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Stop asking pundits to predict the future after the coronavirus. It doesn’t exist.
“The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t. But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty. Rousseau exaggerated only slightly when he said that when things are truly important, we prefer to be wrong than to believe nothing at all”
We should ask only what we want to happen...
“But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment“.
* This is, btw, something I have been saying for years… my job is not to tell people what is going to happen but to help them find out what they want to happen (their desirable futures rather than their predetermined futures).
Are people thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have...?
“Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus — which we are only beginning to understand — nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine…. At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion”
Image via Javier Jaén voa NYT
"We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on demanding certainty"
“It is bad enough living with a president who refuses to recognize reality. We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on litigating the past and demanding certainty about the future. We must accept what we are, in any case, condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step ….”
