A New Uncertainty Principle

Life is uncertain, and not just life. You do not know, to a certainty, what will happen tomorrow or next week. We all live with uncertainty and the psycho world has barely addressed the issue.

Yes, I do know that physics has an uncertainty principle, as does philosophy, via Descartes. Today, we are looking at the uncertainty that defines decision making in everyday life.

The important point is that, as I have occasionally opined, there is no certainty about tomorrow. And that means, as Wittgenstein once affirmed, that there is no such thing as a scientific fact about what will happen tomorrow. The notion that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning is a hypothesis, not a scientific fact.

Now therapist Gary Greenberg makes a valiant, but ultimately unsatisfactory effort, to define how uncertainty works in therapy.

He opens with an important point:

As much as we might like, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot know the future — about an election or anything else.

Then he  continues:

Next stop, my office, where you are sure to hear that you have to learn not only to tolerate the uncertainty of making a decision, but also to welcome it, to explore and elucidate it, so that you can carry that knowledge into the future.

Let’s clarify the point. You do not know the consequence of your action, but you are obliged to do something. It’s your turn to make a move in life’s chess game, and you have to do so. You do not know how it will work out, because you have not evaluated all of the countermoves and the moves to make after the countermove. 

Making a move shows that you have courage. Because courage entails taking a risk and being responsible for the consequences. Taking a risk means that the outcome is uncertain.

As long as the outcome is uncertain, you will feel some level of anxiety. If you seek absolute certainty, if you want to know exactly what the future will bring, you are likely to freeze, to fail to take action.

In many of life’s situations we overcome the uncertainty and the anxiety by instituting routines. 

If you wait for certainty or if you believe that you must have certainty before you can act, you will turn the old adage-- don’t just sit there; do something-- into a new adage: don’t just do something; sit there.

Now, Greenberg makes an astute observation. In a country whose people have been therapied to within an inch of their sanity, citizens are absolutely positively convinced that they know the future under Trump. And they were convinced that they knew it under Harris.

Now, one side seems to be on more intimate terms with hysterical apocalyptic visions. It assumes that a Trump victory will spell the end of democracy in America. It insists that Trump will destroy the country and deprive it of its freedoms. It has told us that Trump is about to send Joy Behar and the View ladies to concentration camps. 

Since Greenberg tries to be fair and balanced, he continues that Republicans have asserted, to a certainty, that Harris would have opened the floodgates to illegal migrants, criminals and derelicts.

Comparisons are fun, even if they are especially vapid. The assertions about what Trump, aka Hitler, will do are easily belied by a glance at his record. Since he was president already, one can do a reality check and evaluate the hysterical phantasmagoria that had taken over their minds.

As for the Republican charge that Harris would allow an invasion of migrants, the truth is, she has already done so. It is not fantasy. You might believe that she would turn a page and shut down the border, for good, but believing that she will do what she has already done is surely rational.

But then, for the salient issue, how did this happen? How did so many Americans allow their minds to be overcome by absurd apocalyptic scenarios-- to the point that they were absolutely and completely persuaded that their fantasies are the truth about tomorrow?

To make this easy, the answer is that they are not living in the real world where people make decisions and take actions that determine the results of a game. They are living in a fictional world where everything is written out and determined in advance. 

When you say that you are certain that you know what will happen tomorrow or next year, you are saying, first, that history follows a script, and second that you know what is in that script.

In short, you are saying that you are detached from reality and have taken up residence in a magic kingdom. At that point you have no reason to do much of anything. The Zeitgeist will work it all out.

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