Don't Go By Reports

what an ancient confusion teaches about a post-truth world

The Confusion

A group of villagers, the Kalamas, in the town of Kesaputta, described a problem to the Buddha.

Some brahmans and contemplatives came through, expounding and glorifying their own doctrines while disparaging everyone else's. Then others came through and did exactly the same.

“They leave us absolutely uncertain and in doubt,” the Kalamas said. “Which of these venerable ones are speaking the truth, and which are lying?”

Does this sound familiar?

Swap brahmans and contemplatives for therapists, wellness influencers, pundits, and politicians, and you have the exact shape of the problem now. Not too many opinions. Too many credentialed, charismatic people, all pointing in different directions and insisting the others are frauds.

We like to think this confusion is new. The algorithm, the 24-hour news cycle, the attention economy: we tell ourselves we invented this particular exhaustion. The Kalamas would disagree. Two and a half thousand years ago, they stood exactly where we do now, unable to tell which authority to trust, worn down not by a shortage of guidance but by its glut. It's oddly comforting, in a way: whatever this is, we're not the first to feel it.

The Buddha's Acknowledgement

What's striking is what the Buddha didn't do next. He didn't correct them. He didn't present his own doctrine as the reliable one, the answer that would finally end their search. That would have made him just another voice in the marketplace, glorifying his own teaching and disparaging the rest, no different from the brahmans and contemplatives who'd confused them in the first place.

Instead, he did something almost no one in his position would do. He agreed with them.

“Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born.”

He didn't rush to resolve their confusion. He called it reasonable. Given what they'd actually been shown, with competing authorities each glorifying itself and disparaging its rivals, doubt wasn't a failure of discernment. It was the sane response; there is something kind about that. Before he tells them anything useful, he lets them know their confusion is understandable.

What Not to Swallow Whole

Then he went further:

“So in this case, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’”

Read that list slowly. It isn't a rejection of religion, tradition, or reasoning. It's a rejection of every shortcut we take instead of looking for ourselves: hearsay, custom, holy books, clever argument, resemblance to what we already believe, and the one that stings most, trusting someone simply because they're ours. Our teacher. Our therapist. Our tribe. Our side.

Most of us don't encounter this as a debate between credentialed elders taking turns in a village square. We encounter it as a feed. Headlines, influencers, experts and anti-experts, wellness and political accounts, all arriving in the same scroll, tuned for a reaction rather than a verdict. Nobody waits their turn. Everything argues for itself at once, at volume, and doubt, held for long enough, starts to feel unbearable. It's tiring in a way that's hard to admit, this business of not knowing whom to believe.

Most of us resolve it the easy way. We pick a side and lean on it, treating agreement with our side as a stand-in for evidence. Or we go numb and stop trying to tell the difference between what's true and what's merely loud. Neither is a centre. Both are ways of ending the discomfort of not knowing without doing the work of actually knowing anything. I don't say this to shame anyone who's landed in either spot. I've done both myself.

The Test: Harm or Wellbeing

What do you go by, then, if not reports, scripture, logic, or the teacher's authority? The Buddha didn't leave it abstract. He asked the Kalamas a direct question.

“What do you think, Kalamas? When greed arises in a person, does it arise for welfare or for harm?”

“For harm, lord.”

He walked them through it three times, covering greed, aversion, and delusion, each time asking them to test the claim against something they could observe: a person overtaken by greed, hatred, or confusion harms others and is harmed in turn. Not because scripture says so, but because it's visible if you look.

“So, as I said, Kalamas: when you know for yourselves that these qualities are unskillful, blameworthy, criticised by the wise, and lead to harm and suffering when adopted and carried out, then you should abandon them.”

The mirror image holds true: when you know for yourselves that a quality is skillful, blameless, praised by the wise, and conducive to welfare and happiness, you should enter it and remain there.

Two tests, not one. The first is internal: does this, actually practised, reduce harm or cause it? The second is external: does that verdict hold up against people whose judgement has earned trust, “praised by the wise,” rather than against those praised by whoever already agrees with you? Drop the second test, and the first collapses into whatever you already wanted to believe, which is most of what passes for “trusting your truth” now.

Notice, too, that the test doesn't stop at belief. It applies just as much to speech and action, because a belief that is never tested against what you actually say and do is merely an opinion dressed up as a conviction. 

Internal wisdom asks whether what you believe, say, and do withstands the harm it causes. External wisdom asks whether people you trust for good reason would recognise it as sound. Both matter, since a mind left alone can talk itself into almost anything, and a crowd left alone can do the same.

That's what I think a centre actually is. Not a fixed midpoint between two shouting sides, arms folded, refusing to pick anyone. A centre is a method you carry with you from post to post, applied the same way no matter who's talking or how loudly. It doesn't hand you a conclusion. It hands you a question you can actually ask.

“The wise” does a lot of work in that sentence, and most of us don't have a tidy panel of wise people standing by to check our thinking against. That absence is a big part of why we're in this mess to begin with. Even so, the test still holds its shape, even when the answer is hard to find. At the very least, it tells you that trusting someone simply because they already agree with you is never the same as trusting someone wise.

That's a smaller promise than “here's how you'll always know the truth.” It's also a truer one, and not a bad place to start when seeking people whose judgement you'd trust, even when hearing it costs you.

Knowing and Not Wanting to Know

There's a version of delusion worth naming here, even if the sutta itself doesn't spell it out in quite these terms. It isn't simple not-knowing. It's knowing enough to be responsible, while keeping the knowledge fuzzy enough that it never has to change anything. 

We may know, more or less, that the AI tools we rely on were built using data centres and labour we've never looked into, that very cheap clothing usually has a hidden cost borne by someone else, and that meat priced that low was not produced with much care for the animal. Few of us deny any of this outright. We just keep it at a comfortable distance from whatever we do next. 

That's a different problem from the confident false claims examined so far. Those come from outside, from other people's doctrines, feeds, and politics. This one is self-authored. Nobody has to lie to you about the AI tools you use. You do the work yourself, a little every day, by not quite looking. Running the test on yourself is harder than running it on a stranger's claim, because you're not a neutral judge. You're a beneficiary. 

The honest version of this test isn't “become someone who traces every supply chain clean,” which nobody can actually do. It's smaller and more accessible: stop calling the trade-off ignorance when it's actually a choice. 

It's often true that you don't know the specific practices of the AI company behind a tool you use, since nobody can be expected to audit them without real effort. What's harder to admit honestly is lacking a general sense, since most of us do know, in broad terms, that an AI company of any size is probably entangled in something we wouldn't choose if we looked closely. 

“I have a rough sense this AI company is tied up in things I wouldn't like, and I'm staying for now because switching is a hassle I haven't prioritised” is a true statement. “I don't know anything about it” usually isn't, once that rough sense has crossed your mind even once. The gap between those two statements, even when said silently to yourself, is most of what honesty means at this scale.

We are, constantly, and we mostly resolve them by degree rather than by a clean rule. Almost nobody lives with full consistency between their values and their consumption, whether it's shopping, food, clothing, or energy. I think that's less a personal failing than a feature of living within systems too large and interdependent for any one person to fully audit. 

The question that seems to matter more than purity is where you draw your own lines and whether you're honest with yourself about the trade-offs you're making, rather than pretending they don't exist.

Doublethink

Politicians introduce a wrinkle the Kalamas may never have had to contend with, because a single voice can hold two contradictory claims at once and ask you to accept both. Orwell had a name for it: doublethink, the capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both.

It's a sharper problem than ordinary hypocrisy and deserves to be distinguished from it. Hypocrisy is failing to live up to a principle you claim to uphold. Doublethink is holding two incompatible principles at once while discouraging anyone, including yourself, from noticing their incompatibility.

It rarely arrives naked. It comes wrapped in patriotism, fear, morality, or group loyalty, because the wrapping makes the contradiction seem unnecessary to examine, or worse, disloyal to examine. It isn't the habit of one party, one country, or one kind of leader. Watch for it especially on the side you're inclined to trust, since that's exactly where it's hardest to spot.

We must restrict freedom to protect it, a leader says, while denying that any freedom has actually been given up. The state is inherently incompetent, the same leader says, except when I am the one running it. Our violence is defensive; identical violence from the other side is aggression. Whichever side loses an election starts noticing, often for the first time, how fragile the whole system really is, while whichever side wins treats the same result as proof of how sound it always was. Both positions are held with equal conviction, as though neither had ever changed.

What makes this harder than what the Kalamas faced is the wrapping. Competing brahmans, at least, gave you two separate claims to weigh against each other. Doublethink gives you a single claim built from two halves that were never meant to touch, and asks you to feel disloyal, unpatriotic, or morally suspect for noticing the seam.

There's a simple test for it. Would the same person accept the same argument, the same standard, and the same action if their opponent were the one making them? If the answer changes only with the identity of the actor, something other than principle is at work.

It isn't quite the Buddha's test, since checking your own consistency isn't the same as testing your view against someone wiser than you, but it's a close cousin, and a useful one, because you don't need a panel of wise elders to run it. You just need to be willing to ask it of yourself, which is its own small act of courage. A standard that bends to tribe was never a standard. It was tribe wearing a standard's clothes.

Speaking Out or Staying Gentle

Running the test is only half the work. The harder question comes after you've clearly seen the harm: what do you do with what you now know?

The Buddha lived with this constantly, as his teaching put him in the company of some genuinely dangerous people. In another part of the canon, a king who came to him had murdered his own father to take the throne. The Buddha didn't refuse to see him, denounce him publicly, or make the meeting about the killing. He answered the man's question and let the weight of what he'd done sit where it was, unspoken but not denied. 

Compare that with another tradition of moral confrontation: Jesus turning over the tables of those profiting within a sacred space, naming corruption to its face, in public, at a cost. Both are real responses to real harm. They don't lead to the same place. One preserves the relationship and the chance of change. The other names the wrong so plainly that nobody in the room can pretend not to have heard it, and it often ends the relationship, sometimes more than that.

I don't think there's a clear rule for choosing between them, and I'd be suspicious of an essay that pretended there was. Stay quiet too often, in the name of preserving a relationship or keeping a door open, and you can end up simply absorbing harm you never actually challenged, mistaking your own comfort for patience. 

Speak out every time, and you risk becoming someone whose only mode is indictment, someone people eventually stop hearing, and who sometimes damages relationships that a little more patience might have kept alive.

What I keep coming back to is something simpler than a rule. Before choosing, it helps to ask plainly: does calling this out here, with this person, actually reduce harm, or does it mostly relieve something in me? Does staying gentle actually open them up, or does it just let the harm continue because I was too careful about the relationship to risk it? 

There's no way to answer that in general. It has to be asked afresh each time, of the person in front of you and the harm at stake. The honest answer will sometimes be uncomfortable in either direction.

What This Actually Offers

Does an ancient teaching for a confused village actually help someone drowning in a modern feed? Not by resolving doubt. That was never on offer, then or now, and I'd question anyone who promises it. 

What it offers instead is permission to remain in doubt long enough to run a test, and a straightforward test to run: not who is speaking, but what happens when their claim is put into practice, and whether that verdict survives contact with people who don't already need you to be right.

It's worth noting that this essay has only covered the first half of the teaching. The sutta itself doesn't end with the test. It goes on to describe a mind grown free of hostility, resting in goodwill towards everything in every direction, and it closes with the Buddha describing a peace that holds whether or not there's an afterlife, whether or not actions carry consequences beyond this one, because a mind free of ill will has already done the only work that was ever fully within its control.

That's a broader claim than this essay has made, and a kinder one. I've stayed with the testing because it's the part most useful for a scroll and a feed, but it isn't the whole of what's on offer, and it seems important to say so.

That's not a minor matter to be handed down through a conversation that took place two and a half thousand years ago in a small town most of us will never visit. 

Not certainty. Just a way to stay steady while we look, and good company for the looking. In the end, the Kalamas didn't leave with an answer either. They left with a way of paying attention and a village in which to practise it together.

We could do worse than the same, whatever our village has become.

Rory Singer

You can also read this post on our Substack journal, Unfolding.