The fear of uncertainty and the deceptive allure of binary thinking are both things I have written about before. Our living universe originates in a chaos so profoundly untrammelled that there is nothing to stop the continual process of emergent order, together with its eventual decay.

As humans we cling to the edge of this eternal dance of emergence and entropy, vulnerable, fragile and far more ignorant than we can usually bear to admit.

The great uncertainty and chaos is like a veil of existence so profoundly uncomfortable to many of us that our personal and collective project of swapping it out for whatever belief systems will give us certainty ends up feeling more real than the reality we are avoiding. Our religion, our spirituality, our status or wealth, our political ideologies or our group identities, all desperate anchors in a world animated by uncertainty. The addiction to certainty is probably our most prolific global addiction.

I was listening to a podcast by senior physicist Professor Michelle Simmons the other day on radio speaking about the value of doubt and even of self-doubt. (https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/boyerlectures/boyer-lectures/102960870). She observed that at the heart of all good scientific enquiry is the uncomfortable humility of not knowing the truth and therefore needing to be continually open to new information. Confidence she explained is for charismatic leaders not for those who genuinely seek to understand phenomena.

The concept of the ‘confidence trickster’ takes on an enlarged meaning in this regard. People who have managed to fool themselves enough to feel confident in what they think they know, turn around and try to sell their illusion about themselves to others. This is true of the cult leaders, the charismatic politicians, fascists and dictators, billionaires, life coaches, even many professionals and definitely true of of the influencers and conspiracy peddlers on the internet.

So it’s confusing, who should we trust? I try to navigate that question by preferring to turn to those who know they don’t know, over those who think they do. Having said that, it’s not as if noone knows anything. In a specialised society we have many people with highly developed knowledge and discipline in certain fields. Reliable knowledge is only ever part of an emerging picture and is usually  acquired through learning from the accumulated discoveries from many others in the past, together with ongoing curious exploration. What really propelled the great thinkers and scientists was not their arrogance and self-assurance but the opposite, their inherent scepticism, doubt and the resultant curious exploration.

And the issue of who to trust is further complicated by the corruption, greed, contest for power and the growing sophistication of the means of propaganda to deceive and distract.

The crisis of faith in leaders, and the perception that we are being manipulated by powerful vested interests has generated a very real and understandable scepticism about official versions of reality. In this regard it is easy to understand the resistive stirring of dissonance and disbelief that propels so many into conspiracy theories and false narratives, but here is the catch. The dissonance, doubt and uncertainty that we feel is healthy, what is unhealthy is the addictive swapping out of this feeling for the illusory certainty of an alternative explanation. What irritates me most with conspiracists is not what they question, but what they are so sure they know.

And binary thinking is just another construct that divides grand uncertainty into a simple proposition of this or that. If you don’t buy into my grand conspiracy then you must trust everything the government says, for example.

For the true sceptic though, the lies, the manipulation, the false narrative, the corruption are all around us, they do not emanate from a single source. Nothing so magically simple as an illuminati, an all encompassing ‘they’ or a secret cabal that planned all of this.

Instead, what we see is that most of this was not planned, the world is actually a chaotic struggle for control by thousands of differing vested interests all vying to control manipulate and deceive for their own ends. Corporations for example, from their inception have been a form of collective AI established for the relentless pursuit of profit. They collectively control far more capital than governments globally, and participate in the affairs of the world from a lens of relentless self-interest. Global corporations stifling competition, manipulating government and public opinion and attempting to monopolise markets is ongoing. Just look at the misinformation the fossil fuel lobby has generated in recent decades to try to cast doubt on climate science. In addition to these corporate agendas, add in the ambitions of narcissistic and psychopathic dictators, oppressive regimes, religious fundamentalists, billionaires, influencers and all manner of grifters large and small and you have the soup of competing agendas, manipulation and deception that animates our modern world.

There isn’t just one or several powerful elites trying to control the world, there are numerous ones. The good news is that as a result, like crime gangs in a big city, none of them ever get anywhere near achieving total unquestioned dominance or control. In a sense an ecology of corruption emerges in which the contest of competing agendas has them all undermining each other.

This is not to say that we can’t map and critique where the strongest constellations of power lie. Transnational corporations, international banking, global agriculture, weapons, big pharma, Murdoch media, big tech and social media companies. The ecology of corruption is all around us, but it lacks a definitive single perpetrator. The most important discipline of all in critiquing all this is the humility to stay in your doubt, your scepticism and your not knowing.

In my own personal journey of dissonance and not knowing, I keep my scepticism filters on high alert to those who claim to have simple answers. I much prefer those who dedicate their lives to doubt and enquiry, who conduct themselves according to disciplined codes of sceptical rigour, and who mostly stay within their field of expertise, admit to the limitations of their knowledge.

The specialist social researcher, medical expert, author, philosopher, teacher, psychologist, scientist or even politician that has the humility to level with us about the small piece they might know amidst the entire universe they don’t, deserves our respect so much more than the confident fanatic, hardline ideologue, smooth talking guru or therapist, or obsessively singular conspiracy peddler.

Is uncertainty really so uncomfortable that we must hide from our beautiful unpredictable fragile world behind simplistic delusions. Uncertainty is in the fabric of our existence, better that we lean in to this most uncomfortable of experiences in every way we can. Exercise our uncertainty muscles because these are what really help us live in a world full of mystery beyond our capacity to understand.

The doubting, the questioning, the dissonance, all of these are healthy, so is the research, the critiquing and the challenges to power. What isn’t useful is swapping out all of this rigour and curious enquiry for the false security of an all-encompassing explanation.

This was first published in the Nimbin Good Times, April 2024

 

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