“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Voltaire
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that, in the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell
“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.” Michael Crichton
Two years ago, my daughter co-founded a new company called the Artful Belonging Studio. The purpose is to promote the teaching of honest history and to facilitate a sense of belonging for all students in our schools. As it turns out, she is swimming against some pretty powerful currents. It seems that honesty and inclusivity are not high on the list of this administration’s funding priorities. She is fighting the good fight, AND she is up against a long history of historical distortion, as well as a tidal wave of current policies. History and politics can pose problems for new businesses.
Since I like to understand the context of my children’s work, I was intrigued when I saw a NYT column on how hard it is to bend the arc of history. The article, by Charles King, on the decline and fall of empires gave me a much clearer insight into the challenges we all face. The title was “What the Definitive Book on Empires says about America Today.” I especially appreciated his account of how Gibbons wrote his famous “Rise and Fall.” Highly recommended.
My main takeaway from the article was that history is a selective narrative of competing certainties based on delusional, uninformed or incomplete thinking designed to confirm bias vs. discover truth. Now that’s an honest appraisal of what we are dealing with today.
In parallel, I just finished reading T. M. Luhrman’s book, How God Becomes Real, which lent substance to my takeaway. Luhrman is a Stanford anthropologist who studies how cultures shape psychotic experiences. In the book, she raises the question, “Do we worship what we believe or believe what we worship?” As you can imagine, I lean strongly toward the latter. To me, the statement gets at the heart of conditioning. For example, think about the ritual of eating a piece of bread and saying, “This is the body of Christ” and then sipping a glass of wine and saying, “This is the blood of Christ.” It seems reasonable to assume that taking part in that ritual over a period of time might lead a person to “swallow” the statement and come to believe in its truth. Over a period of time with endless repetitions, people actually believe what they worship.
While the act, in itself, is harmless, the conditioning is dangerous. The more certain you become that the bread and wine are somehow magically transformed into the physical attributes of someone who died over 2,000 years ago may make you vulnerable to seeing myths as realities—of making real what can’t possibly be true.
The conventional understanding of religion assumes the former—that an individual must first intellectually assent to a doctrine before participating in its rituals. However, psychological and sociological evidence strongly supports the latter. Human beings are fundamentally creatures of habit and conditioning; we often act our way into believing rather than believe our way into acting.
While the physical practice of a ritual—such as the Christian Eucharist—is benign, the underlying cognitive conditioning can possess a more troubling dimension. When repetitive action successfully bypasses rational skepticism to make the impossible feel real, it leaves an individual uniquely vulnerable to accepting broader myths as absolute realities.
The concept that ritual precedes internal conviction is deeply rooted in psychological conditioning. When an individual engages in a physical, repetitive action accompanied by specific language, the brain begins to close the gap between symbol and reality. This phenomenon applies to politics as well as religion. Consider the daily recital of the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools. Children repeat the words long before they grasp complex geopolitical concepts like “liberty and justice for all.” The physical ritual of standing, placing a hand over the heart, and chanting in unison conditions a deep-seated, emotional patriotism that precedes critical political thought.
The danger does not lie in the individual act of eating bread or saluting a flag; it lies in the cognitive priming that results from it. When the mind is successfully trained to accept a logical impossibility as a literal truth, the psychological immune system against misinformation becomes compromised.
On a broader societal scale, this exact cognitive mechanism fuels the proliferation of secular myths, such as QAnon or extreme political propaganda. Participants enter online echo chambers where they perform daily “rituals”—sharing specific memes, using coded language, and repeating group mantras. Just like religious adherents, they “believe what they worship.” The repetitive action conditions them to accept increasingly bizarre fabrications as objective truth, entirely uncoupled from empirical evidence.
Luhrmann’s inquiry shines a light on a core vulnerability of the human psyche: our beliefs are profoundly malleable, shaped far more by what we do than by what we objectively know. Ritual is a beautiful and necessary part of the human experience, capable of building deep social cohesion. However, when rituals are designed to replace critical thought with blind certainty, the conditioning becomes perilous. By training the mind to treat the impossible as factual, we open the door to a dangerous epistemological slide—one where any myth, no matter how unfounded or destructive, can be manufactured into reality.
In 1988, I wrote a book entitled Leadership Myths and Realities. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve had a long fascination with myths and realities. Almost 40 years ago, I summarized the ten myths that characterized effective leaders. All of these myths contained a shred of truth, but they were dangerously incomplete. For example, the myth that “great leaders are primarily focused on building financial capital” might appeal to Wall Street capitalists, but it isn’t particularly compelling to the broader population, and the myth is woefully inadequate. It turns out that human and organizational capital are the most sustainable investments that leaders can make.
Yes, we are seeing more and more mergers and acquisitions, and corporate profits are soaring, but the real leaders and game-changers are those who invest in human capital and are constantly on top of new trends in science and technology.
The book, The Art of the Deal, on the other hand, is a financial fantasy that resulted in multiple business bankruptcies. That same transactional philosophy is now bankrupting the soul of America as well as ordinary workers’ pocketbooks. And yet Trump is absolutely certain that his policies are better than anyone has ever seen before.
What we have learned from history and are painfully relearning today is that certainty is much more of an enemy than truth. As Voltaire said in the early 1700s, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” In the early 1900s, Bertrand Russell suggested that the fundamental cause of trouble in the world is our cocksure stupidity. At the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, Michael Chrichton shared his certainty that there is too much certainty in the world. The myths march on.
Perhaps it’s time to stop fighting about competing certainties and start building collaborative communities in which every belongs and matters.
I’m hoping that the Artful Approach to Belonging succeeds beyond my daughter’s wildest imagination not only because I’m completely certain about the “rightness” of the idea, but also because it promotes an honest approach to history that encourages artful and inclusive imaginings of what’s possible. As a result, I’m hoping that we can all experience a sense of belonging and an openness to truth. May it be so.
