Living with Ambiguity

We exist in a world of friction. The linear demarcations of absolute certainties encounter one another and drag across each other’s surfaces of truth. Everyone operates in complete faith of their convictions, and everyone, it seems, is having a tough time squaring their ideas of reality with those of others as well as fundamental reality itself. At the same time, we live so many aspects of our personal lives, some intrinsically important to our happiness, in states of total ambiguity. Upon inspection, most people would be able to confirm this as well as the fact that they will continue to live with that ambiguity until they die. How is it that we can relate to ourselves, our choices, and others, as inherently ambiguous, but when we look to the world at large, its leaders, legends, and histories, we grow furious at any hint of ambiguity?

We demand almost idiotic simplicity and certainty from the most complex situations facing society and seem to be willing to burn everything to the ground if it doesn’t go our way. Oppenheimer is said to have stated that the nuclear age now required human civilization to mature into adulthood very quickly. We have obviously failed to do so, but maybe now, facing the continued threat of nuclear annihilation, combined with the climate crisis and a technological revolution on the verge of spinning out of control, we could find a way to export our capacity to cope with ambiguity in our daily, individual reality and transfer it into our systems and societies?

The rigidity with which we encounter the world feels borne out of a vulnerability and insecurity of self, one that must protect its identity in the face of any perceived criticism. We take this extremely sensitive viewpoint and staunchly apply it to regional, national, global political and historical events and figures. This completely unambiguous view on the world as it has existed in various forms over thousands of years, and how we think it should be interpreted, is the source of billions of people's frustration as they argue about how things should be perceived and understood in the present. This rigidity of thinking, the need to control every detail, is reminiscent of a child’s reaction to vulnerability and insecurity – their way of protecting themselves (which is often reflected in their later, adult relationships).

Projected onto our current societal, media-entrenched landscape, this results in the interpretation of any encounter with the smallest detail that doesn’t fit with our specific worldview – especially via our personal portals to the universe (our phones) – as an attack on our very being and heritage. Instead of maybe regarding a random comment on an app or website with the same “seriousness” as graffiti scrawled on a wall we are passing by, we often instead become incensed, our heartbeat accelerates, and we are driven to angrily reply to this disembodied voice that emerged from the fog to question our very essence.

Our heroes, our leaders, our freedom fighters, our rebels, our activists, our geniuses, our theorists, our artists – they all seem to be saints, touched by angelic purity to guide us into the realms of heavenly otherness than those other vile figures who populate the shadows of whatever we disagree with or just might happen not to like so much. It doesn’t matter if you’re a genocidal fascist, Stalinist, random movie goer, feminist, moderate Christian, Indigenous rights activist, neoliberal conservative – everyone harbors some person, theory, idea, or historical event that, if doubted or cast into a slightly different light, will trigger a storm of furious rebuttals and corrections. The mere idea that someone is looking at this idea that is so set in our minds and emotions, and seeing it differently, sparks intense rage and confusion as opposed to, say, a healthy curiosity as to why someone could see it differently.

And yet, as mentioned earlier, we live with ambiguity every day and continuously so. We are always making compromises with our own values as we navigate our daily lives and the relationships that structure the essence of our well-being. We are far less righteous when analyzing our own behaviors or events in our lives. We are willing to make all kinds of concessions when it comes to our personal lives that we would never dream of allowing on any other level. We will gladly, and knowing full-well what we are doing, overlook factors we have stated are sacred to us, let red lines be crossed, because in that moment or situation, we have the awareness of a bigger picture, of how this specific moment fits into a larger narrative or might get us closer to a goal we are trying to achieve. While this can often have negative effects for us in terms of a toxic relationship pattern or being unhappy in a job, we also use this ability to navigate the complexities of our lives. It helps us regularly understand that what we want and what we see as right just isn’t feasible in certain circumstances. In partnerships, as parents, as children, as siblings, as employees – we understand that the nuances of life can’t always adhere to our strict screed. Then, when faced with real tragedy, be it sickness, death or whatever, we fully come to grasp the ambiguities of life. We inherently feel our limits, our inability to understand, let alone control life.

We manage all these states of affairs without the feeling of constant, intense friction. We understand the people in our lives to be human and to judge them as such. Can we not turn that on political or historical figures and events and know that those we hold so dearly could also, in fact, be completely horrible parents, friends, or partners? Can we not see that those heroic struggles were also undertaken by some very terrible people who also did terrible things? Similarly, is it not possible to understand that some of those people we deem to have been the worst, the most evil, were also loving mothers and fathers, dedicated husbands and wives? Could the bravest of heroes, rebels, and freedom fighters not also commit atrocities, and the worst genocidal, human rights’ abusers, save the lives of innocents? Of course they could. They all could. This obviously does not excuse these behaviors, nor does it mean that we cannot agree to any such thing as common morality, virtues, or ethics. All it should do is let us learn to understand – as we seem to intuitively do in our daily lives – that these elements are not objective pillars of universal truths. We, as humans, have built religions, philosophies, and civilizations around trying to make this ambiguity make sense. There is a reason we still read and practice millennia-old Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Because we face the same ambiguity in the world now as humans have since time immemorial.

And, in the same way as Oppenheimer remembered the Buddhist Bhagavad Gita on witnessing the first atomic explosion, we circle back to our need to mature as a species. How can we fuse these two “worlds” into one overall perception of circumstance without it becoming an ocean of indifference and blurred borders? We clearly can navigate ambiguity in our lives, so we must somehow rid ourselves of the childish impulse to have all our societal or ideological pillars be saints, benevolent parental figures who history blessed us with to light our way with righteous and flawless theory. Besides having obvious authoritarian overtones, it leads us nowhere except sectarian fracturing and infighting. If we can live with the knowledge of an ambiguous history, present, and future, we will be much more likely to be able to solve our problems. There surely must be a path to dissolving the borders between our puritanical, objective perspective on reality as we want other people to understand it and acknowledging the multi-perspective, subjective reality we, and every other human being who has ever existed, live in.

Being able to do this, to mature as a species to the point that we can live with and accept ambiguity on a large scale and over long periods of time, could be the key to overcoming many of our current problems and failures of communication. To grow enough to accept these ideas and truths would be foundational for developing an actual strategy to tackle the looming challenges and crises we face as a species.