“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.” — Bertrand Russell

We love our insights, collecting them like shiny stones, tweeting them, tattooing them, and even weaponizing them in comment sections. But in our highly polarized digital age, Bertrand Russell’s warning rings louder than ever: insight alone—no matter how poetic, how emotionally satisfying—isn’t truth. It’s a performance, a gut feeling dressed in business casual and calling itself divine authority.

The most dangerous insights are the ones that go unchallenged, those bolstered not by evidence, but by repetition, dogma, or aesthetic polish. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way religious institutions treat sacred texts. The Bible proves the Bible is true because the Bible says so. That’s circular logic masquerading as moral certainty.

But the danger isn’t limited to religion. It’s everywhere. Self-help gurus say “trust your intuition” like it’s infallible. Corporate leadership peddles “vision” as a substitute for accountability. We love untested insights because they’re easy. They give us the illusion of clarity without the cost of complexity.

However, Russell isn’t telling us not to trust our instincts. He’s telling us to test them. Turn your insight into a hypothesis. Challenge it with experience, contradiction, opposing voices. Otherwise, we’re just reciting personal mythologies and mistaking them for universal truths.

If you’re serious about truth—not comfort, not branding, not social currency—then insight is only the beginning. The real work is what comes after.