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This blog should come with a health warning. “The author suffers from extremely low natural hormone levels and is therefore susceptible to wild mood swings. Please handle with care.”

Interrogating myself as to why I feel so demotivated at the moment, it suddenly occurred to me that I am a month late with my quarterly injection. By the time I manage to secure an appointment with a healthcare professional, I will likely be two months late, and therefore right at the bottom of that steep trough of melancholy.

I read today that an overly trusting personality may be linked to low levels of testosterone, which explains quite a lot. The actual title of the study was, “Testosterone decreases trust in socially naive humans,” which does sound an awful lot like me. Indeed testosterone is linked to aggression, competition and social status, three traits nearly completely absent in my personality.

So here we are: I am a product of my physiology, not to mention a strict Christian upbringing, causing me to forever turn the other cheek, both literally and metaphorically. Another name for this is “stupid,” always trusting of others, despite having no clear justification for doing so. The same could apply to my approach to faith and community.

I will readily admit that I am a literalist in respect to the prohibitions and injunctions of our tradition. All those teachings about being truthful, patient, humble, charitable, chaste and just: yes, I believe in all of that. I take them to be literal injunctions that apply to all believers. Naturally, I long assumed that this is what the majority of Muslims are also on. But it turns out I am just socially naive.

And so here I am in a pickle, as a result of that inner compulsion to speak up in defence of what seemed to me to be the central tenets of the path: to speak the truth, to be just even against ourselves, to oppose the mingling of truth and falsehood. So it was that I so frequently felt compelled in the past to challenge those disseminating misinformation. My error: believing others were equally invested in verifying the truth.

But of course not. Why did the science of hadith authentication develop? Because people were known to fabricate narrations attributed to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and the righteous people of his time. Ergo, it was known long ago that even believers, well-meaning or otherwise, were capable of simply making things up with no regards to the truth.

And so of course the same is true in our own time. Propagandists don’t care that much about the truth; what they care about is whether a piece of information serves their ultimate goal. If they have to mix truth and falsehood, so be it. If they have to pass a photo from one crisis off as evidence of another, they will. If they have constructed a narrative to which all believers must adhere, woe betide that isolated believer who takes his faith too seriously, pleading about the facts.

So to the health warning that comes with this blog. It is true: I am socially naive, believing in the general goodness of others. Perhaps we can blame this on my physiology, a consequence of having been gifted an extra chromosome at conception. Perhaps we can simply ascribe it to faith in God. Either way, you’ve been warned.