Nothing I Follow Disagrees With Me

You noticed it in a car park, which is where most of these things happen.

You had been listening to something on the way over and you had agreed with all of it, and you found yourself thinking that this was a very good one, and then a second thought arrived on top of the first, which was that you had thought exactly that about the last four.

They are all very good ones.

And then the thing that has been sitting with you since: you cannot remember the last time you read or heard something that made you think you might have been wrong about anything.

Not a small correction. Not a nuance. Anything.

You are not in a fringe. Most of what you follow is entirely mainstream and quite a lot of it is sensible. There is no obvious problem with the diet.

Except that it has told you, in slightly different words, roughly four hundred times, that the way you already see it is the way it is.

And you are aware that this is exactly what it would feel like to be wrong about something.

That is what you cannot get past. Not that you have been misled by a bad source, but that you have arranged, without ever deciding to, a life in which nothing arrives that could correct you.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you which views to change. I do not know what you think and it is not the business of this page.

I am not going to tell you to go and read things you find repellent. There is a fashion for that and it mostly makes people angrier and more certain, because reading the worst version of the other side is a way of confirming yourself with extra steps.

And I am not going to name anything you follow. This site does not hand out targets.

What I am going to say is that the problem is structural rather than doctrinal, and that the answer is a person rather than a reading list.

You are not in error because your sources agree. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness has nothing to do with the quality of anybody's information diet, and the Holy Spirit is in that car park with somebody who has just noticed something uncomfortable.

The verse requires two people in a room

There is a line in Proverbs that is quoted constantly and is almost always used to describe something it is not describing.

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.Proverbs 27:17

Two things about it, and they are both physical.

The first is friction. Iron does not sharpen iron by agreeing with it. Sharpening is what happens when two hard things are drawn against each other with pressure, and there is heat in it and some material comes off.

The second is that both pieces are present. This is not a description of reading. You cannot be sharpened by a book, because a book does not push back, and it never knows what you said.

That is the whole of your situation. You have a great deal of input and no friction, because everything you consume is a one-way transmission that cannot respond to you, and even the best of it can only ever confirm or fail to reach you. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Proverbs 27:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

So four hundred agreements is not evidence that you are right. It is evidence that you have been reading, which is a different activity from being sharpened.

You are not going to be sharpened by better sources. Scripture says iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend, Proverbs 27:17, and it describes two people in contact rather than a person and a text, and the Holy Spirit works through a friend in a way He does not work through a feed.

Why it happened without a decision

This matters, because you have been quietly ashamed about it since the car park. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Proverbs 27:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

You did not choose this. Every choice you made was individually reasonable: you followed people you found helpful, you stopped following people who were unpleasant or shrill, and you gravitated toward those who explained things in a way that made sense to you.

That is not tribalism. That is ordinary taste, exercised repeatedly, and the aggregate result is an environment in which you are never contradicted. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Proverbs 27:17, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

And there is a further effect. Because everything you hear is well argued and you agree with it, your certainty has been increasing steadily while your exposure to challenge has been decreasing. Those two movements feel identical from inside. Both feel like being more sure.

That is why you cannot tell, from where you are, whether you are right. Not because you are foolish, but because the instrument you would use to check has been quietly disconnected.

You are not able to audit this from the inside. Scripture says he that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him, Proverbs 18:17, and the searching requires a second person by construction, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the person who is willing to be searched.

What to ask, and who to ask

Not a stranger, and not on the internet. Somebody you actually respect, who knows you, and who is not obliged to be nice about it.

And the question is not do you agree with me, which gets you a polite answer.

Ask: what do you think I am wrong about?

Then be quiet. That is the hard part and it is the whole of the exercise. Not defending, not explaining what you actually meant, not saying but in the first ten seconds.

You will want to. Everything in you will produce a clarification, and the clarification will be accurate, and it will end the conversation.

Let them finish. Then say thank you, and think about it for a week before you reply to any of it.

You are not weakened by being corrected. Scripture says the ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise, Proverbs 15:31, and abiding among the wise is described as the result of hearing rather than of being right, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a hard sentence from a friend survivable.