How We Handle Not Knowing (In-Depth 10 - 20 min read)

[DocWatts]

Howdy, I thought I might share another write up from my philosophy book. This one is an in-depth exploration of the coping mechanisms we adopt in the face of uncertainty - their underlying emotional purpose, and how authoritarian regimes exploit the psychology behind these defense mechanisms. I also outline a healthier alternative - attunement - a process-oriented stance where we treat our views as works-in-progress that we fine-tune in response to pushback from the world.
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The rise of authoritarianism worldwide isn't just a political crisis - it's also an epistemic one, rooted in how we respond to uncertainty in a complex world.

How We Handle Not Knowing: Attunement And Its Alternatives

Just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you can’t develop an adequate picture of the world without breaking a few cherished certainties along the way. This is easier said than done, however, since we don’t hold onto our mental models in a disinterested way. When the world refuses to be squeezed down into a familiar box of our preferred dimensions, we’re faced with a choice: attune our views to better align with reality, or adopt a coping strategy to maintain our comfortable illusions.

Attunement means treating our viewpoints as works-in-progress that require ongoing maintenance and receptivity to pushback from the world. Its antithesis is withdrawal into coping strategies - ploys for denying aspects of Reality that challenge our preferred narratives. We’ll be focusing on three such evasive maneuvers, prevalent responses to uncertainty that we’re likely to have encountered in daily life: 1) Fearful entrenchment, 2) Fatigued surrender, and 3) Confused compromise.

For the most part, these maneuvers aren’t a deliberate choice - they’re habits we slide into when our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. When our viewpoints become enmeshed with our identity, safety, or sense of belonging, our resistance to changing course can take the form of fearful entrenchment - where we double down on our established views to avoid the discomfort of course-correcting. Fearful entrenchment is a classic sunk-cost fallacy - where we cling to a position despite mounting evidence that it’s untenable, because changing our mind carries unacceptable opportunity costs. This could be a blow to our ego, our social clout, or our wallet.

Conspiracy theories are a telling illustration. When a vaccine skeptic is presented with data that shows a precipitous drop in cases of some debilitating disease in inverse proportion to vaccination rates, selective epistemic rigor becomes a common fallback. The skeptic may accuse public health officials of colluding with vaccine manufacturers to fabricate evidence - while applying no comparable scrutiny to their ‘alternate sources’ which challenge established facts. What’s important to realize is that inconsistency isn’t an accidental byproduct of this evasive strategy - it’s a defense mechanism for deeper emotional investments. The opportunity costs of abandoning one’s conspiracism aren’t trivial. It means abandoning the power-fantasy that we have special knowledge that’s unavailable to the deceived masses. And it may entail leaving a community we’ve been using to meet our identity and belonging needs.

So that’s fearful entrenchment. But what of its oppositional counterpart? If the debris of collapsed-certainties has left a strong impression on us, we might withdraw into fatigued surrender - where we give up any hope of arriving at substantive truth. In this stance, we settle upon an attitude that ‘truth’ is little more than a label for personal preferences and socially agreed upon conventions. A person who’s been burnt by a political ideology might land upon the thought-terminating cliche that ‘all politicians are corrupt’. And if this gives them a convenient excuse to stay home on election day, so much the better - why put in the effort to navigate an imperfect system when you have a ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card at the ready?

And if we haven’t given a particular issue much thought or attention, we may default to confused compromise - a cobbled together hybrid that attempts to split the difference. This might lead us to commit to the fallacy of the middle ground. “Climate change is real, sure, but I don’t think it will be as catastrophic as the alarmists are claiming. We should try to curb emissions, but not at the expense of the economy. Plus, I already drive an electric car, so I’m doing my part.” Or else, our position might resemble an incoherent horseshoe, where we arbitrarily pick and choose from incompatible viewpoints. “The common man is being kept down by a cabal of wealthy elites within the deep state, who funnel our hard earned tax dollars to people that are here illegally. We need a strong leader that will put working families first by running the government like a business.”

So that’s the trilogy of evasion. To bring the emotional underpinnings of these evasive maneuvers into sharper relief, let's return to our cooking allegory. Picture a bustling kitchen where a row of cooks are busy making omelets - each working from the same set of ingredients but with contrasting styles.

The Kitchen Of Uncertainty: Four Chefs, Three Failures

Notice the absolutist, who maintains a white-knuckled grip on their one perfect egg, petrified of how they’ll feel about themselves and look to others if it slips from their grasp. This is the absolutist’s solace - when the ambiguity of the world gnaws at us, we can at least take comfort that a definitive answer is out there. Accessible to us in principle, if only we can perfect our methods, purge our biases, and apply the correct form of reasoning. When we ask what’s driving the male loneliness epidemic or why home ownership has become an impossible dream for so many, we don’t want to be placated with a “it depends on your perspective”. Nor do we appreciate “what does it mean to you?” therapy-speak when we have pressing questions that demand answers. When institutions that are meant to serve as trustworthy curators can’t coalesce around an emotionally satisfying explanation, our shared epistemic foundation begins to crumble.

Now observe the relativist, who stands paralyzed amidst the rows of egg cartons, dissatisfied with the recipe book but unwilling to put their own culinary convictions on the chopping block. We’re likely to drift into this evasive maneuver when established authorities have let us down, repeatedly proving themselves fallible or compromised by conflicts of interest. Or else, we find that the answers they offer repeatedly fail to align with our lived experience. This erosion of trust leaves us isolated in our sensemaking. Before we know it, we’re adrift in a sea of competing claims without a clear anchor to steady us. With no surefire method for which experts to trust, we’re at last thrown to our own resources to “do our own research.” On the surface this sounds reasonable. In practice, it can become an exhausting non-answer that sends us to the dark corners of the internet, where we become easy prey for charlatans who promise easy answers to life’s problems.

And occupying the awkward space between our dueling chefs is the confused compromiser, whose dubious hodgepodge of mismatched ingredients is a result of deviating from the menu in an unpracticed way. This approach sometimes emerges out of simple laziness, when we can’t be bothered to pick a lane - but don’t have the confidence to just admit that we either don’t know or don’t care. Or it may result from apathy and exhaustion after swinging like a pendulum from one failed ‘certainty’ to the next. Unlike the relativist who abandons the search for truth altogether, the compromiser still craves the comfort of having answers, just without the rigor required to make them coherent. What our confused compromiser is left with is a patchwork of convenience that offers neither the stability of honestly-held absolutism nor the consistency of thoughtful relativism.

Contrast these problematic stances with the more process oriented approach of the pluralist - who doesn’t fret about making the perfect omelet, because their aim is to become a better cook. After all, if today’s omelet doesn’t meet our expectations, we can learn from our mistakes and try again tomorrow. The pluralist’s flexible approach is rooted in a fundamentally different mode of relating to the unknown, in comparison to our other chefs. Rather than denying ambiguity or surrendering to it, the pluralist seeks to cultivate attentive responsiveness to its eddying currents. It’s a mindset that seeks to demystify without oversimplifying. To acknowledge nuance without surrendering to paralysis. To strive for coherence without forcing false compromises for convenience’s sake.

The larger contrast points to the deeper emotional stakes of our epistemic stances. When we’re at a crossroads, it’s not intellect but intuition that gives us that initial push in one direction or another. Our life experiences predispose us to an instinctive posture towards a lack of epistemic closure. Beliefs, then, largely serve as post-hoc rationalizations of these foundational intuitions. Yet these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate practice.

Because Pluralism is an ongoing practice rather than a set of beliefs, the buy-in is ongoing engagement rather than mere intellectual assent. It offers no fixed answers for how certain is ‘certain enough’, because certainty is a moving goalpost that shifts with the situation. On one level this is intuitive - we all know that picking a restaurant for a special occasion carries lower stakes than policy decisions that will affect millions of lives. Yet between the trivial and the profound lies a no man’s land of consequential everyday choices, where we need to be able to pick a lane while working from incomplete information.

A Pact With Certainty: Authoritarianism's Faustian Bargain

The epistemic ecosystem where these three evasive maneuvers operate has contributed to and sustained a more sinister development. Absolutism, relativism, and confused compromise exist within a complex feedback loop with other societal forces, which bad actors have been all too happy to exploit. 21st century authoritarianism has found its niche within the cracks of this fragmented epistemic ecosystem. Like a weed that will choke off the surrounding vegetation and eventually fracture our driveway if left unattended, these ideologies suffocate truthful viewpoints and demolish our capacity to have productive disagreements. Rooted in the frustrated desire for the comfort and security that comes with certainty and fertilized by the disillusionment when these hopes are repeatedly dashed, modern authoritarianism offers a seductive bargain.

The authoritarian bargain - from Nazism to Maoism to MAGA - is the emotional comfort of certainty without the burden of truth-seeking. It’s the epistemic version of having your cake and eating it too. Emotional validation without introspection, certainty without responsibility, belonging without accountability - what’s not to like? Too bad, then, that the cake is poisoned and the person selling it knows it. Even worse, most of the people eating it know it too, but have convinced themselves that the poison is an acceptable trade-off for the intoxicating feelings it provides.

So how do we resist the allure of these dangerous oversimplifications, without falling into decision paralysis or noncommittal compromise between extremes that should be rejected? The key to navigating this murky terrain lies not in arriving at the perfect solution, but in learning how to attune our methods to the situation we’re embedded in, in accordance with our values. A value is an emotionally intuitive starting point that orients our decision making, grounded in what we authentically care about. In contrast to the normative frameworks that grow out of these foundational orientations, values can usually be expressed in just a few words: curiosity, equity, fairness, justice, purity, recognition, reciprocity, self-reliance, and mutual respect are some examples.

Becoming clear on what our values are is an indispensable part of how we use pluralism to navigate the panoply of perspectives. With a clear understanding of our values and pluralistic rigor as the two halves of our compass, we can begin to get a sense of how we become embedded in our various perspectives - and what to do about it. To that end, we need a sense of which viewpoints we’ve come to on our terms, which we’ve slid into out of apathy or coercion, and which are unavoidable outgrowths of the contexts we’re embedded in.

When authoritarians feed upon our collective exhaustion at the panoply of competing claims about the world, the antidote lies not in clinging to an inflexible certainty, or bowing out of the truth-game altogether - but in the courageous practice of attunement: messy, demanding, and essential for a civil society that can sustain democracy.

Edited May 18 by DocWatts

[Nodar Bakradze]

I really respect your project. Writing on “world disclosure” in an accessible fashion is a heroic feat, keep up the good work.

[DocWatts]

6 hours ago, Nodar Bakradze said:

I really respect your project. Writing on “world disclosure” in an accessible fashion is a heroic feat, keep up the good work.

Thanks, appreciate it! 

When I was reading through 'Being and Time' and 'The Phenomenology Of Perception', I remember thinking that there's got to be a more accessible way of conveying these insights.

Grounding abstract concepts in tangible everyday metaphors and familiar examples, and writing in (what I hope is a more) engaging writing style are my tactics to that effect.

Edited May 19 by DocWatts