The Wisdom of Uncertainty and "The Circle"

Happily, my recent retirement frees me to do some things I've always wanted to do, like attending last week's Conference on World Affairs (CWA) at CU in Boulder, the renowned “conference on everything conceivable.”

I was inspired by one standing room only session entitled "The Wisdom of Uncertainty."  The panelists did a great job of outlining the human dilemma in which we dislike uncertainty and take Herculean measures to avoid it, even though "not knowing" and questioning the basic assumptions we’re constantly making can be the very best path to renewed creativity, innovation, and growth.  They also pointed out that every amazing new breakthrough in science occurs when someone decides that they don’t know something, tosses out assumptions, and sets out to learn the truth.  One panelist asked the audience who had seen a sunset – and then explained that none of us had, since the sun doesn’t set, although the phenomenon that looks like the sun setting was only recently understood correctly after the "certainty" that the sun revolves around the earth was questioned.

The panelists also pointed out that there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty.  For example, you can be confident that your efforts to write a blog will bear fruit, despite a case of writer's block from hell, even though you're not certain exactly what you'll come up with or whether the topic will remotely match your initial concept.  Uncertainty can pave the way toward new connections and ideas.

Speaking of “not knowing,” I just finished an unsettling novel by David Eggers called "The Circle" about a social media company in Silicon Valley that has absorbed all its relatively feeble predecessors (Facebook, Google) and metastasized into a behemoth organization with leaders Quite Certain that their innovations can solve all the problems of the world once they are able to “close the circle” by collecting and tying together all information and making it fully available and transparent to everyone for the greater good of humanity.  Thus, employees are encouraged and ultimately coerced where necessary to constantly share their perceptions and feelings. In fact, privacy is considered insubordinate since it robs everyone of the information and transparency needed to resolve problems and prevent wrong doing.

The novel’s protagonist is new hire Mae, a young woman the company immediately sets out to indoctrinate and who at one point is even led during a company-wide meeting to publicly utter the 1984-style maxims of The Circle:

SECRETS ARE LIES

SHARING IS CARING

PRIVACY IS THEFT

Mae is relentlessly pressured to share more and more of her most private thoughts and experiences, from intimate encounters to medical data.  At a couple of points I felt claustrophobic enough to put the book down and get a breath of fresh air, wishing Mae could do the same.

Kayaking on the bay, Mae escapes a couple of times to that most precious source of centering, solitude and peace, nature.  She paddles to an island, climbs a tree, wonders about the content of a bird’s nest and decides she cannot know this information without disturbing the nest and its inhabitants and so foregoes the knowledge. For a short while she remembers to breathe and acknowledges the value in "not knowing" what's in the nest or below her in the dark depths of the bay as she kayaks back to shore.

But she quickly gets in trouble at work for this, since being alone and not sharing information about her experience are viewed to be willful and selfish acts, unsupportive of the world view The Circle's leadership is so certain is correct.

I can recall a few times in my own career when I saw the same level of arrogant, absolute certainty from leaders, feeling both amazed and disquieted by it.  There is a wisdom in uncertainty, in seeing the world from constantly fresh perspectives and questioning self-limiting assumptions. In the end I would rather lean that way than walk around absolutely certain about life, the universe and everything. 

Also, it occurs to me that perhaps I’ve been way too lackadaisical up to this point about the question of privacy.  When carried to the extreme where it's socially unacceptable not to constantly share, the value of what is shared seems diminished--better to live with a greater degree of uncertainty.