272. When We Cannot Know

After something has gone horribly wrong, we want to make sure it won’t happen again. We start looking around for explanations and we consider each possibility carefully, exploring all of the factors that might have led to the disaster.

In most cases, we eventually figure out what caused the problem and we fix it. But when some of the causes were human beings, this might not be possible. What we want then is to understand why the people involved acted in the ways they did, so that we can prevent future harm through education, incentives, or better rules.

But human beings often make decisions based on flawed or at least limited reasoning and trying to understand even one of us can be a real challenge. To attempt to understand the decision making of a group or an entire society is even more difficult. The scale of the problem sometimes means that many explanations are plausible with no single one being more or less likely than the others.

Our tendency at this point is to give up. But we don’t give up by accepting that we cannot know what actually happened. We give up by declaring one of the explanations right and giving that explanation our full backing. We do this because the alternative of leaving the problem unexplained is intolerable to us. It is intolerable because of the overwhelming worry that doing so would mean we cannot prevent the disaster from recurring. We would much rather be confident in a wrong explanation and feel safe than admit that we simply cannot know.

The worry we feel is a kind of suffering so strong that it pushes us to accept the belief that we understand something we actually don’t understand. With greater awareness, we can recognize the attachment that produces this suffering, and begin to free ourselves from it. We then become more capable of seeing and accepting that we cannot know, and we will be less likely to fall for simplistic solutions that are often far more dangerous than a mere lack of knowledge ever could be.