…especially in modern-day America, currently in the grip of a wave of anti-intellectualism and a backlash against reason and logic that’s quite remarkable, and depressing, to behold:

I wish to propose for the reader’s favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system: since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.

— Bertrand Russell, On the Value of Skepticism, 1935.