Uncertainty Isn’t a Human Flaw, It’s a Feature of the World

We’re waking up to the reality that uncertainty is not a war to be fought or a disease to be eradicated but an inherent quality of a complex world. We need to cultivate our collective capacity to sit with uncertainty and complexity.

So we stand now at a crossroads. Can we live with the fact that neither professional forecasters, nor historians, nor profiles, nor even DNA can untangle the systemic complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity of our lives? All of our ancestors did so. Or is a more predictable life – calmer, easier, with less fear of error or surprise – too tantalising

The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rational

Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction.

absolute certainty about all aspects of life would be tyranny. So, at a time in our history where we have huge decisions to make—about the climate, about technology, capitalism, democracy—we need our freedom, of thought and action, more than ever. In an age of uncertainty, we have to ask ourselves what we need to be, and what we need to do—and to c