I Think, Therefore...

One day, I was perusing an atlas (one of my favorite sorts of book) and it occurred to me that I didn't know if any of the places I was looking at actually existed. Although I suppose it's more accurate to say that I realized that I had no good way of knowing, in the moment, if any of the maps I was looking at were genuine. Not in the sense of the paper towns that mapmakers add to maps to catch out plagiarists, but in the sense that the whole exercise could have been an elaborate fake. After all, it's not like I've ever been to Karagandy, or am likely to ever go in my lifetime. Or Paris, for that matter. The realization that much of what I believed about the world came from lacking reasons to disbelieve, rather than reasons to believe, was striking. Of course, it's possible, at least in day-to-day life, to be too skeptical; and I, for my part have to be careful of that. Still, it's oddly freeing to understand how much one understands of the world is second-hand, if not even more distantly-sourced.