3. Indeterminacy and the Manufacture of Certainty

 [About: uncertainty, bullshit; the capacity for indeterminacy.]
[Length: Approx. 1,400 words; 6 minutes to read.]

We are overloaded with information. A cliché but a painful truth for many of us. While the quantity of information available swells it seems that its average quality is diminishing. Yet the complexity of the problems facing us intensifies, and we need good information more than ever. Some, such as David Michaels whose work is described in “The Manufacture of Uncertainty,”¹ contend that corporate and political forces are intentionally polluting the information space. Along similar lines in “The Assault on Reason” (Penguin 2007) Al Gore says “public discourse [has] become less focused and clear, less reasoned…the ‘consent of the governed’ [is] becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.”

There are indeed problems at the systemic level, and we could investigate a range of partial solutions that have been offered for media, corporate, educational, and governmental reforms. But for now I want to draw your attention to the inner psychological dimensions.² Indeterminacy (uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox) is inherent in knowledge and information and is also becoming increasingly problematic. We can point to two complementary responses to this indeterminacy. (1) We can try to reduce (i.e. fix) it, and (2) we can accept and adapt to it. I will save inquiry about the former for another essay, and will here consider the later: dealing with the inevitabilities of indeterminacy.

As family members, workers, and citizens we must make countless decisions, usually between the rock of wanting to make the right or best decision and the hard place of having inadequate information. Something about how the ego works makes it particularly regrettable, frustrating or embarrassing to have been wrong. Thus, it is difficult to admit to the full scope of our unknowing and our subsequent vulnerability in this regard.

In fact, we mostly move in the opposite direction–avoiding or denying uncertainty. It would seem that certainty and confidence are more important than truth. Though cultures such as ours in the United States seem particularly exaggerated in this regard, the phenomena is universal–let us call it “bullshit” for the moment. The entertaining little best-selling philosophy book titled “On Bullshit,” by Harry G. Frankfurt (2005), differentiates lying from bullshit, and it claims that the latter is more insidious in society. Lies are always or intentionally false but bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The bullshiter has complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to the facts. He “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to [truth] at all.” For him or her, what is important is to have an opinion, to make an impression, or to save face.

The bullshit phenomena needs two roles to sustain itself: the most salient is the purveyor of bullshit, but equally destructive and perhaps more pervasive are us bullshit consumers taking in so much of what we hear at face value, guaranteeing a compliant “market.” It is often easier to believe than to question (unless the information is unpalatable to us). We manufacture certainty, both in our listening and in our speaking, reams and reams of it every day, whether it is logically or morally warranted or not. We only have so much energy and attention to spend ferreting out the truth, so one consequence of the increased quantity and complexity of information in modern times is that we must manufacture more certainty in our lives, leading to an escalation of bullshit.³

Lets now put aside the term “bullshit” and return to “indeterminacy.” There are some malicious or negligent elements in the growth of indeterminacy, but to focus on those (as the word “bullshit” does) hides the inescapable and innocent all-too-human element of the “manufacture of certainty.” In short, the emotion of certainty is a biological necessity for action. Dan Goleman writes in Emotional Intelligence⁴ that “feelings are typically indispensable for rational decisions, they point us in the proper direction, where dry logic can then be of best use. While the world often confronts us with an unwieldy array of choice [emotions] send signals that streamline the decision by eliminating some options and highlighting others at the outset” (pg 28).⁵ In the realm of pure thought and imagination we can consider many perspectives and possibilities. If we had all the time in the world we could continue to gather more information and work out the likely consequences of each alternative. But in the time-bound real world, when we must act in addition to ponder, we inevitably do so with incomplete information, and the felt sense of certainty can push us from the realm of cogitation into the realm of action.

Yet this natural mechanism seems out of balance in the modern context and unable to function effectively. Public communications are rife with spin, opinion, and false confidence, yet in the face of decisions we often we teeter, waver, backtrack, and apologize, unable to find confidence when it is needed. There are external, systemic, antidotes that could be mentioned, but, again, focusing on the internal for now, what is called for in part is an increased human capacity for holding uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox–a deeper humility, in what poet Yeats calls “negative capability,” and what Fred Kofman (in his book Conscious Business) calls “ontological humility.” So when I say at the beginning of the previous essay “I’m confused, and I wish more people were,” I am really prescribing a greater openness to and acknowledgment of uncertainty, as it is always already existing within one.

Returning to the theme “the mind of the heart and the heart of the mind” from the first essay, we can say that this capacity for dealing with indeterminacy has intertwined emotional and cognitive elements. On the emotional side, saying “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” or “I changed my mind,” in addition to submitting one to gross unfashionableness, requires an egolessness based in the heart, a courage to stand with dignity in a vulnerability that, in truth, we all constantly share. The cognitive (metacognitive) element comes from understanding something about the nature of knowledge. If we understand where indeterminacy comes from, to what degree it is inevitable, when it is reducible, and even when it is desirable, we can open to it with clear and far seeing eyes, and experience this vulnerability as an easy and natural state rather than a cloud we labor under. With this understanding we can skillfully work with uncertainty, not just under its burden.

In addition to this capacity having emotional and cognitive elements, it has a critical social (or intersubjective) aspect. Human capacities flower in group contexts that nurture them. Developing the skills for dealing with indeterminacy is difficult if one is pushing against the prevailing tide surrounding one. But any individual, leader, or subgroup can help the whole group “pull itself up by its bootstraps” through small brave and virtuous acts that establish precedents. In a room of distrustful people one person can significantly alter the consciousness of the others by setting a positive example. (Of course, the opposite is also true.)

The ability to understand indeterminacy and deal productively with it is an emerging human capacity. (That is to say, it has always existed in humans, but seems to be a deepening cognitive skill available to an increasing percentage of humanity when one takes a long term historical and evolutionary view.) Tapping into current scholarly thought, scientific results, and the motivational insights of more spiritually-oriented sages in the service of supporting the expansion of this capacity in my readers and their organizations is one of the major goals of this blog.

In the next post we shift from the topic of uncertainty and indeterminacy to the topic of Truth. If we are swimming in a sea of indeterminacy, is Truth an outdated concept? Should we and can we aim to know what is True or Real?

1. See “The Manufacture of Uncertainty: How American industries have purchased ’scientists’ to undermine scientific verities when those verities threaten their profits.” By Chris Mooney in March 28 2008 issue of The American Prospect. In this article he reviews “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health,” by David Michaels, Oxford University Press, 2008. [↩]
2. This will be a repeating theme of these essays: that in addition to considering the theoretical or scientific analysis of a thing, I will encourage you to look inside and find how an issue is alive in daily life, and to find within one’s own mind/body a seed of the problematic phenomena which it is so much easier to notice “out there” in others. [↩]
3. Contributing to the escalation, as pointed out in, one is more likely to engage in bullshit, or any activity of questionable ethical quality, to the extent that everyone else seems to be doing it. [↩]
4. Bantam books, 1995. [↩]
5. Goleman has more to say on the topic of emotions and finding the truth in “Vital Lies Simple Truths–the Psychology of Self-deception,” 1985, Simon & Schuster: New York. [↩]