By 
Let me start with an eternal, undeniable, inevitable reminder: we know absolutely nothing. The universe is an infinite chaotic, unknowable clusterfuck, facts as they’re reported are entirely unreliable, and in reality, it’s impossible to get a grasp on just about any clearcut truth.
We like to think we know things. We say with confidence that hurricanes will increase at x rate over the next decade, or what we saw the night Mrs. Henson got stabbed, or that God loves us.
But the truth is that a toddler could manipulate the facts to point any way they want, your memory has proven to be woefully unreliable, and that feeling of God’s love very well might just be gas.
In every facet of life, we’re always, on some level, hazarding a guess.
This eternal uncertainty has only gotten worse with the modern tsunami of information.
Let’s try an exercise: Step back for a second, and consider what someone is really saying when they tell you to “Do your research” or to “Learn the facts!” about something.
Those ideas basically boil down to: “Read some shit that somebody else hazarded a (maybe) more educated guess about which fully includes their biases—be it political, or the desperate need to get you to click on them–and make your judgement based off of that information, and then pretend like you know things.”
Unless you speak science and can interpret the facts yourself (which none of us without degrees can do), this is what happens every time we read an article, or a book, or watch a documentary about anything. That’s the best form of gathering information that we have. It’s listening to some asshole in glasses and going, “I think this specific asshole seems right?”
The struggle therefore is this: Nobody knows anything. This means that we don’t know what the right thing to do is. We don’t know what the end result will be of our vote, or our statements, or from purchasing this specific brand of kidney beans.
Why Thinking You Know Things Sucks
Most of us convince ourselves of certainty in at least some areas of our lives. We state our opinions with confidence, without so much as an “I think” before we start blathering. It’s completely fucking insane, and it’s nearly universal.
Those of us like this are across-the-board lying to ourselves. We’re making worse decisions than we otherwise would, we’re miseducating others, and perhaps most importantly, we’re rendering ourselves completely unreceptive to change. We develop an immediate, degenerative stubbornness and unwillingness to consider other viewpoints, and it is, in many ways, ruining our society.
It’s this exact stubbornness that halts all open communication. It’s this—this stupid idea that we know what the hell we’re talking about—that keeps us from understanding anything on any level. It prevents us from learning more and making less shitty decisions. This all comes from our tendency to read a thing, spend no energy doing any further research on it, and then tell you that I’ll come at you with my AR-15 if you dare question my beliefs on it.
Pause: As a fellow human, I do think it’s important to stop at times like this, step back and marvel at what self-destructive dipshits humans can be. Like Jesus Christ.
But of course, as always, the other extreme also sucks.
Why Realizing You Know Nothing Also Sucks
Then there are the rest of us. We see how literally fucking nothing is cut and dry. We see that the only universally accurate descriptor for the world is that it’s messy and unclear. We see the truth that in nearly all cases the truth is impossible to know.
And as a result, our brains regularly feel like they’re melting. We feel no security, we can’t put together a coherent argument, nor can we really fight for anything. We don’t see “both sides” of everything because that would imply that there are only two sides.
Instead, we see the multitudes of reality whizzing by at a million miles per hour, and clashing into each other, and resulting in an endlessly ambiguous world, and all you can really do when you see that is throw your hands up and go, “I….fuck…Jesus, I have no idea.”
This, for us, makes both basic decision-making and sanity-maintenance real fucking bitches.
So what the hell do we do about this? How do we humble ourselves, and understand how little we can possibly know, and avoid the resulting, paralyzing tidal waves of existential dread and confusion?
I’m not going to pretend like I know, but my best guessing leads me to the following three-step process:
- Get Closer to Knowledge
- Habitually Remember You (Still) Know Nothing
- Calm Down
So let’s try to take this one step at a time.
Step 1: Get Closer to Knowledge
In a perfect world, you could just accept that you know nothing, shrug, and move on with your confidently oblivious life.
But guess what? Reality is full of decisions that unfortunately, stupid old you has to make. You have to decide how much screen time your kid gets. You have to decide whether to give a shit about refugees, and chem trails, and Insta filters, and organic food, and war policy, and the right workout routine to make your ass look more boner-worthy. You have to vote.
You’ll probably never know the right decision about any of this, but if you don’t do your best to get as close as you can, then you’re an asshole. So here are some ways to get closer to knowing things.
- Remember: Something merely existing does not make it a good source of information. Listen to reputable news organizations, and not some weirdo’s blog.
- But also, remember that those news organizations (along with everyone else) desperately want you to click on them, and they’re super influenced by that, which means they twist information to be as extreme as possible. A good rule of thumb is to tune down the violence and despair of everything they say by like, 50%.
- Talk to any experts you can possibly know and trust. This almost always means people with degrees—not people who just say things confidently.
- Scientific consensus is the best thing we have, but it’s rarely reported on. If you ever can find a reliable description of it, follow that.
- Also try (using methods 1 and 2) to verify what you’re learning as much as you can. Don’t count anything ever as knowledge just because some asshole said it in an audiobook.
- While doing all of this, fight your own biases, and seek out biases in others, and account for both. Then finally…
- Weighing all of this, reach a decision point, but never pretend that you’re certain. The closest thing to certainty you should ever reach is being able to say, “This is where I’m at right now.”
Step 2: Habitually Remember That You (Still) Know Nothing
Every time you catch yourself about to state an opinion with any confidence at all—with any illusion of certainty—pull back. Clarify over and over—hit the person listening to you in the fucking face with this notion: “I don’t know for sure, but based on what I’ve been able to figure out, _________.”
Get the idea in their head of how much it takes to know something, and how we all come up so woefully short in this area. You’re exchanging things you’ve heard from various sources–not things you know.
Call others out when they’re expressing certainty. Ask about their sources. Get them to question what they believe so much that by the end of it, they’re questioning their own existence. If you can get them saying, “But…am I actually Patricia?” you’ve done the lord’s work.
Spread the lack of knowledge that we all have. Follow up every declarative statement you hear and mistakenly say with, “But no one actually knows this for sure.” Be that annoying asshole.
Step 3: Calm Down
There’s a cultural obsession we tend to have about sticking to our guns, and there’s a real problem with this: our guns are fucking wrong, like, constantly. You’re wrong constantly. We all are.
This obsession is all part of a greater cultural obsession with being right. We’re obsessed with being right because it helps us to feel more in control, and when we’re right and others are wrong, we feel braingasms of internal ego masturbation.
But we’re not actually in control, because we know nothing, so that part is bullshit. And jerking off your ego tends to not do a whole lot for you, except create a big gross mess in your brain.
Our obsession with being right is pretty much nothing but bad. It keeps us from learning new things, it halts all productive conversation, and it prevents us from seeing reality as it actually is. It’s the culprit behind all partisanship, and refusals to read things, and Thanksgiving screamfests.
So basically, our obsession with being right totally sucks.
So calm down. Being right doesn’t matter. Get over it. It’s one of the worst priorities a person can have. Being right is nothing to be proud of. It’s not an accomplishment. You just guessed better than somebody else. Wow. Hoo-ray. Congrats, special little guy.
It’s only when we let go of the need to be right that we can stop wrapping our ego up in what we pretend to know. When we do this, we can fully accept that we know nothing, and be okay with it, because well, what else can you do? If you don’t know what the right path is, then the only value you can find is in doing your best to figure it out.
So don’t find value in doing the right thing. After all, you don’t know what the right thing is.
Instead, find value in your attempt—in the fact that you have priorities you can stand by, and that you did your best to figure out how to serve those priorities. You’ll make wrong decisions still—and I mean constantly. By virtue of being a person, you’ll always suck at being right.
But so what? If you don’t care about being right, it’s not that big of a deal. Try your best to learn from it, give yourself a break, and move the hell on.
If you fully accept that you can’t know anything, and all you can possibly do is your best in figuring things out anyway, you can accept yourself and your fuck-ups, and you can accept others’ fuckups as well. And when you do that, you’ve done your part to create a more open, loving world, and I know that that is awesome.
Or at least, that’s where I’m at right now.
