Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr from Paris, France (10 August 1787). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 5, pp. 324–327.
In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.
Excellent advice in this age of sequential manufactured roiling crises (Anthropogenic Global Warming, Covid-19, Russian Collusion, Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, etc.). There are whole message manufacturing complexes trying to bamboozle and coerce people into submission. The only solution is to use reason, logic and evidence to arrive at a considered position. You might be right or wrong but an aggregation of such considered opinions across all upright citizens is far more likely to be right than is the manufactured consensus of select authoritarian "experts" serving as frontmen of special interests.
Citizen's upright considered opinions is the foundation of our republic, not the transitory self-serving goals of special interests.
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