The Dangers Of Certainty

To be certain is to close the eyes, ears, and mind.

Photo by Tom Roberts on Unsplash

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Voltaire

There will always be things in our lives we feel confident in our knowledge of. The sun will rise tomorrow, all living things require water to survive, whichever line we join will immediately become the slowest moving. There are many things in our lives which have a great deal of evidence, both anecdotal as well as resulting from dedicated and detailed study, supporting our assumptions and assertions about them.

But the truth is the more we examine a ‘rule’ or phenomena the more variations and outliers we discover. Certainty should be reserved for those extremely rare instances where the communally agreed upon evidence is staggeringly overwhelming, not used to falsely bolster our every emotional reaction to the latest sensationalized headline.

The most tempting aspect of reducing our outlook on the world around us to our immediate emotional first reactions is how seductively simple it makes that world appear. We either like something or don’t like it and once we’ve branded it either way we never have to examine or consider it again.

Not only are things, and their impact on our lives, never that simple reducing our scope and duration of…