Rebecca Solnit writes on Facebook: “I don’t understand why people like to make predictions about distant events, as if the present is destined to remain stable, instead of thinking that in the meantime there will be unexpected changes. I suppose it is a way to manage worries, but there is one thing we know for sure: we must accept the unpredictability of the future and not replace it with false certainties.
I remember when it was impossible for a black man to win the 2008 election; I remember the widespread illusion that Hillary Clinton’s 85 percent chance of winning in 2016 was equal to 100 percent, whereas if more people admitted that a 15 percent chance means that an event happens quite often ( about 15 percent of the time, I’d say) maybe it would have been different; I went to read the news of 1989 and I had the confirmation that no one had realized what was going to happen in the countries of Eastern Europe. The night before the Paris climate treaty was approved by 197 nations, many intelligent people told me it would never happen.
We have to prepare for the unexpected. Assuming we know things we don’t know is starting with the wrong map. Knowing what it is that we don’t know is a fundamental part of knowledge and perhaps the beginning of wisdom. If you want to be sure of yourself, trust in uncertainty is a great option and is always possible. I wonder if the reason people assume current conditions will remain stable in the future is that they don’t study the past.
The past shows that change is constant and that the world we live in today was unimaginable until a few decades ago. The past gives us maps to read, and what we read is that unpredictability, surprise and sudden change are constant (even if what we call sudden change is often the result of long-standing forces that have been overlooked) “. ◆