People sometimes claim to be unable to decide between the claims of, say, DHS and migrant defense activists. Faced with conflicting stories, people sometimes retreat into a kind of Pyrrhonian skepticism: each side is incompatible with the other, they’ll say, but neither side’s claims can easily be rejected. So we’re left with an undecidable clash of equal and opposite positions.

What to do? The original Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that tranquility was to be sought in the undecidable clash of such equal and opposite claims.* So they lived their lives–or tried to–without having any settled beliefs at all. If belief leads to conflict (they thought), non-belief eliminates it, producing the calm equanimity of the perpetually uncommitted. I sometimes wonder whether this is the guiding ethos of our news media and its modal consumer. If “mental health” means tranquility, and tranquility demands perpetual agnosticism, maybe it’s safer (people seem to be reasoning) to give equal credence to every claim, even if the resulting tranquility is purchased at the price of cognitive paralysis.