The big epidemic of this age is not Covid, or some other transmissible medical sickness, but rather, an epidemic of certainty. Everyone is so effing sure that they’re correct about everything.
I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.
— Marshall McLuhan
The nanosecond we learned the world was borne of quantum uncertainty, and that life is just a random Card Sharks play, we embarked on a paradoxical defensive adventure to narrow the scope of accepted truth. As if there is a life mode that eliminates uncertainty and risk. And then we created entire microeconomics of social reward around answering every “?” with a “!”
Folks don’t care anymore whether they are for real wrong or right. Everyone now, with impunity, can appear and feel correct. _All_ the time. Certainty is a wonderful cushion - a padded room, if you will - that buffers even the most ludicrous perspectives on reality against challenge.
Repeat after us: “Doesn’t matter if I’m right, just that I’m certain.”
The future, after all, is a synonym for uncertainty. At some point in life, surprises and obstacles are inescapable. To inure oneself against chaos, who wouldn’t adopt as much confidence in one’s intellect as humanly possible? Confidence, false or true, is often pure (and sometime effective) defense.
To have confidence in the future also affords never looking back, and presence in the moment. What a life, yes, to live with zero regrets? That’s a dream state, where you are pure flow.
We’re surrounded by people
Who can’t think for themselves
They fear loneliness more than they feel hell
Then take comfort that they can’t even tell
Say goodbye to the world it’s just as well
We’ve gone through the looking glass
Nothing’s left up ahead we haven’t already passed
Now we’re so alone
We don’t need to turn our backs
We’ve gone through the looking glass
Confidence is not a synonym for intelligence. Smarts may power your decision making, and may aid you in making quicker decisions. But intelligence may also act as a stuck anchor dragging along a reef under your motor boat. Knowledge can weigh you down. Comprehension is only useful at the point it becomes instinct, where thinking becomes pure awareness, not a process.
Humans and domesticated creatures are the only life forms on Earth that eat without having to hunt. Humans alone may be the only creatures that eat for pure pleasure. A caterpillar may sense it is easy prey in the food chain, so it probably expends more energy on its awareness than on accruing knowledge of the stars.
A Great Egret probably expends more energy on its awareness while stalking skinks, than on learning the genii of all the different skinks it may consume.
The ability to convert intelligence to instinct is the great upstream lost skill of our time. It’s all so strange, and kinda tiresome. Could you imagine getting up every morning, and just aspiring to be a human extension of autocorrect and autocomplete? That’s pretty much 3/4 of my social scree - I mean, feeds.
“You are SOO WRONG!”
“Oh yeah? You’re more wrong!”
“Well, you’re the most wrong!”
Well, yeah. Fwiw, each side of an argument can display equal intelligence and confidence, while also betraying comprehension. In the end, though, “ne’er the twain shall meet” discourses advance nothing. Everyone needs to just kick back and share great crab cakes, for god’s sake.
I was always an A-minus student, fwiw. I long ago accepted I’m catastrophically incorrect about 10% of the time, which is thankfully just enough for me never to fall prey to blind certainty. Straight-A students are the most dangerous of all, even more than F’s. They are just sooo cocksure.
Today…
The world’s not an idiocracy:
“No one knows they know nothing. So everything’s ok.”
The world is, rather, a smartocracy:
“Everyone knows enough to think they know everything. So nothing’s ever ok.”
A smartocracy was inevitable (in hindsight, of course) with the rise of our mediacracy, where lives are spent in a constant tight-rope walk between machine and mind.
Artificial intelligence and robots will first come for all the jobs that require little thinking, but eventually also will usurp all the work that requires the most thinking. In the coming paradigm, you can’t afford to be stupid, but there will be no need to be so smart, either. Just a little confidence will go a long, long way. Hi ho.
Everything’s an equation.
Everyone’s their own god now.
Everyone’s a sensation.
Everyone is too smart now.
The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Btw, your brain isn’t too wet or warm to harbor your consciousness as a quantum wave.