By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing.
Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust -- but not when they become gullibility and credulousness.
Whistle blowers such as Harry Markopolos have a hard time getting through to people who want to believe. Their intellects suborned by greed, otherwise intelligent people who were warned by Markopolos were taken to the cleaners by the avuncular Bernie Madoff despite the improbability of a legitimate 1% per month return in a market that safely permitted half of that.
They were skeptical of Markopolos while credulous of Madoff. A clear proof of not only the difficulty of balancing skepticism and credulousness, but also of the weakness of the intellect in the face of the torrent of the passions.
By the way, Markopolos' book, No One Would Listen, held my interest from the first page to the last. It lives up to its subtitle, "A Financial Thriller." A central lesson is that we should be deeply skeptical of federal regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. It failed utterly to uncover the Madoff Ponzi scheme and dismissed the repeatedly-made Markopolos warnings. Liberals, with their tendency to believe in the salutary effects of an omni-intrusive and purportedly omnicompetent government, should heed this lesson.
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