“When I was still pretty young—I don’t know how old exactly—I had a ball in a wagon I was pulling, and I noticed something, so I ran up to my father to say that ‘When I pull the wagon, the ball runs to the back, and when I am running with the wagon and stop, the ball runs to the front. Why?’
He said, ‘That, nobody knows.”
The boy was Richard Feynman, the brilliant physicist, popularizer of science and author of the best-known lecture series in all of physics, which inspired generations of scientists.
Feynman’s father wanted to inspire the boy by showing him that there were things in the world still waiting to be discovered.
And, in a sense, he was telling the truth. Underneath the known rules of friction and inertia are the rules of behavior of subatomic particles. Underneath those are the fundamental laws of physics, many of them still a mystery. Beyond those are the metaphysical questions of the universe’s existence, cause and meaning, if any. Saying that we “know” things means saying that we have become satisfied with the explanations we have been provided thus far and are happy living with the remaining ambiguity.
Thinking the way Feynman’s father did is psychologically uncomfortable, and our society today doesn’t like it. We value certainty above all.
Before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the polls had predicted that Hillary Clinton would win. The pundits were certain of it and journalists thought it a foregone conclusion. The polls were completely wrong. Trump won the presidency.
Afterwards, analysts were again “certain” about why the polls were wrong, and “confident” that in 2020 the pollsters would get things right. In 2020, they predicted that Joe Biden would win in a landslide.
Biden did indeed win, but the polls were even more off than in 2016. A few days after the election, the pundits were again “certain” why the polls were wrong, and “certain” that in the future they would be better. And so on.
From motivational speakers to creative nonfiction writers to politicians and talk show hosts, the people we listen to have a job to provide emphatic opinions that render the world black and white and make outcomes look inevitable in a neat, cause-and-consequence kind of way. The words “I don’t know” are rarely heard in public discourse, because nobody would listen to them.
In psychology, this preference for certainty and intolerance of ambiguity has been operationalized through the term “cognitive closure” by professor Arie Kruglanski of University of Maryland, and others. A high need for cognitive closure leads to phenomena ranging from mood instability under uncertainty to preference for authoritarian forms of government.
To Jerome Kagan, one of the pioneers of developmental psychology, uncertainty resolution is one of the foremost determinants of our behavior. When we can’t immediately gratify our desire to know, we become highly motivated to reach a concrete explanation. Many of our motives – achievement, affiliation, power – have the root in this impulse, according to him.
Physicists may be happy to operate with imperfect laws that describe just a part of the world, and accept the ambiguity that lies beyond. Most of the rest of us are not that comfortable and crave closure.
For closure, we pay a price.
Closing our minds to further inquiry results in beliefs that might not be true or are patently false. In fact, the more questionable our beliefs are, the less likely to question them we tend to be, lest we open a can of worms. The vicious circle is governed by another concept from psychology – confirmation bias. Originally coined by Peter Wason in the 1960s, it denotes a tendency to prefer information that confirms our prior beliefs and values.
The escalation of this process through social media has produced the world in which we live today, and it has been well documented – the world of interpersonal silos and social media echo chambers. When the film critic Pauline Kael famously said in 1972 that she couldn’t believe that Nixon had been elected in a landslide since she barely knew anyone who had voted for him, she was ridiculed. In today’s society, her position would be the norm.
But in the Venn diagram of beliefs of the diverse groups out there, often diametrically opposed to each other, there seems to be one area of intersection, one point of agreement: our societies are becoming less fair, less just.
In July 2020, the Altruist League conducted the biggest ever survey of global grassroots movements, which included both right and left wing groups. The simple statement, “My society is fair and just,” saw only 15 percent of agreement among the responders, in dozens of countries and on all continents barring Antarctica. Whether they are thinking that the liberals are coming for their guns or that the conservatives are threatening their reproductive rights, people on the ground seem to believe more and more that their societies are fundamentally unfair.
The perception of injustice is deeply linked with a growing global wealth inequality. The problem is not that inequality is growing per se, but that its growth is perceived as unjust. This seems to be the consensus of a number of comprehensive studies that have appeared over the last five years, including by the European Commission and the World Justice Project. Citizens are on average less and less likely to be convinced that the world is a true meritocracy. This will be a cause of continued instability in the future.
With destructive technology becoming more commonplace and more available, and discontent growing, it is clear that the time for acting isn’t infinite.
There are very physical dangers to the continued existence of civilization, even if currently they seem remote or theoretical. Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford University writes about the so-called Vulnerable World Hypothesis. With enough time, destructive technology will have proliferated so much as to allow very small groups of disaffected people, and even individuals, to develop or purchase a nuclear device or a bioweapon (e.g. a deadly virus). Today’s mass shooting or a bomb attack will be a world-ending event at a not-so-distant point in the future.
But even without massive cataclysmic events, unchecked growth of fragmented realities in a quest for certainty under conditions of extreme dissatisfaction can give rise to totalitarian governments and a regression to lower levels of happiness, education and health. To many people, this might be an acceptable price to pay for a stronger sense of identity, and more certainty.
There can be only two solutions to this problem. One is a surveillance society where we try to control people’s access to information and technology, eventually resulting in a turn-key totalitarian state. The other is a world where many more people feel happy and fulfilled, with a stake in the survival of the world.
In our work, we are interested in the second solution to this challenge.
Opinion convergence characterizes most social groups, including the ones to which we belong. It’s easy to laugh at the neo-Flat Earthers and pity the antivaxer crowd. Let’s spare a thought for the management gurus and consultants and their merciless recycling of buzzwords throughout the decades. Let’s not forget corporate social responsibility (CSR) tropes and promises of market-based solutions to all the world’s problems. Let’s not idolize the ground-led social movements either, often disorganized, lacking diversity, stuck in ideological blueprints of 1968, and often too ready to be co-opted when the money starts flowing in.
If we see ourselves firmly as members of one group or another we have no chance to succeed in our quest as philanthropists. As outsiders, we must traverse them freely and understand the reasons for their worldviews and aspirations. In particular, our job is to show how capital and political influence, and those owning and managing it, can be a force for good in solving systemic problems. For the moment, they are often not.
When racial injustice protests erupted in 2020 in the United States, following the killing of George Floyd, the League’s team counted dozens of press releases from major international organizations specifically using the phrase “something must be done.” Often, actions stopped at that. There was compassion, and fear, and some money flowing, and not much of a plan.
Activists, too, repeated the phrase with similar readiness: “Something must be done.” And so they marched, and inspired people, and burned things, and started conversations, and made people afraid.
Governments, courts, media houses and all the other institutions of our society experienced epiphanies of their own. These puzzle pieces of change, none black and white on its own, often do not speak the same language; in an age of religious self-interest there is nothing, no one, connecting the dots.
The job is yours if you want it.
Rarely in history have we had so much need for people who can stand outside the ossified structural roles of a society, see it in its entirety, and steer it. In 5th century BC Athens, that figure was Pericles. Coming from one of the aristocratic families of the city he put his faith in democracy and freedom of speech, and chose to strengthen the courts. He lost elections, and won them, and presided over the most remarkable time in Athenian history, indeed any history, the Golden Age, the Age of Pericles. Among his fellow aristocrats, Pericles was condemned for betraying his own kind.
To counter the social tides, or to nurture them for a good cause when appropriate, and persist for so long as to leave a legacy, is indeed a monumental task. It calls for a uniquely driven spirit. It calls for a tolerance of ambiguity of a scientist, and the capacity for intrinsic motivation and self-expression of an artist; it is therefore literally both art and science. This is the kind of mentality that the Altruist League works to instill in its members.
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