Why Don’t We Doubt Our Insecurities?
A Distinction Between Doubt and Insecurity
People often mistake someone who has doubts for someone who is insecure, as if doubt were synonymous with hesitation, indecision, or weakness. But they are very different things.
Doubt is one of the most fundamental gestures of thought. To doubt does not simply mean not knowing, but to open a space between knowing and not knowing: a crack through which thought seeps, a suspended zone that allows questioning what seemed given.
Etymologically, doubt comes from the Latin dubitāre, related to duo (two). To doubt is to stand at a fork between two paths: we neither affirm nor deny, but pause, suspend judgment, and in that intermediate space thought becomes active. Far from being a flaw, doubt is the very condition for the possibility of thought. It allows us to review, nuance, resist.
In contrast, what we call insecurity refers to a different experience. The word derives from the Latin securus, meaning “safe, without worry.” In-security, then, is not being free from worry, not having protection, shelter, or support. Insecurity is not simply a doubt about our abilities: it is the sense of being exposed, unprotected before the judgment of others, the uncertainty of the world, or even oneself. It is a state of vulnerability.
And it is precisely in that state that doubt becomes impossible. Because to doubt requires some ground: a context in which ambiguity can be sustained, suspension tolerated, and conflict endured. Doubt needs a certain firmness to unfold. But in insecurity, that ground does not exist. Everything is already dismantled.
This becomes clearer if we consider the different forms insecurity can take: emotional, when we feel the love of others is unstable or conditional, and that we must earn it to avoid abandonment; familial, when our upbringing denied us comfort, recognition, or validation; economic, when lack of resources prevents us from projecting the future or even sustaining the present; and social, when the cultural environment marginalizes, erases, or devalues certain identities. In all these cases, what is lacking is not thought, but the conditions for thinking. It’s not that we don’t want to doubt our insecurities, but we cannot: we lack a safe place from which to question them. Without that support—internal or external—doubt does not liberate, but threatens to leave us even more unraveled.
But insecurity is not just an internal or private experience. It does not always arise spontaneously from within; it is often induced, maintained, or strategically provoked by another. Recognizing this means seeing that keeping someone in a state of insecurity can be an effective way to control their thinking. Because insecurity blocks doubt, and without doubt, there is no transformation. When someone is unprotected, fearful, or at another’s mercy, they cannot risk questioning the structure that sustains them, even if that structure harms them.
In many relationships—partnerships, friendships, family ties, workplaces—a margin of insecurity is deliberately maintained. The diffuse threat of loss or abandonment guarantees continuity, albeit in a terrible way. Providing assurances, on the other hand, is much riskier: because it enables doubt. And once someone can doubt, they can also change. They may even doubt the one who gave them security.
This is also evident in politics. Frameworks of insecurity—social, economic, cultural—are often skillfully managed: fear of war, crisis, or collapse is invoked to inhibit criticism and justify decisions that curtail sovereignty. A narrative of constant threat is imposed, causing thought to retreat, preferring obedience over analysis.
It is even more evident in the global economy: hundreds of millions live in structural insecurity, where any attempt at personal change—switching jobs, studying, migrating, saying “no”—entails a risk they cannot afford. Many know something is wrong, that they are mistaken to remain in that dynamic, but they cannot afford to doubt their path because there is no margin for error. They risk it all on a coin toss. And thought cannot flourish in ruin.
Faced with this web of insecurities—emotional, affective, professional, economic, social, political—in which we are often trapped with no real possibility of transformation, perhaps the first step is not action, but recognizing the very limits of our thinking. To notice which ideas we have been able to question and which we have not. Which certainties we maintain not because they are true, but because doubting them would put us at risk. Not everything we don’t question is conviction; often it is mere survival.
Sometimes, what is missing is not doubt, but the minimum conditions to make doubt possible. When those conditions do not exist, the first step is not to think differently, but to become aware of what we have not been able to think. And why.
Recognizing the fear that has forced us into silence, the threat that has rendered certain questions unthinkable, does not resolve anything immediately. But it makes clear where the blockage begins. It does not transform our environment or ourselves, but at least opens a crack in obedience.
A crack from which we can see where fear seeped in: the minimum condition to face it and, perhaps someday, feel a bit more secure.