It's not binary; it's not like I'm promoting being in a cult and surrendering your rights to thoughts and opinions :-> On a daily and regular basis, I trust my

It's not binary; it's not like I'm promoting being in a cult and surrendering your rights to thoughts and opinions :-> On a daily and regular basis, I trust myself, my thought process, experience, rationale, etc. I spent decades consciously honing my analytical and logical skills and I will spend lifetime continuing to do so. And it serves me well. But, I believe, there needs to be a "safety valve". A "who watches the watchmen", somebody to provide a sanity check on your own rationale and story and narrative and thought process, which left alone can take you from first principle to lala-land, one seemingly logical step at the time, over years if needed. There needs to be an external influence/person who can, if situation calls for it, help you see things from an external yet trustworthy perspective, when your internal narrative, the "personal story of your life", starts strongly diverging from objective consensus reality. (on a deeply personal note, I'll freely admit my sister did that for me ~15 years ago - after for a year or so I spun an increasingly personal internal narrative about something in my life, with a short but incisive comment, she momentarily enabled me to see myself through her eyes, and not love what I saw, and get that instant split-vision of my narrative and external narrative of what and why and how and whence I am where and how I am. Anybody else, I would've discarded or been defensive or otherwise ignored it. And I see many people around who desperately need a "grounding" or "reality check" or "slapping sense into" or "righting the boat" or whatever we choose to call it, but don't have anybody that can reach them. )