Skeptopia: How to Think Clearly in an Age of Bullshit
A survival guide for the intellectually homeless
Perhaps the most famous asker of awkward questions in history is the philosopher Socrates. Born in 470 BCE, Socrates is remembered for his method of exposing flawed reasoning and inconsistencies in those who claimed to be wise. Not surprisingly, his questioning irked, if not humiliated, the smartest people in the room, and he paid for this insolence with his life. In 399 BCE, the Athenian state sentenced him to death for encouraging Athenians to question accepted beliefs, traditions, and authorities.
While we have no intention of drinking poison hemlock at Skeptopia, we pay a deep debt, along with the rest of civilisation, to this ancient Athenian gadfly, widely considered the founder of Western philosophy.
Let's keep Socrates in mind as we consider how to think clearly in an age of bullshit. But first, we should define three words you'll encounter here frequently and which more or less map the terrain we're trying to cover at Skeptopia.
Skepticism
The word comes from the Greek skepsis (σκέψις) meaning inquiry, doubt, and looking carefully. It passed through Latin as scepticus – someone who belonged to the sect of skeptics – before arriving in English as skepticism: the habit of asking questions like, How do we know this is true?
Utopia
Coined by Thomas More in 1516, the term joins the Greek ou (no) with topos (place) meaning nowhere or a place only in the imagination. More was playing on the word eutopia, meaning good place, to signal a warning: beware anyone trying to build heaven on Earth.
Skeptopia shares that caution. We believe utopian thinking misunderstands human nature, where it sees our flaws not as features of the human condition but as bugs to be ironed out, often by force. When looked at this way, ideologues start to resemble frustrated engineers trying to remake humanity into a reliable machine with reliable outputs. Engineers are generally good people. Engineers of the soul, not so much.
Bullshit
Finally, the word that matters most for our purposes at Skeptopia. It's not a beautiful word, but in its very coarseness, it's a fitting word for our time.
Talking bullshit isn't the same thing as lying. A lie has a relationship with the truth in that it's trying to escape it. Bullshit doesn't bother with such formalities. It's indifferent to whether a thing is true or false. Its purpose isn't accuracy but effect.
The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to whom we owe another debt, defined bullshit as speech aimed at persuasion without regard for truth.
"When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false." – Harry Frankfurt
Frankfurt wrote his essay in the 1980s at a time when bullshit rolled off the printing press or got transmitted to our TVs. Today, bullshit travels much faster without passing through an editorial filter (although it often does that too), and anyone can transmit and receive it anytime, anywhere, along with (and this is new) algorithmic promotion.
Bullshit is both the currency of the culture wars and the engine of social media discourse, where certainty is inversely proportional to knowledge.
Paradoxically, today's bullshit rewards sincerity, or rather, the performance of it. In an empathy-led culture, facts take the backseat to feelings because what matters in this environment are the emotions.
This is not the post-truth world we keep hearing about. It's more accurate to call it the pro-bullshit one, where moral signalling outranks reason, identity trumps evidence, and tribes do the thinking for us. The only real heresy in such a world is to ask questions out loud.
The death of shared reality
For most of the time that humans have talked about facts, we have disagreed about what they meant. For example, is it a fact that God created man? Or can we thank Darwinian evolution for the mess we're in? Does the Earth go around the sun, or is Donald Trump at the centre of the universe? These are things we can offer up to scrutiny and, based on evidence and reasoning, decide what's true and false. (If we were to trust the media, we'd assume the Earth revolves around the Orange One, but that’s another matter.)
Increasingly in our brave new world, we disagree about whether facts exist at all. We've moved from "people see the world differently" to "everyone's entitled to their own truth". And from there, inevitably, to "truth is oppressive".
This isn't just a philosophical drift that started as a thought experiment in the minds of French philosophers (although if we must blame someone, we can start here). It's an epistemic crisis, a collapse in how we define, pursue, and share knowledge of reality.
We see it everywhere, from academics losing their jobs for publishing peer-reviewed work on sensitive subjects to journalists being denounced for reporting facts that contradict activist narratives. We’re no longer disagreeing on the facts but living in rival realities where your truth oppresses mine.
The term lived experience has shouldered itself rather aggressively into this conversation. For those who invoke the term, statistics and studies are useful only when they agree with subjective experience, but the moment they clash with someone's story, they're deemed invalid. Capitalism may have taken more people out of poverty than any other system, but not all have reaped the benefits. “Therefore”, says our iPhone-wielding, Instagram-posting educator, "capitalism is violence." Hmm.
On paper, it's absurd, but we're not looking at an Excel printout or carefully tabulated statistics. We're watching someone perform “their truth” while a million people watch online. It works because algorithms favour outrage over nuance and emotion over accuracy. Certainty is what matters in this domain, not humility. If the facts serve the tribe, that's all for the good. If they don't, then change the facts or invent new ones.
Socrates, in this version of reality, would be sidelined, then cancelled, then defamed as a bigot or worse. The difference (one suspects) is that he'd not only drink poison hemlock, he'd ask for seconds to be sure.
Language as a weapon
When we think of language and politics, we naturally reach for George Orwell, who saw more clearly than most that words are the building blocks of reality. Political language, he said, is designed "to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." But that was 75 years ago. Today, we're using language to obliterate solidity and make the wind blow in the direction of our preferred narrative.
Words that once had clear meanings now function more like mood music. Violence once meant physical harm. Now it means discomfort. “Silence is violence” but actual violence – well, that's “protest” when we do it. It's all very fluid (not the gender kind) and the rules change faster than you can learn them (i.e., at the rate you make them).
Take racism. It used to mean the belief in racial superiority or the act of discriminating based on race. Now, it can mean failing to speak out against perceived injustice, or speaking incorrectly, or simply holding the wrong facial expression during a DEI workshop.
Or take dog whistle – once a term for plausible deniability in political messaging, now just a lazy way to accuse someone of wrongthink without having to prove it. The beauty of calling something a dog whistle is that evidence becomes irrelevant. You don't need to show what someone actually said or meant, you just need to suggest that somewhere, somehow, the wrong people might be nodding along. It's all a bit Kafkaesque, really. You're guilty of sending signals you didn't know you were sending to people you've never met.
This isn't just words changing meaning over time in the way “literally” now means “figuratively” (it doesn't, of course, but I can’t control other people’s usage). No, what we’re seeing is something else. When words lose precision, they become weapons, and the vaguer they are, the more damage they can do. Try defending yourself against an accusation that shape-shifts every time you respond to it. Try having a conversation when the definitions keep changing mid-sentence. You can't. Which is, of course, the point.
We've stopped using language to describe the world and started using it to decorate our positions. The result is an arms race of euphemism, accusation, and weaponised vagueness, in which actual meaning is the first casualty.
The rise of moral performance
Social media changed us in several ways, perhaps chief among them, how we think about virtue. Moral seriousness (you'll have noticed) has turned into a kind of pageantry, where virtue is signalled and outrage becomes a brand. Public grief is scheduled and every cause has a costume, whether it's a keffiyeh or a rainbow flag.
Remember when that Cornell professor was caught on camera saying he was “exhilarated” by the October 7th attacks? Within hours, the video went viral. Within days, we had a full cycle: outrage, counter-outrage, think pieces about the outrage, and meta-commentary on the think pieces. Everyone performed their part perfectly. Nothing changed.
The pressure to perform is relentless, but the stakes are social, not ethical. Use the wrong phrase, quote the wrong person, post at the wrong moment, and you've signalled the wrong affiliation. Your morality is measured by how quickly and fluently you can echo the emotional chorus of the tribe.
This is what we might call competitive compassion: a hierarchy of performative sincerity where the loudest pain wins, and silence is read as betrayal. It's not enough to care. You have to care visibly, theatrically, and with hashtags.
It’s not confined to the left. On the right, we see the same performative dynamics at work, just with different scripts. Take Candace Owens, who has built an empire on manufactured outrage and strategic provocation. It's competitive compassion in reverse; a race to see who can be the most callously contrarian, with sincerity measured not by consistency but by how many libs you own along the way.
But complex moral choreography inevitably leads to exhaustion. Not just for those watching, but for those playing the game. Because when everyone is always auditioning, nobody knows what's real.
Virtue becomes reputation management. Identity becomes strategy. And moral clarity is replaced with mimetic anxiety: what do the good and right people think today?
The skeptical mind, by contrast, is quieter. Less eager to perform, more willing to pause. It knows that moral seriousness doesn't announce itself with emojis or statements of solidarity. It shows up when no one's watching. That's harder to monetise, though.
Political homelessness
If the culture wars have taught us anything, it's that both sides are now reading from the same script, just with different stage directions.
On the left, we find therapeutic authoritarianism: the belief that censorship is care, free speech is harm, and safety means intellectual conformity. On the right, reactionary anti-rationalism: a performative freedom that declares war on complexity and replaces principles with grievances and conspiracy theories.
The language differs, but the logic is shared. Both sides promise clarity, control, and moral certainty. Both vilify doubt. Both are hostile to nuance. And both seem oddly uninterested in liberty except as a slogan.
If you believe free speech matters even when it's uncomfortable, you'll be accused of enabling hate. If you think identity politics has overreached, you're told you've joined the far right. If you question populist conspiracy theories, you're labelled an establishment shill.
Welcome to the void in between. This is a space for those who still think in paragraphs, not hashtags. We're not centrist fence-sitters (frankly, the worst of the lot – we'll need another article for this), but people who are politically homeless because they refuse to outsource their judgment to the crowd.
It's a lonely place. But it's also the only place left where thinking out loud doesn't feel like trespassing.
The skeptical mindset
So what do we do? If truth is fragile, language is broken, and ideology is everywhere, how do we think clearly?
The answer is both simpler and harder than you might think. We need to get comfortable with doubt again. Real doubt, not the performative cynicism that passes for sophistication on Twitter, but the kind that makes you pause before reposting the hot take, or makes you wonder if maybe you're the one who's missing something.
This is challenging because our entire media ecosystem runs on certainty, and there are no engagement buttons that mean "I'm not sure" or "it's complicated" or "let me think about that". The algorithms reward hot takes and mic drops. We've trained ourselves to have opinions the way we have reflexes.
But here's the thing about certainty: it's usually inversely proportional to understanding. The people who know the most about a subject tend to be the most aware of what they don't know. We sometimes call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, based on a well-researched study you can read about here. Meanwhile, someone who watched a YouTube video is ready to die on that hill.
Thinking skeptically means giving up some things that feel good. The rush of being on the right side of history (which side is that again?). The comfort of having a team that does your thinking for you. The satisfaction of that perfectly timed clapback.
It's not glamorous work. Nobody's going to screenshot your moment of intellectual humility. But it's the only way to keep your brain from becoming another node in someone else's network.
The point of Skeptopia
Skeptopia isn't another team in the culture wars. God knows we have enough of those already. What we're trying to build here is smaller and stranger: a place for people who've noticed that the emperor has no clothes, but also that the people pointing this out are naked too. It's meant as a refuge for those who still think asking good questions matters more than having the right answers, who'd rather admit ignorance than fake certainty.
If that makes you intellectually homeless, if you're tired of choosing between approved worldviews like they're items on a menu, then maybe you belong here.
The Athenians killed Socrates for asking too many questions. Today, we'd probably just ratio him on Twitter. Progress, of a sort. But the old gadfly had it right: the unexamined life isn't worth living, especially when everyone else is so certain they've already got it figured out. Nobody wants people drinking hemlock for their principles, but we need more people willing to say those three unfashionable words: “I don't know”.