Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

 

Uncertainty as the Human Condition (Part 2)

"The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to compel man to unfold his powers."

                                                                --Erich Fromm, social psychologist

Margaret J. Wheatley, management expert, had this to say about the effect of uncertainty on leadership and global politics: “I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21^st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.”

Uncertainty means never having perfect information, or even anything approaching the information we want to be sure of in making decisions, especially those with long-term outcomes.  The disturbing truth about our choices is that we can never be sure we made the right one, or even a decent one.  And so, of course, our ability to learn from competing options is quite limited. Choices move around a flow chart, each new one dependent on previous choices. There may have been a much better field of options for any given choice, but what will ever remain unclear is whether, given the limited facts available about the choice, we chose the right ones to pay attention to.  At the same time, we also may be ignoring an entire set that was never even allowed into our line of sight. 

Businesses hate uncertainty and would rather take no action and make no investments in the face of it. A current example is the tariff mandates by the President, which change with each diplomatic negotiation.  No one knows how to price inputs and outputs.  No responsible manager can commit themselves to any kind of plan, even the briefest of holding actions, except for the default plan, which is inaction.  This uncertainty response gives the tariff initiative power to paralyze the entire economy.  This is one outcome, management expert Wheatley reports, of the fact that uncertainty has boosted leadership of the command-and control kind, which gives the illusion of assurance of knowledge, safety, and protection in unsure times.  In fact, its main outcome is more uncertainty.

We routinely rely on old information, bad assumptions, partial truths, or information that proves us right (confirmation bias), or on no research at all, but simply habits buried in time or custom or groupthink.  In addition, life doesn’t often give us the ability to do scientific research on our own beliefs and behavior.  There is no way to compare options not taken--because we can’t create a control that compares choices evenly based on lived experience—whether our choice of College A versus College B, of spouse A or B, or career choices, has delivered the better result.  We would need to live multiple lives to make this comparison work.

This is why, when a family friend asked me if I believed in the perfect soulmate being out there somewhere for each of us, I couldn’t give her an answer.  Her own husband, who she thought was so perfect, was her model for the ideal match.  But this wonderful guy could have been down the list of best choices—I didn’t want to break that news to her.  There is no way to show that she made the perfect or even best choice; there are just too many alternatives around.  However, she is forever certain that there was no other choice, that he was “the one” (especially now he’s deceased).   Unprovable, but likely to hold the key to much happiness.  All I could say was, “This is a more complex question than it appears.”  She was puzzled that I didn’t immediately agree with her romantic beliefs—and maybe thought I had given up on the game myself or had a shocking lack of beautiful ideals to live by.

Somehow every person must learn to live with the curse humans have always lived under:  lack of complete information, unsure outcomes for any situation, and the universality of the laws of change.  This is why the habitual college admissions prompt, “Describe a challenge you faced, what decision you had to make, and what you learned from it,” is such a thorny one to figure out.  We just have to take the track of the novelist and create an arc with an internal theme that seems logical or shows the logic of emotions.  The person who made the decision is also then a person changed by acting on that choice-- and so has a problem with objectively analyzing the outcome.

We become instantly attached to decisions we have already made, so that we can’t evaluate them with any objective fairness. Therefore not much can be learned from them—because the overtly successful ones don’t have much to tell us. Mistakes and bad calls carry more intelligence. So we learn little from success, an eternal conundrum that must be lived with in every moment.  While our future is a touchstone of hope, it is at the same time the wellspring of all our fears and the core of anxiety gnawing away at that hope.