Heroes Not Zombies

We live with an illusion of certainty. The volcanic ash cloud over Europe this week is a clear example of real world unpredictability. Alan de Botton writes about this in his usual fluent way here.  He quotes Seneca in saying that we believe two things – that tomorrow will be like today, and that calamity can occur any day. We prefer to ignore the latter and proceed through life as if only the former is true.

We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This Goddess can scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear along with our hotel in a tidal wave.

The financial crisis of 2007 onwards has dramatically revealed that the “masters of the universe”  are no such things at all. If you ever did believe what economists or politicians said, are you able to believe them now when they tell you they know for sure what will happen to the economy and how to manage it?
There have been many earthquakes and floods over the last couple of years – none of them predicted, and, probably, none of them avoidable. Yet we live as if earthquakes and floods only happen to other people. Does the Earth “behave” in predictable ways? Can you be certain?
The volcanic ash which has grounded planes throughout Europe for a week wasn’t predicted either. Will it happen again? When will the current problem stop? Day by day, almost hour by hour, thousands of people have had to live with complete uncertainty about  their travel plans.
This is the way the world is. These are “black swan” events as so well described by Nicholas Taleb.

My area of special interest is health care. How certain can we be in this area? Not very, is the true answer. Despite the fact that authorities claim to know for sure which treatments work and which don’t, in real life, they don’t. Nobody can say for sure whether or not a particular treatment will do what it’s intended to do for any individual patient. It’s amazing how often we forget that.

So what’s the opposite of certainty? Uncertainty? Well, yes, to some extent, but then it’s difficult to live with absolute uncertainty isn’t it? No, I think the opposite of certainty is reality. Certainty is an illusion. It only works for us as an illusion when we make our focus very narrow, and very limited. The more we generalise, and the longer the timescale we consider, the less we are able to be sure.

What are we to do? How to live with this? There are a lot of answers to that question. I’ll explore a number of them in future posts, but here’s a few to be going on with – living in the present, living mindfully, developing flexibility, adaptability and diversity, building connections and networks, building resilience and exploring what Taleb calls “the ecology of uncertainty”, resisting generalisations, and doubting those “experts” who claim to know for certain what’s best for you, in your life, based on their statistics.