From Certainty to Probability
The New World Created This Past Decade
Thanks to the Brownstone Institute for running this piece. You can visit the website at: https://brownstone.org/
Even just a few years ago, there was a certain certainty about the world, about society.
Now there is only probability and it’s as if civilization has been forced to shift from a Newtonian world view to a quantum consideration.
That feeling of most everything being a bit – or a great deal – off now is driven by the constant need to judge chances of truth.
A head constantly swiveling never rests.
The world has moved from analog to digital and now to metaphorically quantum in its presentation and how people must interact with it. It is now an “-ish” world and that loss of even a semblance of regularity is responsible for much of current angst.
People simply cannot “get comfortable” in a world that is not reliable or relatable.
The emergence of Newtonian physics – the idea that there are basic rules and laws and a clockwork calmness – wrenched the western world out of the last vestiges of the middle ages. Medieval society, as noted by UCLA Prof. Eugen Weber in his brilliant lecture series called “The Western Tradition,” was an “approximate society.”
Things happened not at 5:13 p.m., but, for lack of a better term, at about 5-ish. Personal timekeepers were relatively rare – with the entire town relying on the church clock, if it had one – and that was really not problem as numbers themselves were often used for effect rather than to communicate facts.
Claims of battling “100,000 soldiers” were wrong, but not necessarily false – numbers did not define facts but were seen as acceptable exaggerations.
Except, of course, when it came to money. That counting houses made sure those numbers meant something and have since the emergence of civilization in Mesopotamia.
In fact, the very first person whose name we now know with certainty is Kushim, He was, as Ben Wilson put it in his book “Metropolis,” not a king or a priest , warrior or poet and his name was on receipt for barley.
“(O)ur earliest known individual was a diligent Urukian bean counter,” Wilson notes.
From the baseline of Newton, western society changed. The scientific method, the enlightenment, the growth in new technologies all come from the same origin: the immutable rules.
To this day, Newtonian physics essentially explains everything in a person’s day-to-day life. For practical purposes, nearly all humans have no need for Newton’s successor, quantum mechanics.
Born of Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and countless others, quantum mechanics and theory eliminate the definite. Things are only most likely and even 99.9% likely is not immutable – it is not Newtonian.
And that shift – from certainties to probabilities – is the subconscious base from which much of society’s current problems suffers.
And that is largely due to humans being hardwired to look for patterns that they can then turn into facts. But if the brain cannot create facts anymore, only probabilities, a permanent sense of unease descends upon people.
It could be possible that humans can make the shift – someday – to being comfortable, or at least less uncomfortable, in a probable world, but that has not happened yet and will not any time soon.
The very notion of certainty has been hobbled by the pandemic response, the surveillance state, and the socialist socialite power structure at the heart of globalism. Experts are no longer experts – if they ever really were – institutions can no longer be trusted – if they ever really could, and the future, save for small self-asserted superior subset, cannot be relied upon.
The elites see this shift – this destruction of trust and reliability they shaped – as just the first step to a society made of (fewer) people that is far easier to manipulate because the definite cannot be known. Life becomes a series of options and controlling those choices is at the heart of “nudge theory” which, at its heart, cannot tolerate hard clear clean trustworthy facts.
Facts cannot be nudged – probabilities are made for nudging, manipulating, toying with by overclass for their own benefit.
The world has become approximate again.