, the cost of renting my office, my assistant's salary, yadda yadda yadda. Look at all of that red ink!

It was a rounding error on their balance sheet.

He just laughed. "You're such a jokester." 

Big companies are like cruise ships. They have their own language, customs, and sense of belonging, everyone in the same boat. The captain sits somewhere unseen above deck steering a massive structure that can't easily change course.

The harder I try to get canned, the more they ignore me. I'm like a passenger who jumps overboard, waves his arms and screams Help! and no one notices. 

Except I can't even do that. 

The only thing I haven't tried yet is stripping down to my boxers, climbing up on the desk and singing I Will Survive at the top of my lungs.

Then the day finally arrived. 

Cleeve called me up and said, "We need to talk. How about we get some lunch together on the company's tab at Walter's?" 

I was more than happy to oblige. In fact I was giddy, certain that he was finally going to cut me loose and wanted to do it over cocktails, to ease the shock. 

A few days later we met. I was looking upbeat, bouncing on the balls of my feet, while Cleeve looked preoccupied, anchored firmly to the ground. 

We were shown a quiet table in the far corner of the resto. No doubt Cleeve's secretary arranged this particular table so there was no chance we'd cause a scene. 

"How are you?" Cleeve said, sitting across from me, his face long.

"I'm great," smiling broadly.

"Health? The wife and kids?"

"Couldn't be better."

"Good, good."

There were more inane pleasantries for five minutes. We reviewed menus, ordered something expensive and doubles.     

Waiting for our meals to arrive, Cleeve reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a piece of paper and pen.  

"I have something I need to talk with you about," he said.    

I am thinking, finally, someone read the spreadsheets. The memo has gone up the chain. The upper echelons have commanded that it's time to trim the fat, and he's seen the obvious. I'm the fat. 

"Yes, yes," I said, anxious for the news. 

He's going to make me an offer. Write down a figure to buy me out. It'll be on the low side, but I won't care. I'll be so happy just to get out. Even so, I'll protest. Not too much. Just enough so Cleeve feels gratified to have done a tough job. 

He wrote out a number. High five figures. Slid the paper across the table.

It was quite a bit more than I thought it would be. 

He said, "Look, I know it wasn't what you were expecting."  

I didn't say anything. Stared down at the paper, biting my upper lip, trying desperately to suppress a triumphant laugh.

"It's all we can offer."

"But are you sure I can't get a bit more." 

"We haven't had a great year. Didn't quite hit our revenue projections." 

"Well," I said. "I guess this is it then."

"Yes," he said, looking disappointed. 

"I understand. I've really enjoyed working for CF. It's been a great experience."

"Next year," Cleeve said, "with any luck, we'll have a better year. I'm sure we will." He grinned reassuringly.

"Next year?" I said.

"Yeah, the annual bonuses are tied to a formula that's locked in."

"Bonuses?" I'm feeling dizzy, and not just from the second round of doubles. 

I failed again. 

I was quiet for the balance of our meal. Felt like I'd tried everything and was now resigned to working for CF forever. His phrase 'locked in' echoed in my mind.

These days I'm still being as unproductive and absent as I can be. 

The summers are easier because at least there's golf.

I expect that someone from HR will soon be sending me time-management and mindfulness webinars and asking if I want to increase my remote work hours.

And I've started practicing my Gloria Gaynor imitation.