Its scary to read about what humans thought

I was reading up on Wikipedia today about an herb which can lead to severe renal failure and then this one concept was mentioned which people actually believed as recently as a few hundred years ago: the doctrine of signatures. It is the idea that plants which resemble a specific body part or organ can be useful for treating ailments to that part or organ.

We read this now and think, my gosh, how bunk. Its so flagrantly false. But people who were considered leading authorities in their times actually believed this bunk. Its scary to think about. To me, such things are actually among the scariest of all things.

Its one thing to experience peril from, for example, some external thing like a raging storm, or a river that is raging and overflowing in a torrent, or perhaps being alone in the middle of a dark forest at night. But the kind of peril faced by being completely off in one’s beliefs represents a certain kind of peril which can really be unnerving.

If we humans cannot rely on our minds to make sense of things and not scramble them, what can we rely on? If our minds are badly scrambling things yet we actually invoke and magnify such scrambling it just seems off-the-scale terrible to me.

I wonder if anyone existed during the times when this “doctrine” was being professed who would have objected “This is total and utter bullshit! There’s no basis to this whatsoever.” To me, such a person is one to really be celebrated. It seems like society is always inclined to support supposed authorities but often takes a harsh view of the skeptics who challenge so much stuff as just being BS.